Whatever the cause, the two friends have logged more adventure time together and separately than Thelma, Louise and Amelia Earhart combined. Take, for example, the time they paddled their kayaks after a gang of dolphins out into the Gulf of Mexico. “They were a little shy at first,” says Heidi Gritsavage, a 35-year-old Hendersonville resident who works at a nonprofit mental health agency. “But then they got used to us. They started doing tricks around our boats.”

Then there was the time they tried to kayak across a channel in the Tampa Bay near St. Petersburg, Florida, and almost got run over by a barge. And the time they did a five-day trip down the Santa Fe River outside of Gainesville, Florida, and came across “Loincloth Ed,” a guy who lived in a grass hut and ran around mostly naked in the woods. And don’t forget the camping trips in subzero temperatures or the hundred-mile bike trips in Western North Carolina and Florida. 

Separately, they seem to encounter even more drama. In January 2007, Diane Smoyer, a recruiter for Kimmel & Associates in Asheville, decided to join three pals on a winter hiking trip to Max Patch. When they arrived at their jump-off point atop the 4,600-foot mountain north of Asheville, the road was covered with snow and there was a sideways car blocking the road. When Smoyer stopped her Toyota SUV, all three friends hopped out and Smoyer backed up. But the minute she stepped on the gas, the car went off the mountain backwards. “When I jumped out of the door, the belt locked and I was hanging out of the car just getting ripped down the side of the mountain,” she recalls. That little adventure cost her 12 broken bones, a punctured lung and a lost kidney. It also nearly ripped off her left arm. “I really shouldn’t be alive,” she says. Fortunately, after two months in the hospital and four surgeries, she has full use of the arm with only a bit of nerve damage and a few lost muscles. She’s back to mountain biking and hiking full speed. 

Gritsavage’s brush with the grim reaper came from what some, including her mother, would call just plain insanity. With paid time off, she decided to take in a multi-day rodeo in Tennessee. During an intermission the first day, the announcer told the crowd they could participate in Bull Bowling. “The announcer was sounding like everyone would want to be in this event,” she says, noting that the prize was $100. “I was thinking that it sounded really cool. [My friend started] looking at me like I’m crazy. She told me, ‘I was raised on a farm and I’ve been chased by a bull. You don’t want to go out there.’” People sitting around them also started to chime in that getting gored by a bull was no fun. She checked with a rodeo clown, who assured her that it would be okay, and ten minutes later, she signed up. 

She strolled over to the bullpen and asked a cowboy if she could borrow his bull-riding vest. “He looked at me like I was crazy,” she says. “He said, ‘Are you kidding me? If you get gored, I’m out $250 bucks.’” She finally found a cowboy named Matt who lent her a vest. By this time, she says, she was determined not to be run off by the bull. “I dug my heels into the dirt. I was not going to move and I was going to win that hundred dollars,” she says. 

A bell clanged and the chute opened, and out of the corner of her eye, Gritsavage could see a 1,500-pound bull charging at her out of the pen. Rodeo clowns and other Bull Bowling contestants started running all over the place in the ring. The crowd was whooping and cheering. The last thing Gritsavage remembers was the bull’s giant head near the small of her back, and then she blacked out.

A friend filled her in later: the bull had knocked her about ten feet in the air, and she landed face first in the dirt. The next thing she remembers was being immobilized on a stretcher, numb and temporarily paralyzed. “All of the people in the audience thought I was dead,” she says. One of the cowboys was near her stretcher and started crying when she woke up. He promised her that, when she recovered, he would take her to a Waffle House for breakfast. 

The next day, she went back for the second day of the rodeo. “I walked in and the lady who was running the ticket stand dropped her jaw and said, ‘Aren’t you the girl who got hit by the bull? We all thought you were dead.’” Gritsavage was admitted to day two of the rodeo for free. “But,” she says with a sardonic smile, “I never did get my hundred bucks.”    —John Clausen