Thread Storytime

Just read part 4 and saw this on 4chan lol

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when we scout areas for new bike trails it's usually in areas with thick growth and little or no usage from humans, maybe a few game trails here and there but often we're routing trails up hillsides against bluffs so those don't even exist. every now and then we run into stairs, it's the weirdest goddamn thing. some are obviously just old foundations or old cellar stairs which are kind of cool to find and we try to route the trails towards them as a "feature" to see, and looking through old maps of the areas we can sometimes figure out what the foundations are from (usually a homestead marked on a 100+ year old map). On two different occasions though after hacking through thick brush we've come to openings where there were just a random normal set of stairs. the first one we found like that had burgandy shag carpet and had maybe 6 stairs. it was exactly like this guy described, looked like it was ripped straight out of a normal house... looked like someone had just built it or something and put some 70's carpet on the fucker. my buddy i was with at the time had been trailbuilding for yeeears and said occasionally they run into these, he had no idea what they were either, but said to not go near them or up them. his reasoning was they were unstable and could fall at any moment or something.

on the second occasion we ran into them i remember we had finished flagging an area for a trail which went up a hill side, so it was a series of wide switch backs to keep the trail grade at 15% or below. this is how you get a bike trail up a hill without making it stupidly steep, you move back and forth across the hillside until you're at the top and it ends up with a pretty length trail, miles as opposed to a few hundred feet of pure elevation climb. anyways, we got through flagging the first half of the trail which got us to the top of this valley we were working in, and had no plans to proceed further but didn't want to walk the entire flagged track back down, so we took a heading (we knew the road was straight west) and cut straight out of the woods. on the way back we came upon another small clearing, but this time it had a spiral staircase like you'd find in a cabin or something. the railings and things were made of cast iron twisted metal, and it looked liked it had wood steps with like a tan carpeting on it, but the wood and carpet were obviously weather worn and rotting away... i would guess this one had been there awhile.

really, they were weird as fuck but i could never find any information on them and other trail builders had similar stories, but never found any answers. i haven't done any of that stuff in years and had completely forgotten about them... i don't know where this guy is at (guessing up north, we don't get heavy snow here), but both the stairs we found were in missouri. the new staircase we found i probably couldn't find again, it was in the deep ozarks in the middle of nowhere, no civilization in site. the old spiral case was actually near kansas city, i know roughly where we found it and i bet i could find it again if it's still there. i know what section of trail we found it on anyways.
 
also the tree wells one is scary because we were always taught if we got lost in the snow to take shelter under a pine tree, fill in the snow around it and it's supposed to create a shelter to protect you from the elements, sort of like an igloo. googling it though, looks like there's a few deaths every year from people falling into them, and head first is how a few sites i saw said it usually happens.