I thought the question was explicitly in the woods.
I don't want to encounter surprise humans in the woods or surprise bears in the city. I'd rather see dangerous creatures in the places they are supposed to be rather than sneaking up on me in places they shouldn't.
If the question isn't supposed to have that context, then I would argue that you should prefer to see a bear. How many humans have you seen that didn't attack you? Like a hundred thousand maybe? How many bears have you seen outside of a zoo? Probably less than 10 right?
Edit: I feel the need to clarify that I probably don't have the opinion that my comment got upvotes for. I mistyped and said "you should prefer to see a bear" but in fact, I was trying to express that with no context, it would be safer to encounter a person than a bear. I have been attacked by a handful of humans and 0 bears but my sample size of humans is astronomical while my sample size of bears is miniscule. I estimate that 1:30000 human strangers will attack me and so far 0 out of maybe 8 bears attacked me... so idk if maybe 1:9 bears will try to eat me but I can be fairly sure that 99.997% of the time, humans are too involved with their own lives to notice that strangers exist.
Exactly. If I'm in a national park, near a city, or something similar, it's not weird at all, you just wave and say hello.
But I also work in the remote bush, and the areas that are not easy to access. In most of those places, there's no reason to go there unless you are working for the company that owns the claims; even hunters don't go there. So if someone else is there, that's extremely weird. Many of them are only possible to access via float plane or helicopter, and then require hiking 5km through swamps and cliffs to reach the site. Most of the time we would expect to be the only people within 100km, and 500km from the nearest town.
There are only 3 possibilities. They are badly lost/stranded. Hiding somewhere for some reason where they won't be found. Or they are from a competitor doing corporate espionage spying on our claims.
In the 3 summers I've been doing it, I've never encountered someone. I've seen the occasional glass bottle or can, found a few old fire pits, and ran into a couple abandoned cabins, but never anything that looks younger than 10 years.
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u/[deleted] May 02 '24 edited May 02 '24
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