Booby traps in the National Forest

Sounds like one of the more militant environmentalist groups .. in past it was just moonshiners .. growers .. or the occasional nam vet fed up that sought life away from society protected there perimeters that way ..

No idea if he alive these days but one of the guys from s.o.g that served in vietnam with had a place up in the northwest u.s as he chose to live away from people .. had his perimeter set up like a firebase complete with boobytraps ..

Its a crazy world all kinds of people in it ..

originally posted by: Feltrick
a reply to: MarlinGrace

Naw, the Squatches steal the shotgun shells from campers and the aliens taught them how to make improvised land mine with them. The aliens don't care for Bobo either as they are friends with the Squatches and don't like to see them upset. Seriously, if Bobo was running around my woods, I'd probably do the same thing.

I think the Squatches are okay with Les Stroud as he is less obnoxious than Bobo and doesn't make as much noise; he just moves about quietly and doesn't make a scene.

Yeah, the Squatches definitely hate Bobo and his band of misfits.

Ok that I will agree Bobo is enough to make me crazy as well. They are a pretty bizarre group of people. I just watched the Les Stroud episodes they were very well done. I can't stop laughing long enough to change the channel on the hillbilly monster show with the group from West Virginia they are hilarious. I am beginning to wonder if ole tracker could catch a cold let alone a appalachian monster of some sort.

Thanks for having a good sense of humor.

a reply to: HardCorps

Wow, what sort of sick minds would do something like that? Same type that would put explosives in tennis balls, is my guess. I never heard of such a thing myself, but my hiking was in other parts of the country. I wonder if some of this is from environmentalists, trying to keep people out of the woods. They've been known to spike trees, so I think it's possible.

a reply to: HardCorps
yrs ago,they used similar stuff on the Barstow to Vegas off road race.Pretty nasty stuff.I'm an off road racer,and I'd hate to run over this stuff.

a reply to: LadyGreenEyes
spiking a tree is to mess with a logging company,these are intended to hurt/kill people.Being an off road racer,I know I waste fuel and pollute,but our track is laid out to prevent any enviromental damage

a reply to: HardCorps


When I came back to revisit this post--- I saw a few folks got the wrong impression.

this was not meant to be a DIY on booby traps...
More of an awareness kind of deal, let you all ya know this sort of thing goes on all the time and not just here in the Western US.

I also want to say--- If you find a booby trap--- don't mess with it!

Often the booby trap you see is a feint--- to get you to come closer so the trap you never saw can get ya!

If you find one--- pick up the phone and report it. Might be you save some faultless little kids from getting hurt Bad!

originally posted by: LadyGreenEyes
a reply to: HardCorps

Wow, what sort of sick minds would do something like that? Same type that would put explosives in tennis balls, is my guess. I never heard of such a thing myself, but my hiking was in other parts of the country. I wonder if some of this is from environmentalists, trying to keep people out of the woods. They've been known to spike trees, so I think it's possible.

We have a largish garden out in the countryside. A few years ago, we found little circular and square rings of small stones around the trees in our garden. Inside each ring was a small pile of dry leaves. This looked suspicious and when we looked under those leaves, we found little metal snap-traps - like shark jaws.

It didn't take us long to see who the culprit was - some scruffy looking guy with missing teeth and fingers.

When I was in the military we were trained to place mines and traps all along the sides of the trail and wait for unwanted guests to arrive, throw a few rounds at them and they would dive right into the mines and traps.

Really could mess up a guy's day....

a reply to: RickyD

Those there shotgun shell mines can blow half your foot off.

A 9mm one can blow off a toe.

A .223 like an M-16 uses can liberate one of 1 or 2 toes.

They will reduce your forward momentum for sure unless you're just really lucky.

These things have been around for a long time and are the reason the military is real fussy about picking up any unexpended cartridges in any operation to keep them from being used against them later in improvised traps.

You think that stuff is bad?, you should see the stuff in the military publication entitled "Mines and traps", they can't call it a booby-trap manual because then it would be against the Geneva conventions...

An HE grenade with a tripwire attached to the pull-pin inside of a 55 gallon drum with 5 or 10 gallons of gasoline, rocks and other injury causing missiles, buried and camouflaged along a road or trail is just one example of what is in that manual, the tripwire can be tripped by passing troops or vehicles or pulled from nearby by friendlies ......OUCH!!!

Things that go BOOM are fun for some strange reason, I'm sure most of you would agree.

before a reply to: Gazrok

Maybe Arnold is out trying to get the predator.

Seriously this is sick and it is just unbelievable. Why?

Blimey Stormcell I don't know if anybody else has mentioned it but your avatar looks suspiciously like a surfer flying through the air. Sort of a UFS. In England some large land owners do tricks like this. They are known as man traps. I used to work for one and have seen some nasty traps. Mainly to injure or impede poachers. As most large land owners are also the local magistrates the law is ALWAYS on their side.

If I ever get a ATV, I'm going to make sure that it is outfitted with these tires. You can run over nails all day and in the end will just have snow tires.



I've ran across traps before while hunting, put there by people growing pot.

Lack of trail etiquette might be a contributor to this kind of stuff happening. Somebody roughing it in the woods may have been nearly run off a trail or harassed too many times... I could see where they might get a little flippy. Not that it gives them the right, but it's understandable why they might do it.

More or less, if you see somebody that looks like they're living in the woods, give them their space and try to be nice to them. Who knows what frame of mind they're in and what would set them off.

someone was setting nail traps on remote roads in the panamint valley calif desert years ago.
We believed at the time it was a group of thieves that were trying to disable trucks and jeeps to steal parts or whole trucks or jeeps.

later we found it was the Manson family.
en.wikipedia.org...

Vietcong tactics are quite scary as seen above lol.

a reply to: Gazrok

When younger, I had a bullet in a tree, and fired at it with a pellet gun. After numerous hits and dents on the bottom of the bullet, most in the right spot, it eventually actually blew...but took a lot of work at it, and certainly showed me a nail would not do it.

The last bag of cheap 9mm wad cutters I bought had three duds. One had two pin dents before it fired on the third time through.

The bullet in the tree might have been a dud.

a reply to: mysterioustranger

I heard of this by pot growers using the National forests for farming. Apparently, the growing usage of the forests is a big problem due to the seculsion...

They use the national forest because its anonymous, and its easier to hide from the competition. And maybe because its more fun.

I met a lazer dot at night once, then a forest ranger's horse got shot a little bit after that.

The deer sure don't care about folks on foot like they should. You could kill some of the older ones with a sharp stick.

Some of the rattlesnakes are PAINTED camouflage exactly the same pattern as the under growth. They look kind of slow and sick, but that makes them slow to rattle and you might sit on one. The one I saw had yellow belly scales and a fern pattern on its back. The exact same pattern as the shin high ferns that grow next to the Pacific Crest Trail in Oregon.

originally posted by: blkcwbyhat
a reply to: LadyGreenEyes
spiking a tree is to mess with a logging company,these are intended to hurt/kill people.Being an off road racer,I know I waste fuel and pollute,but our track is laid out to prevent any enviromental damage

With the spiked trees, loggers can be hurt, however. Perhaps the same mentality that causes someone to do that is behind this. If some group or individual felt as though people shouldn't be in those places, they might set traps to hurt the people, and thus discourage more people going there.

I don't have ANY issues with people doing off-road racing, etc. There are set areas for such things, and it's a valid use. Spiked strips on the vehicle trails like that could cause serious injury or death if a 4-wheeler hit one just right. Whoever is behind this, I hope they are caught and locked up before someone is badly injured or killed.

a reply to: stormcell

Oh, wow! Did you ever find out why he did it? That's beyond twisted. Kids play in areas like that. I did, mine do, and tons of others as well.

To me the scariest one out of those has to be the fishing line across a trail,

That would be impossible to see if you were cruising around on a mountain bike, esp if it was placed at the bottom of a trail on a hill.

very nasty indeed.

As to the 'why' - well i hope it was for an actual reason even if its a bad one like drug growers at least theres a point to it then, just setting up random traps is strange. Surely if somone was doing somthing bad for fun they would stick around to see what happens. sick suggestion i know, but there it is.