Hiking has been known to be many people's favorite past time for as long as I can remember, but for myself, hiking has posed more traumatic experiences than anything. The culprit for these awful times has been...cows. I have never understood the term "holy cow," because, in my experience, they have been nothing holy. Most people only find themselves in these scenarios once in their life, but not me; no, I found myself in three different ones and here they are.

My first situation -- the first time I knew that they were ungodly creatures -- I was around 10 years old and my family was in Canada visiting some extended family and friends. My parents were out for the evening and the people we were staying with decided we should go on geocaching through their back woods. (If you don’t know what geocaching is you should look it up, I have a feeling you would enjoy it). So we set out with a goal in mind of finding this prize. Long story short, we ended up not finding the geocache and we ended up at the bottom of the mountain. At this point, we were just walking to find a trail, but just when we thought that was our biggest issue, we see it. A huge cow, with horns -- one may call it a bull. We presumed we could just creep around it but I had I been to the rodeos; I had seen what these creatures are capable of. It then "mooed" as it does and began to come at us; we ran up into the mountains to escape. It turned out that we ran into a bunch of wild blackberry bushes, which sounds all sweet and dandy until you are being scraped by the thousands of thorns they produce. All in all, we made it back with some wounds and one traumatizing fear of cows.

A couple years later, my father and I went hiking up in some mountains close to my house. Getting to the top was smooth, no problem -- nice view might I add. On the way down is when we ran into it. A cow. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) It was standing in the middle of the trail. Our first thought was, “wait it out,” but after 10 minutes we decided we didn’t want to be stuck on this mountain because of a piece of meat. So we threw a stick at it, which seemed like a reasonable decision until he decided he wasn’t into that and turned around and start coming toward us. At this point, all I could see is the flashback of my previous experience and panic sets in, “Could this be the end?” “How could they spin this story to make it a more honorable death?” In an act of heroism, my dad went to take this beef on and the cow decided it wasn’t worth it, so he trotted off into the sunset, and we remained alive -- alive, but not the same.

My third and most recent incident was this past summer. A friend of mine and I decided to go on a popular hike in our area and watch the sunset at the top. We set out on the trail and it was all sunshine and rainbows until we reached the top of the first hill. There we saw it, staring at us with those black eyes. Naturally, we decided to send her dog after it, you know, instill some fear. We were relieved when we thought it had worked as he began to walk away but just when we thought we were safe he let out a moo, and I kid you not it was as if he had summoned his tribe because 15 cows come running from the hills towards us. We started fleeing the scene but I swear the first cow went to go have a pow wow with his fellow tribe because after a few minutes we went back to see if the situation had cleared and all 15 cows were standing in a wall on the path staring at us. So we left and went to watch the sunset at the bottom of the trail.

As I cope with all these traumatic events I come to the conclusion that cows are conniving, and they certainly know what they are doing when they rebel against us humans. It’s as if they know that they are my favorite meal and this is the only stand they can take against me. All in all, hiking will never be my favorite past time, and I will forever fear cows, but I think I have learned a lot from this, and I hope you can too.