Yawn, Another Boring Weekend - NOT!

So there we were, four grown men, Boy Scout leaders at that, out for a hike around the lake. It was a chilly October Saturday afternoon, spritzing rain, sleet, snow, sun with a high of about 36 Fahrenheit. We were taking part in the Arapahoe District BSA Camporee outside of Ward Colorado, camping with 25 boys and 11 adults from our troop, over 150 total at the camp for the weekend. The boys were in hot competition shooting shotguns, riding bicycles, shooting BB guns and other fun events that could be thought of. It was after lunch, and the four of us decided we'd leave the boys to their devises and hike around the lake, about a 2.5 mile hike. As we approached the spot where an earlier group taking this same hike had seen the wildlife, we paused in search of our own adventure. To be fair, I was the only one in this group that had also been part of the previous hike, so I knew where to look and pause. But, alas, we saw nothing. The other 3 with me were incredulous and did not believe the stories we told of the morning hike, thinking we had mistaken what we saw for something else. Not seeing anything on this hike just solidified those thoughts. Now mind you, on this hike we had the troop Scoutmaster himself and three Assistant Scoutmasters, not a squeamish bunch by any means, brave and strong, tromping through the aspens and lodge pole pines, with some meadow sprinkled in for good measure. Okay, back to the hike, we proceeded from the pausing point, with some ribbing being taken by yours truly. As we rounded a bend in the path and passed a grouping of small trees, almost like 10 foot high shrubs, with me in the lead, we see coming straight at us, out of nowhere, running at quite a clip with obviously more steam to be made, 3 (not 1, not 2, but 3, count 'em 3) Moose. The cow in the lead must have been in heat, as the bull had his nose in her backside and didn't even notice us. The third was another cow along for the run. As they approached, I quickly stepped back two steps and over three so I was behind one of the other men, cowering. Thankfully at about 20 feet from us they turned back towards the woods. We breathed sighs of relief just as they approached the edge of the woods and turned back toward us. I kid you not, I made full eye contact with that lead cow and she was not going to change her direction from us for anything, I almost ran, for fear of getting trampled. Again at about 20 feet they turned toward the woods, and this time proceeded into them and out of sight. We all breathed again, talked it through wildly and actually paced off the distance from where one of us was standing to where the closest moose turned. 21 feet...... We continued our hike with some great stories for the rest of the camp, only pausing for the other 4 moose we encountered that felt the need to cross our trail one-by-one within 20 or 30 feet of us, pausing to check us out before moving over the hill. So in 2 hikes on the same path I encountered 8 moose, granted some from the first hike were probably the same from the second hike, but still. The first hike we didn't get within 100 feet of the moose. The second hike won. The rest of the camping trip was fairly ho-hum after that, all we had was a moose through our campsite in the night, a troop that refused to stop chanting at all the other troops, ours included, after we were all in our tents, snow in the night so that we woke up to 3 inches on the ground on Sunday morning, and a tent with 5 boys in it collapse under the snow in the middle of the night so that they had to be rescued. It was a great time!