Strange Experience/Wild Dog??

[B2crawler]

When I was still in High School about 97 I and two other friends were four wheeling in the Panamint Valley outside of Death Valley.  We all went to Trona High School if you want to look this area up and see how desolate this place is.  There just aren't many folks out there in that part of the desert.  We had been wheeling on the West side of the valley when we came up on a mining road that hadn't been used in a few decades. After following it a ways it probably could have been a wagon trail.  Grease Wood bushes had grown between the two tracts.  It takes a LONG time for a Grease Wood to grow big there.   Actually while on the road it would completely disappear and then reappear after a few hundred feet.  We worked our way into this canyon going from the valley floor  into the mountains for several miles.   At the point we could go no farther in the Toyota Truck we might have been 10 miles from the paved road, and 30 miles from the nearest town...Trona.  Now remember we're kids and this is about 2-3 in the morning. We decided to hike farther up the canyon.  I bet we only made it half a mile from the truck when a dog bark brought us all to a stop at the same moment.  A few seconds go by and my friend Eli says,"Did you guys hear that".  As he's saying this we hear it for the second time, but a little louder.  This has us going and we both snapped at Eli about all three of us stopping at the same time of course we heard something and would have heard it the second time more clearly had he not talked at the wrong moment.  This is all very quiet talking mind you.  Then we heard it a third time with no walking or talking noise.  This sounded like a BIG dog with deep bark.  I don't think it was just a dog barking that scared us..it was what how why where did this thing come from.  As fast as we all stopped at once we took off at the same time with nothing said after the third bark.  We flat out boogied back to the truck.  To this day I still wonder what a large dog was doing out there.  Maybe a hiker...never seen any vehicles around.  Lost or dumped dog wouldn't last long out there in the Mojave Desert without food water.
Sure was a lot of fun.  No better place to grow up obsessed with guns and four wheeling. 

[Oldtimer]

There is a saying in Haiti, when a dog barks in the daytime, it is just a dog.  When it barks at night it's MR. DOG.

[halfbreed]

Use to do a bunch of auto repo, my paertner was very afraid of dogs. Big or small made no differance. I would just waltz up and do my thing. Once had to play with both the ladies pit bull, and rottweiler guard dogs plus an assortment of hunting dogs.
 One very dark night however was a differant story, way back in the woods, literally about 150 yard long driveway, we went in to get 2 vehicles. could not even see the driveway we were walking on. We finally got on the carport, and the deepest gutteral growl told us 'not tonight".
 We went back in the morning and all we could find was a very small lil rag mop of a dog. we got the 2 vehicles, but did not find his big buddy. Still want to know what it was though.
 John