- Don’t take shrooms, folks — especially if you’re about to walk into the wilds.
Hiking through a pristine forest on a curving mountain path under a big blue sky can make you feel so good it’s like you’re high. But you know what would really add to the experience?
Actually getting high out of your skull.
That’s what this quartet of hikers in New York State thought. The four intrepid adventurers ventured into the woods and decided to munch on some magic mushrooms.
However, their trip soon turned sour. Either the guys had no experience of being on shrooms or the stuff they took was stronger than they anticipated.
In either case, the hikers got hopelessly lost. After a couple of them began hallucinating out of control, the most sober in the bunch decided they needed help and alerted the authorities.
Park rangers found the discombobulated hikers without much issue and escorted them out of the woods. The rangers drove them to their lodgings — only for the dudes to realize they’d dropped their keys in the forest.
Fortunately, the rangers were able to find and return the keys the following day. According to them, it wasn’t exactly hard to follow the guys’ trail.
A Weekend of Fun(gus)
The fungal incident happened on August 29, when the four friends, all in their 20s, arrived in the Catskill Mountains. They had planned to spend the Labor Day weekend hiking and relaxing in the area.
Apparently, their plans also included enjoying some magic mushrooms.
On the day of our arrival, they headed to the Giant’s Ledge Trail, some 80 miles southwest from the city of Albany. The three-mile loop route is well marked and very popular among hikers.
It’s a good thing that there are clear paths, too. The area around the trail climbs up to 2,600 feet in elevation, and the region is littered with sheer cliffs and sharp drops.
But hey, as long as the dudes stay on the path, all’s well and good. Right?
Bad Trip
So, our adventurous foursome headed into the woods. At some point during (or perhaps) before the hike, they consumed mushrooms containing psilocybin.
Now, as far as psychoactive substances go, psilocybin isn’t the most dangerous stuff. You won’t die from taking too much of it (you’d probably drop dead form eating too many mushrooms before getting a fatal does) and it’s not addictive in the same way as, say, fentanyl, meth, or cocaine are.
However, psilocybin is still a hallucinogenic, so it can make you hear, feel, and see things that aren’t there. Additionally, if your trip goes south, it can cause irritability, fear, and paranoia.
And what do you know — our friends’ trip went south.
Maybe they tried shrooms for the first time, or maybe the fungus was more potent than they thought. Whatever happened, the guys found themselves in over their heads.
And thus, they decided to return to their car as fast as they could. Which, in their minds, meant cutting through the forest in a straight line.
Dangerous Trip
Soon enough, the men found themselves hopelessly lost in the forest. They’re lucky to not hurt themselves, though, because as we said, the area around the Giant’s Ledge Trail has difficult and dangerous terrain.
“It would have been a great location to break a leg,” forest ranger Russell Martin told The New York Times.
As the friends walked, they only got higher and higher. Eventually, they had to stop because they were in no condition to press on.
One of them got so “debilitatingly high,” as the rangers put it, that he simply couldn’t take another step. Another started hallucinating about nonexistent bridges, which wasn’t a good sign in a region littered with potentially fatal drops.
That was enough to the most sober dude in the bunch. He realized they were in no condition to get out of the woods and alerted help.
‘Highs and Lows’
Two hours later, around 5 p.m., forest rangers and members from the Pine Hill Fire Department found the lost hikers. They were a whopping 1,000 feet from the trail.
That said, they might as well have been a million miles from civilization in their condition. The dude who had become unable to walk earlier was huddled in a fetal position and unable to talk coherently by the time the rescuers found them.
Slowly but surely, the rangers escorted the quartet down the mountain and to the trailhead. By that time, they had all sobered up and more or less returned to reality, but they were still given a health checkup.
They were in no condition to drive, though, so the rangers decided to give them a courtesy drop-off at their lodgings. During the drive, however, they realized that they’d lost their keys in the forest.
Fortunately, one of them recalled that — while high out of his skull — he had put their keys in a safe location so he wouldn’t lose them. The following day, Ranger Martin returned to the area and found the keys under the log the hiker had described.
It’s kind of amazing that he could remember the location so accurately. Then again, Martin probably would’ve found the place easily anyway.
“You did not need a tracker to find the route these guys took. I’m not an expert in mushrooms, but these gentlemen definitely rode highs and lows,” he summarized.