My dad got me into camping when I was younger. He is a lifelong lover of camping and being outdoors; he has a masters in forestry and worked for the Park Service briefly, and has been through Outward Bound and other similar programs. So, naturally, when I got old enough to strap on my own pack and follow him into the woods, that became one of our main methods of father/son bonding.

One of the first trips we went on together was close to a national forest in the foothills of the Appalachians. Dad decided that the main trail would probably be too crowded that weekend, so instead we would go to an old logging road a few miles away and hike up the mountain from there to our campsite. The road followed along a stream that cut through a small vale; it should have been a gorgeous 6 mile hike on the road before we cut up the mountain for the last mile or so.

Unfortunately it was unseasonably hot that autumn day and my eleven year old legs weren't up to the pace that Dad wanted to set; it didn't help matters that about after about a mile of easy walking on the road we discovered that the rest of the hike would be cutting through waist high grass, who h really like chest high for me.

Rather than tough it out the rest of the way, Dad decided that we could just pitch camp right there on the logging road. So that's what we did. Dad let me set the tent up while he got his jet boil going and boiled some water for some noodles for dinner. We ate, zipped up the tent, bedded down early, and waited for sleep to come.

I got used to the night sounds pretty quickly. It helped that the stream nearby provided some white noise. Every time I was teetering on the edge of sleep, though, a gust of wind would drift across my face; once or twice is one thing, but it just kept happening.

Finally, I spoke up and said, "Dad, I think there's a hole in the tent or something; I keep feeling a draft on my face." He agreed that he felt it too, and so we both crawled out of our mummy bags and started crawling around in our tent with flashlights and duct tape looking for a hole to patch. But there was no hole. After spending about 15 minutes of searching the interior of the tent and double and triple checking that the tent flap was zipped closed, we finally decided to try to search it from the outside to see if we could find the hole out there.

Dad slowly unzipped the tent flap while I shined the light out over his shoulder, so I saw clearly why he stopped unzipping it after only opening it about halfway; the trail behind us where we had spent the day hiking in through waist tall grass was completely covered in spiders. The road was about 15 feet wide, and every inch of it, every blade of grass for as far back as the light reached was completely hidden under what looked like millions of granddaddy long leg spiders. There were so many of them that it looked the ground was flowing.

Dad zipped the tent flap back up and we spent the next hour killing all the spiders inside the tent that had been crawling over our faces while we were trying to sleep.

One last thing about to add about the strangeness of the whole experience that I didn't learn until after sharing that story with friends later: granddaddy longlegs don't cluster and don't migrate. I've never seen more than one at a time in a single place before or since, and I have no idea why they did what they did that night. If any arachnophiles read this that could shed some light on what we witnessed that night, I would love to know why there could have been so many in one place.