Njal Thorgeirsson
Member
I'm just curious about everyone's input on a particular experience I had last summer...
Story time:
I was up on a 14,000 peak on a sunny early-summer day in Colorado; it's my goal to climb all 58. It was during a weekday on a not-particularly-crowded peak (La Plata).
On the summit, an un-leashed young black lab snatched a bag of cheese and crackers out of my hand and ate the whole thing. It wasn't aggressive, but the dog clearly wasn't trained. I wasn't sure who the owners were so I didn't say anything about how stupid it was to have an untrained and un-leashed dog in an environment like that.
As I was coming down from the summit, my partner and I decided to glissade (slide) down a snowfield to avoid some uncomfortable down-climbing. about half way down, that same dog ran up from behind me, and began jumping over my legs and onto me. I wasn't sure if it was aggressive or not, so I stopped sliding and just sort of froze. As I turned around to see where the hell the owner was, the dog aggressively barked close to my face, and chomped my shoulder and quickly released (I was wearing about three dense layers, so no blood was drawn but I had half a dozen small bruises). The snow was steep and icy, and it declined sharply to the right so I would have felt extremely uncomfortable standing up. I was necessarily stuck in a compromised position. I drew my Leathaman from my pocket as quickly as possible in case the dog attacked with more conviction. Luckily, its owner began yelling and it rand back to him immediately after it attacked me, removing any necessity to consider defending myself. Still, I had no idea what the right course of action was...
What would you have done?
This event prompted me to obtain my CHP (not because I would have necessarily used said firearm, but because I realized that you just never know what can happen).
Story time:
I was up on a 14,000 peak on a sunny early-summer day in Colorado; it's my goal to climb all 58. It was during a weekday on a not-particularly-crowded peak (La Plata).
On the summit, an un-leashed young black lab snatched a bag of cheese and crackers out of my hand and ate the whole thing. It wasn't aggressive, but the dog clearly wasn't trained. I wasn't sure who the owners were so I didn't say anything about how stupid it was to have an untrained and un-leashed dog in an environment like that.
As I was coming down from the summit, my partner and I decided to glissade (slide) down a snowfield to avoid some uncomfortable down-climbing. about half way down, that same dog ran up from behind me, and began jumping over my legs and onto me. I wasn't sure if it was aggressive or not, so I stopped sliding and just sort of froze. As I turned around to see where the hell the owner was, the dog aggressively barked close to my face, and chomped my shoulder and quickly released (I was wearing about three dense layers, so no blood was drawn but I had half a dozen small bruises). The snow was steep and icy, and it declined sharply to the right so I would have felt extremely uncomfortable standing up. I was necessarily stuck in a compromised position. I drew my Leathaman from my pocket as quickly as possible in case the dog attacked with more conviction. Luckily, its owner began yelling and it rand back to him immediately after it attacked me, removing any necessity to consider defending myself. Still, I had no idea what the right course of action was...
What would you have done?
This event prompted me to obtain my CHP (not because I would have necessarily used said firearm, but because I realized that you just never know what can happen).