This is incredibly good advice. Kudos to Travis McGee.
We have been pursuing a little harmless nocturnal archeological project for the past 3 years. Thats fancy talk for digging holes. We know the woods around our neighborhood like the back of our hands. We can now walk it in total darkness. We do carry small green LED lights for the darkest nights but we only use them intermitently.
Walking around in the dark is great for your morale. For one thing you stop being afraid of the dark. Its very empowering. You also develop very good night vision.
Yes you can and will encounter other beings in the woods at night. We have had encounters of the close kind with deer, coyotes, a pesky skunk, a weasel, bobcat and one night a bear. The Bear was a little unerving but we smelled him coming and heard him moving around. He was as anxious to avoid us as we were him. I’ll admit we did high step it back home that night. We do carry pepper spray and a machete. We decided early on a gun was probably a poor idea for that location. We also do not sneak through our neighbor’s yards, well except for Mom. LOL!
Bottom line if we had to we could jump my Mom’s fence (she lives across the street and yes we keep a piece of carpet to facilitate getting over) and disappear down into the 100 year flood plain and be gone.
Yep, just getting past the basic hard-wired fear of the dark is a huge step. Kudos for nocturnal wanderings.
Throw in the odd moose or two and you’ve got our neighborhood. It’s all 5 and 10 acre plots, with every other section set aside as BLM land.
We advise you steer clear of the moose critters. They have a temper.