Quoted By:
Little memory: Typically the weather would be shorts during the day, but all through the night there were certain predictable tiers of cold there in the mountains. Immediately after sundown (8pm the sun was completely behind the ridge) it would get pretty cool, then around 9 my fleece pants were necessary. I was sleeping only in a bivy sack with Sea to Summit bag liner (the red one), and around 11 it would usually call for pulling the liner fully up to my neck and cinching the cord down. Often, but not always, at around 4am I would need to install my base layer top and some thick wool socks.
One of those mornings, at around 4am, I unzipped my bivy to retrieve the base layer and socks, and reached over beside me on the ground to turn on my little Goal Zero lantern. The moment of light revealed right there maybe 1 foot beside my head and staring right into my eyes was what I estimate to have been an 8 inch body length by perhaps 4 inch head height American Bullfrog. I had no idea it was possible for frogs to be *that fucking big* in GA. I have seen *plenty* of frogs over my 46 years, *many* around fist size or slightly larger, but nothing anywhere even close to this.
It sat there, just staring at me while I used the lantern to check it out, moving the lantern around to different angles and such, without even the tiniest flinch, only it's little neck bubble thing flexing from time to time. Still in my bivy other than upper torso and arms, I reached behind me, unzipped the front compartment on the backpack, got my phone out, turned it on, intending to take a photo. After waiting for Android to go through the two long ass startups (encryption, then regular Android), I finally got the camera on and went to set it to flash...and at that moment the frog leaped into the rhododendron maybe 5 feet away faster than a reddit mod post deletion.
