Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting Big Foot, Yeti, and other woodland haints..........

At least a few folks in another thread mentioned their run ins with forest creatures that I guess would be called Bigfoots.

Who has seen them? Where? When? What were you doing? The beast?

Honestly curious. Not looking to ridicule.

You can see the capitalist evil in their glowing red eyes....their coolers are WAAAAAY overpriced.

I know. Yet look at the very first response you got:


SOMEBODY thinks they're funny. Maybe they are.

However, someone else who might have something serious and on topic decides to avoid the abuse and keeps something they might have shared to themselves. The scoftics win just by being rude enough to shut down the conversation, not by having any intelligent counter-points to make.

Tom

I won't cast the first stone and I am too busy right now. However, keep this thread open and I'll toss you a boulder.

Guess I need to stop running naked through the woods...

You'll see a lot more Sasquatches after 70 proof than after 50 proof.

LOL, awesome.

In a thread about sidearms, people pipin' up about sasquatch.

In a sasquatch thread......nothin'

Elusive indeed......

If any such existed they would have been shot and skun, then the story would have been sold for millions.

Bit like alien never-do-wells that get off on sticking metal bits up the arse of primitives...bullshit.

My sasquatch can lick your chupacabra

^^^^ and that, right there, is why every time I start to reply, I talk myself out of it. The class clowns rule the asylum. You can't have a thoughtful discussion with thoughtless people, it just doesn't work.

MadMooner ... you have a PM coming.

Tom

Once while trekking through the deep woods in search of Morel Mushrooms, heard an awful thunderous bellow.....from directly behind me.

Turned around just in time to snap a quick pic.



It appeared he didn't see me as any threat, as I don't drive a big-boat butt-ugly Suburban.

I'd like to read the story

Explains why there aren't many of them.

Lots of 'fraudsters' out there....don't always believe everything you think you see.

Can Bigfoot and Yeti interbreed? Anyone know for sure?

All the evidence is circumstantial at this point.

All right you class clowns, laugh all you want, but I've seen that ^^^ Bigfoot on TV lots of times over the last eight years.

Bump to keep thread alive so Thomas can spill his guts...

Personally... somebody is seeing something, maybe not all of them, but some are.

The question is what, exactly!

Most are probably a mis-identification.

Some fraud, to be sure. But charging around the NA woods in a monkey suit is probably more dangerous than hunting Grizz in sandles with a sharp stick...


BFRO! LOL, LMAO... we haven't photoed one, shot one, tracked one, got hair off one and yet they have the ballzz to say 'this is CLASSIC BF habitat' or that is 'Classic BF behavior'

For the record, I have never seen/heard one.... that I know of.

Me and DD did work with a gal a while back that everyone called 'the Wildebeast'....

not to her face of course!

In an era where virtually everyone man, woman, and child has a smart phone on them 24/7 with photo and video capabilities I find it interesting that no one can seem to take a clear picture of Bigfoot.

If someone wants to be taken seriously about this subject, they need to offer some serious evidence to back up their claim.

Ditto.

Agreed... Dont understand the hesitation now?

This actually, originally, had the makings of an interesting thread. Now? Not so much.

Anyone have any good recipes?

Hi Vek - what would you like to know?

I don't refer to them as "stories", that suggests something made up. To me they're kind of ... just part of what is. Y' live them, ponder them, and pretty soon the "edge" wears out. Not new and shiny anymore. I could tell you about a whole spectrum of stuff from definite sights sliding down the scale to "maybe, I doubt it, but I can't completely discount it" incidents. I could tell you about the why and why not, the characteristics that suggest bigfoot, the characteristics that point other directions, the details I plain can't explain that leave me scratching my head. I could tell you about the state of the research, the science, what we have, what we don't have, what we don't have but we think we should, some thoughts on the why behind that. I could tell you what I think they are ... which addresses that why. I could also tell you what parts of the whole bigfoot mythos that I'm damned skeptical of ... and why.

But I get the idea that isn't really what people are looking for, they're just looking for something to laugh at. I don't really feel like participating.

Side thought: another forum I'm allows people to start threads and manage who is allowed to respond. Others can read, but they can't shut down a discussion through distractions. It's kind of like watching football on TV ... no matter how many pretzels you throw at the screen, the ref ignores you. It's too bad we don't have something like that here for certain kinds of discussion.

Tom

I've always wondered...was Chewbacca a Sasquatch or a Yeti? Or are they the same thing other than environment?

I'm interested in personal experiences - either firsthand or from persons close to the one(s) with experience. If that experience informs other opinions, then fire away.

My interest largely stems from the copy of the John Green book that my brothers had when I was growing up - it made an impression on a wee lad.

By chance....did you support Obama's 'net neutrality regulations?

Vek -

The first thing that I found was a track line. I was 10 or so. I'd read up on bigfoot via some materials I found on my great grandfather's porch. That he had them is pretty incredible given his personal circumstances ... that he would risk his reputation even having them around was entirely out of character unless he had some kind of experience that he never shared with family. That might well be, there are a couple of pointers in that direction.

The tracks were located on a wide muddy area on the riverbank. Ever make chocolate pudding on the stove? Know how it has that glazed surface you can't touch without leaving unavoidable marks .. you can't just smooth it out because you've changed the surface texture? Same situation. There was no way anyone or anything walked within 30 feet of those tracks 'til I showed up. Whatever made them walked in them. "Period." The track line came out of deep water onto the shelf. The shelf had been underwater 'til only a couple hours before. The tracks were laid down after the water receded. The first 4-5 were in a pretty thin layer of "mud" .. sort of a sandy, silty, scunge with some moss in it with that glazed surface look overlaying the rock shelf. They went clear to rock of course. The next 1-2 were in the damp red clay where the shelf transitioned to a very steep bank. From the depth, I think whatever made them was upwards of 1000 pounds. The clay bank above was dry, the tracks weren't clear tracks, just scuff marks.

The river was dropping fast. I don't think that shelf was exposed at daylight that day. The tracks showed no sign of water muting the edges, they were sharp. The sun hadn't hit the mud yet. In that bend of the river, sun hits about 11:00 to 11:30, and I think it was about 10:30 when I found them though that's somewhat guesswork. I would say they were less than 4 hours old with good confidence.

The tracks were 5-toed, no claws, 24-1/2 inches long, 8-1/2 inches across the ball of the foot, 6 inches across the heel, very slightly curved, but no arch was visible. Right heel to left heel, consecutive steps, was 6-1/2 feet and it didn't seem to break stride going up the bank, it just ... went up. The bank was about 20 ... ish? ... feet high, flattened fairly abruptly at the top, and was topped by an impenetrable (by me) evergreen huckleberry jungle with blackberry vines mixed in.

I took those measurement using my fly rod and the 8" notch filed in the cork handle as a gauge so they're not off by much. I measured, then decided I needed to be somewhere else pronto. Great grandpa was picking huckleberries a quarter mile or so downstream up a side creek. I rowed out to mid river, chucked the anchor, and fished 'til I saw him come out on the bank. I knew exactly what I was looking at and there was no way I wanted to be in the brush with "that."

Tom

I ain't gonna call you a liar...If you got more, I'm all ears. Thanks.

I'd like to hear more too.

Yep, I just have to break stuff up into manageable chunks.

The next thing that happened was about 2 years later. That was a full on, fairly long duration sighting. It was not dark, but dusk-ish, light wasn't great, but not horrible either. I can't be sure of the exact date. I know I was not old enough to drive but my cousin, who is 3-1/2 years older, was. I can guestimate based on my great grandfather's health. And it was deer season. Lets say October 1976, best calculated guess. Could maybe have been 77, but no earlier or later.

We have an old traditional family deer hunt. We drop someone off on a particular logging road and they hike down the mountain to the river, then then come out. We'd dropped my aunt off and my cuz drove the truck home. Even if someone is coming out pretty fast, there's a big oak patch a quarter mile past the end of the road so they'll "hang up" 'til it's getting dark. We took the truck to the landing area along the river to wait for her.

We were sitting there BSing about whatever teen boys BS about (he was probably trying to impress me with his knowledge of sci fi or girls or something). We noticed something in the river, upstream, to our left. 150 to 200 yards. It looked like a great big man walking right down the middle of the river. That section is not very deep, maybe 4-6 feet, but runs fairly fast. He passed about 75 yards away in front of us, then went over a shallow gravel ridge and dropped into deep water. Where he passed in front of us, the water is never less than 4-1/2 feet, generally 5 ish, some years even over 6, just depends on how heavy the river current is at the time the side creeks are dumping gravel. We couldn't see the guy REAL well so as he went in front of us, my cuz hit the headlights. Now, that's mid 70s, incandescent lights, not halogens, and the engine was off, so not super bright, but ... bright enough. This "guy" was a solid charcoal-ish color top to bottom. No hat, no reflective skin, no reflective clothing, no apparent fishing implements. Looked like almost black hair top to bottom. He was only settled into the water about crotch / hip joint deep based.

The general number cited is a human male's legs are about 45% of their total height. Bigfoots seem to have slightly shorter legs, proportionally, based on the report data. One way or the other, 45% of this "guys" height was at least 4-1/2 feet. You do the math, I don't really even want to say that number. Egad.

However, if you look at Fahrenbach's chart, those tracks I found in '74 are a pretty good match to that height. The two "events" were only 3/4ths of a mile apart. My guess is it was the same one.

Anyway, he went out of the headlights just before going over the shallow bar into the deeper water. By the time my cuz got the engine fired up and the truck jockeyed around to put the lights back on him, he was a couple hundred yards away. We never got a real good look at him when he was in the shallowest water.

At that point, he was sort of out of headlight range but the river had curved and he was heading due west. There, where the water was deeper, it was fairly still-looking and the surface was real reflective. The sun had gone down but there was a pretty bright spot to the west back-lighting him giving us a real good silhouette view as he swam away. You know how a dog or bear swims, settled low in the water with their chin often dragging so they'll even kind of choke on occasional small waves? This guy swam high. His arms stayed under water, not an overhead stroke, but the water surface hit him mid shoulder, about armpit level.

He was about 350 yards from us where he went out of sight around a bend. I don't know if he got out of the river or swam the next rapids.

My cousin and I told the family what we'd seen when we got back to the house. My father told us we absolutely had NOT seen what we saw and threatened to hurt us, not just a whipping, but permanent injury. He was mad, scared, something. It scared my cousin so bad he changed his story to agree with what dad said we saw .. even though dad wasn't there to see whatever we saw. I pushed that under the mental carpet, didn't think about it much, 'til a few years ago another cousin from another side of the family asked about it. I'd forgotten she was there. She laid out what we'd said exactly the way I just told it to you ... she wasn't there to see what we saw but she remember the story as I remembered the story. She added a few things I'd forgotten 'bout the dogs acting up around the house that night and such. (We only lived about 400 yards from the river where the thing went around the bend.)

Those are the only real concrete things I remember from right there at the house. There are a couple of more ... subjective ... things that MIGHT have been bigfoot related. If you read up on habituation, one of the things that comes up in many accounts is horse mane braiding. We had 2 horses. I remember my father and one sister talking about the manes being braided. Dad attributed that to an old "Indian" guy who lived down the road about a mile. I asked the other sister a couple years ago if they'd ever seen the "Indian" or if it was just an assumption. You know the answer: assumption. Now I wish I'd paid attention, actually looked at those braids myself, 'cause the pictures of braids I've seen are not quite like how gals braid their hair. I'll never know. The people who do know are people who've proven untrustworthy on other things so .. the story is what it is, but the truth ... out of reach.

There's one other but I want to come back to that later. There's some weird [bleep] happens and if I'm going to dive into that, I want to do it sort of together.

More later ...

Tom

Couple times in high school, in the hills above our house, we had something follow us. "We" is me 'n' my buddy Pat. I'm pretty average height, a little heavier maybe. Pat is 6' 4" / 6' 5". We lived about 8 miles apart. When our parents would let us borrow one of the cars we'd meet up and get into trouble. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, but ... "idle hands." "Hey, I wonder what would happen if we ..." etc. If we were of merely normal intelligence we'd be long dead. (You can think I'm bragging ... I don't care enough to brag.)

Anyways, one time I drove down to his house early in the morning to do a cross country climb / hike up a series of bluffs to look for a cave that was supposed to have some Native American artifacts of some sort in them. Others who'd been there said there was a really neat rope swing which you could swing out over a bluff top ... if you had the cajones. This bluff was broken into sections an between them were areas of talus, often with trees on them, and those were usually angled so we didn't have any technical climbing to do, just a real steep walk up a hillside with game trails if we did it right.

We got to the top. Never did find the cave. Never did find the rope swing. We DID find a rock about 4 x 3 x 2 feet, sort of rectangular, near the bluff top, got down on our butts, put our legs against it, and sent it over the edge. one thousand one, one thousand two, one thou .. we got to one thousand six before the crash. Lotsa vertical. We were up on top walking along looking for a different way down, I was in the lead, looking back talking over my shoulder, stepped between two bushes, and for some reason I grabbed a bush before I put my foot down. When I looked down I was hanging half off a 1000 foot drop by a handful of brush. There were rocks down there poking out of the timber bigger than houses. Close call.

We found another route down eventually. Part way down we found a ledge too high to jump up onto far enough to get up that was polished smooth by feet going up and down. Looked to be a cave on top. Cougar den, probably? We didn't have a gun with us. We found where the rock we'd launched had hit a big fir tree and blown it to tooth picks. There was a deep gouge into the ground where the rock had hit, then a trail on down the hill where it'd trashed the brush and a groove maybe 6 inches deep and a couple feet wide. As we were admiring our handiwork we noticed the sounds of something approaching from behind us on the path we'd taken around the bluff base. We decided to use that gouge as our path.

We'd walk, it'd walk .. but a little faster. We ran ... it ran .. a little faster. Always closing the distance. Never saw it. Finally ran out of gouge at the top of another bluff. We had a good open area on both sides and behind us but we couldn't go down and we couldn't go around or up without going back into the brush where "it" was. I still don't know what it was. Cougar, maybe? I'm not jumping to the bigfoot conclusion. We'd drank all our water so Pat filled his metal canteen with rocks and I put one big rock in my day pack so we could swing them like clubs. "It" was going back and forth above us like a guard on duty but staying in the brush out of sight. We screwed up our nerve and when it was at the farthest point on it's arc, we made a run up the hill into the brush and took off the other direction along the bluff top. We hit an open spot of talus where we could see. "It" stayed back in the brush. We had time to look around a bit. We found our trail up the hill across that talus only instead of two sets of bipedal tracks, there were three. Mine were pretty obvious, short legs. Pat's were pretty obvious, longer legs. That third set ... took steps 2 feet longer than Pat's step length. It was loose talus, sort of mudstone flakes, not soil, so there was nothin' but depressions where we'd stepped, so we can't be sure what left those, but since Pat was the tallest guy in our area by a couple inches, I have my suspicions.

I'm still not sure what was behind us though. I kinda assume cougar. When we took out of that open talus area, we were running downhill like hell was gaining on us. Somewhere there both my hamstrings cramped up and I went to frog hops. That hill was so steep that I could sorta squat and two-legged hop, despite the cramps, and land 15-20 feet farther down the mountain each time. I bet it was funny lookin' but I was hauling major ass for someone in that state. Eventually we hit the graveled road and collapsed. "It" stopped a ways above us. We laid there a long time. It must have gotten tired of us 'cause we never had any sign of it once we hit that road.

I wouldn't really think much of that in terms of bigfoot except that extra set of bipedal tracks. Something on two feet followed us up that hill. It was either a guy over 7 feet tall or ... y' know. Something.

Tom

Wow, now that's a good read ! Best I've ever seen on here for sure. Thanks for taking the time.

It wasn't long after that I went off to college, took 5 years to get that 4 year degree (oops), got married, moved away from home. It was a long time before anything else happened ... with one exception.

About a year after graduation, my now ex and I left our daughter with my ex's dad and step-mom overnight for an overnight backpacking trip. It was either her birthday our our anniversary, I don't remember which, and they were real close together. It was a weird feeling day. My ex doesn't like guns but on the way up to the trailhead she wanted to stop and shoot to familiarize herself with the two I'd brought. I had a 6" blued half-lug GP100 and a 7-1/2" blued super blackhawk. We shot some halfway up the mountain at a rock quarry, then drove up, parked, grabbed our packs, and hiked just over a mile, almost flat, into a small lake in a glacial cirque.

We set up camp, had a bite to eat, then I walked 50 feet or so over to the lake shore to make a couple casts. As I was fishing I could hear something coming towards us. Facing the back wall of the cirque, it was high right, slowly moving down and left, not very fast, just hear rocks rolling now and then. It wouldn't have been odd to have that many rocks rolling but they were coming from a focus point which was moving steadily, not just random rocks rolling. The cirque wall was behind a stand of trees so we couldn't see up there.

For some reason we got the willies. We waffled ... stay vs go. We decided there was enough light to pack up and haul ass for the trailhead. We didn't really pack, we just shoved stuff in the packs. We were wrong about how much daylight we had. The trail left to the left out of the bowl the lake was in climbing steeply to the ridge, then leveled out. Whatever was up there, we heard it come down that ridge we had to cross. It stopped a ways above the trail. We assumed it left. Wrong. As soon as we rounded the corner and started the more gradual, closer to level section, it dropped in behind us. It never came down in the trail, it stayed up in the brush above and behind us.

The brush there is big rhododendron, maybe 12-15 feet tall, and Saddlers Oak which is pretty similar looking. That "thing" sounded like it was walking on two feet. We never saw it, we just saw the tops of that brush being plowed aside as it walked, and it didn't seem to encounter any more resistance from the brush than one of us would walking through grass the same height. It was big, heavy, strong, and on two feet.

A time or two we lost sound of it. We thought maybe we left it behind. Then it'd appear behind us again. It seemed to occasionally leap-frog us, then, rather than ambush us as we passed, it'd wait for us to pass, then keep herding us along. .. 'cause whatever it was, that's exactly what it was doing, herding us out of there. Mostly it was 50 yards or so away, a couple times it was within 30-40 feet.

As we approached the parking lot the brush thinned out. It quit following us when the brush got thin enough we'd have seen it. We threw the packs in the truck and headed back to town.

My ex does not believe in bigfoot but she remembers that night and she has no better explanation ... oh, and she's got a master's degree in biology.

So, that was it for quite a long time. But .. since I decided to open my damn fool mouth, I'll add s' more pretty soon.

Tom

So what next? That was July of 1988. Wound up divorced not long after, then a new job, 7 years there with nothing I can think of. Another new job. I was focused on varmint shooting and four wheeling, didn't spend much time hiking and not that much time hunting. When I did, it was mostly in an area that I don't think has regular bigfoot activity.

Family politics happen, though. To get away from them, I had to expand my horizons into new areas to hunt and fish. I apparently stumbled into two locations that are at least seasonally very active.

The first one ... it's ok if you roll your eyes. I've only had one possible sighting there. It's not far from here on a ridge off the side of a bigger mountain that has one elevated knob protruding upwards. There's an old dirt two track towards the top of the knob. The road leaves a decent gravel going uphill, swings right around a little gully, then left over a small ridge onto a flat. At the back edge of the flat a car-sized boulder has been placed to block the road on up the hill. If the gate at the main road is open I park there, otherwise I park on the shoulder and walk the extra few hundred yards. Passing the boulder the ridge is on the left. The road goes up and swings right rounding another big gully. It's a few hundred yards across. On the uphill side of the gully, the road goes left and continues upwards maybe a quarter mile, crosses the main ridge, and goes out into a steep meadow with a lot of elderberry bushes where it peters out.

The first time I was conscious of something weird going on was about the 3rd or 4th year I hunted there to stay away from family problems. The grass was knee high except in the tracks themselves. There were some fallen trees someone had cut out of the road with a chainsaw but left the ends from the uphill side hanging out almost to the tire tracks. I was just starting into that upper canyon area when I smelled an incredibly intense smell of dog s h i t. It was awful, sharp, like having your nose rammed up a dog's ass. I picked up a twig, leaned one arm against one of those log ends, and lifted my foot to scrape the crap I was sure was there off my shoe. Clean shoe. Ok, must be the other foot. Changed sides ... clean shoe. I had a simultaneous "WTF" and deja vu moment, both not understanding what was happening AND realizing I'd done the same thing in the same spot leaning against the same tree end a couple other times in previous years.

That area there is pretty brushy other than the road. It's almost 6000 feet elevation with the thicker / denser true firs, not douglas firs. Lot of brush, too. The gully itself is too wet for the firs so it is open with grass and sedges. The ground has running water over a gravelly substrate that holds some rotting leaf materials and protecting the soil under it from eroding. In it there are patches of willows and what we call ocean spray which is a real woody shrub that can be a little higher than your head, bushy, with small clusters of tiny white flowers.

For several years after finally noticing oddness, I paid more attention. At the upper edge of that gully where the road goes back into the timber, and odd thing happened a lot regarding that smell. I'd get hit by a wall of it. I could sometimes take 2 steps and be clear out of it so I only smelled the clean mountain smell .. slight decaying wood, plants that'd died back, stuff like that. Take two steps forward and I'd be back in the stink. The weird thing is that if the wind switched and blew downhill instead of uphill, the same thing would happen so it seemed like the source was moving and it was real real close to me because it wasn't mixing into the air moving through the trees evenly. This has only happened from about 2:00 pm on towards dusk, never in the morning, never after dark. With few exceptions, it only happens in mid september into mid october. I have caught a whiff of it twice in august now.

I've searched that mountainside high and low looking for what it is and where it comes from with no luck.

About 6-7 years ago I drew a different tag so I couldn't hunt it but I'd gone for a long hike and decided an afternoon slow walk to work out the kinks would be a good thing. I ran into a family of 4 up there hunting: a couple that seemed to be in their early 50s, their mid-late 20s son, and his early teens step-son. The parents were hunting but letting their son lead. The step son was bored, no gun, listening to his walkman not paying a bit of attention. I got close enough to talk to the mom for a couple minutes, told them what I was doing, told them to go ahead and hunt, I'd hold back and stay out of their hair. The son took off up over the hill, went over the head of that bigger gully, and came back down to the road. I met him there.

He was in full bore freak out mode. He said a bigfoot followed him most of the way around. He was trying to get his family rounded up, back to their truck, and get the hell out of there. We stood shoulder to shoulder, 2 inches apart, sniffing the air, smelling the same thing. I insisted it was fecal, he insisted it was incredibly rank B.O. His mom was walking along grabbing handfulls of plants, shoving them up her nose, and sniffing trying to convince her son it was just a plant he was smelling. They left. I wish I'd gotten their names.

Some time in there the vibe o' the place changed. I don't know how else to say it. The first time I noticed it was on the back side of the main ridge muzzleloader hunting. Just had an unwelcome feeling I couldn't shake several trips in a row. The next year it got worse. I was fine 'til mid afternoon and I was fine if I was gone a couple hours before dark, but start crowding into evening ... it was bad. No real reason. Spidey sense. Having the attention of a predator sense. One day I screwed up, lost track of time up in that upper meadow, and had to come through the "danger zone" near dusk. It was bad, real bad.

That finally pissed me off. I'm not puttin' up with being chased off my mountain. I went back mid-afternoon, passed the back meadow, up the ridge, out into a manzanita patch, climbed up on top of a boulder, and sat there watching the moon rise to the east and the sun set to the west 'til it was full friggin' dark. I left my flashlight in my pocket and walked down the trail feeling my way by foot. Nothing happened. The sense of immanent doom has not occurred again.

It might be just in my head but a year or two later I was up there, mid morning, walking back out ... scouting, maybe, I forget ... and "something" hurled a chunk of dead log that looked to be more than 50 pounds up out of a clump of brush, across an opening in the trees, where it hit the side of a big fir going so fast that it bounced horizontally off that tree trunk 30-40 y ards before it hit the ground, again behind brush. I've watch the Olympics, I've watched strongman competitions ... there is no human alive who could do that. It's not possible. Bears don't have hands, that's not possible either.

About 3, maybe 4 years ago, I was talking to a friend who investigates bigfoot reports. He asked for my input on one. He wasn't supposed to share it because he's under contract with a non-disclosure agreement, but I promised not to notice the witness name. The report described someone driving through an open green gate, then up to a little flat where the road was blocked by a giant white boulder. The one and only. The hunter was sitting up against a tree waiting for his buddy when something started bouncing rocks off the tree trunk by his head. His buddy, when he finally arrived, came from the other direction. They haven't been back. I heard one other similar story which sounds like it's in the same place.

So that friend and I decided to drive up there so I could show him around. It was mid-late summer, not the "busy" season. We were headed back toward the truck, right about where I'd been when I first had to stop and check my shoes for "dog crap", looking downhill down the road. We saw two people coming up the hill at the far end of the short straight section. Ridge to our right, canyon to the left , going that direction. The grass in the middle between the tracks and on both shoulders was a little over knee high. Something black and hairy rolled out of the grass left of the road and headed down the hill below us. It appeared to stand up and run away upright. We couldn't see it real well but we could see glimpses of it running through the leaves of the trees along the road. By that time I was pretty involved in bigfoot research myself so we booked down to where it'd been laying in the grass for a better look.

There was a big fir tree about 75 yards below the road. The trunk was bare for for the bottom 40-50 feet. From behind that tree, I saw a shoulder emerge briefly. Bears front shoulders are such that the legs are sort of under the body. This was different. It had broad shoulders like ours that put the legs along side the upper torso. We decided to walk down there. It was real steep. I fell on my ass .. while I was getting back up, my buddy said he saw a head protrude around the tree. I slipped one more time. When we got down there, there was nothing there to see. When we got down there I was able to compare a spot on the tree to where the shoulder had been. The shoulder, never mind the top of the head, was 7 feet above the ground,.

Now, I didn't actually see enough of the thing at the same time to say 100% sure that it was a bigfoot, but I can back into that eliminating the things that can't fit that description. I'm not concerned about saying, by process of elimination, that I'm 98-99 percent sure it was, thought. For now, I label it "probably." That's different than that first one in the river or the one I saw later.

Tom

So .. backtrack.

Somewhere in the late 1990s, before I was involved, that investigator I mentioned was just a normal guy, sort of a redneck / conservative blue collar type raised hunting, fishing, and camping. There's a basin in the mountains with some lakes. He, family, friends, etc would hike in fairly often for extended stays fishing. He said occasionally they'd hear odd, out of place noises but didn't really worry about it. Knocks, trees pushed over, rock clacks, but all at a distance such that he didn't think the makers of the sounds were aware of him, they were intended for others. Then he and a buddy camped at an unmaintained site near one of the lakes. Some time in the middle of the night, 4-5 "things" came through camp from the direction of the lake outlet where there's an easy creek crossing, but left the trail and clipped the edge of their campsite. Most of the "things" stayed on the edge of camp but one really big one walked up on two feet, dragged they could see the impression of from the inside across the tent fabric, poked at it, and was "talking" back and forth with the others on the edge of camp. The language was unknown and my buddy described it as tonal, asian-sounding, but lower pitch. It was 2 guys in sleeping bags in a pup tent. They had a hunting dog with them they used to chase bears. The dog freaked and crawled down into one of the sleeping bags and could not be coaxed out 'til mid morning the next day. They said the dog was useless after that, broke it's spirit ... it wouldn't even go out into it's own back yard in town to pee after dark. They said they didn't have a gun, didn't really know what to do, so they just stayed quiet 'til "they" left.

My buddy didn't go back. We met in 2010 on a web site for bigfoot enthusiasts. There was a gal he called "sis", that he and his wife were incredibly protective of, who I was sort of interested in meeting, so when he suggested we go backpacking, I figured it might be a chance to get past the guard, learn a bit about her, and if nothing else, spend a couple days camping and fishing BSing with someone with similar interests. It was very clear to me as he shared his story that he was suffering from PTSD from the experience and wanted me to be "security blanket" even if he wouldn't say it outright. Since you just don't go looking for bigfoot and find them, I took that angle of the trip as a total joke. NO expectation of anything happening.

We packed our packs and made our plans. I hadn't backpacked much since the mid 80s so I was really in old-school mode still using my old gear. He works nights. I picked him up after his shift ended and we hauled for the mountains. It was a long hike in with too-heavy packs. We hit the 2nd lake and found a camp site right by the trail and within spitting distance of the water's edge. Wasn't much to it, just a flat patch of bare ground with a rotting log separating it from the trail. Set up camp. It's under fairly thick, but not very tall, alpine fir ... maybe shasta red fir, with a lot of huckleberry and snowberry brush. As we set up camp, boiled water, choked down Mountain House, etc, a modest 3x3 blacktail buck still in velvet kept cruising around our camp. It was making a half-circle arc back and forth staying 30 feet or so out, not getting close to us, but acting as if we were providing a safety buffer between it and something else out there. Not certain, but a little ... concerning. We took off over to the outlet creek to filter water. Maybe 100 yards? The deer followed us, well out of reach, but still staying in our "shadow", and returned with us, too. Eventually it got dark, he hung his pack with our food, and I took the garbage a ways outside camp and hung it. We went to bed. My buddy had been up 25 hours straight at that point and was whupped.

So ... we were in a basin, under fairly heavy fir timber, and the moon was a couple hours from rising. I fell asleep .. best guess about 9:45. I have low back problems. I woke up .. again, only a guess, I didn't check my watch ... about an hour later. I could not breath ... at all. Sinuses completely blocked. I could hear myself hyperventilating. I was having trouble moving. All the muscles in my face were spasming and twitching uncontrollably ... like being tazed in the face. I could feel pressure points in the fluids in my eye sockets but it was so dark I couldn't see anyway. I was in full throttle panic and assumed I was dying, not sure from what, but medical emergency, couldn't breath, 5 miles into a wilderness ... that's dead. It wasn't merely scared, I was [bleep] terrified, I was recognizing and accepting the inevitability of my impending death.

I discovered I could breath through my mouth. It was HARD, labored, but I could get air. There as a little relief. I could get out of full panic and think a little bit. Something seemed odd about that hyperventilating sound. It seemed out of sync with my chest and it seemed like it came from a foot or two away even though I couldn't locate the direction. I decided to perform an experiment ... I put my arms across my chest so I could be sure that I was really not moving ... and held my breath. Sure enough, the hyperventilating sound continued.

Brief break to describe that breathing. It was truly huge volumes of air ... horse lungs or bigger. It was not wheezing or whistling, so it was large nasal passages. It was FAST despite the seeming depth of the breathing. You know the sounds of a dog snuffing along a scent trail? Not quite that fast, but close, and there were no breaks, it was just nonstop, no changes in cadence. It went on and on and on the whole 45 minutes or so without any change.

I was laying there trying to figure out what to do, what the HELL was going on, when there was a loud knock ... wood on wood ... from about 50 yards above camp in the woods. (Oh, there was a game trail going that direction, FWIW.) That was mushy, like hitting a little bit punky tree. A few seconds later, off to the south at a little different angle and another 25 yards away, there was a second knock. That one was sharp, hard wood on hard wood.

The thing about those knocks ... you can tell how fast wood is moving when it hits stuff by the pitch of the impact. Those knocks were wood hitting wood at a velocity that wood falling from the available trees couldn't reach accelerated by gravity because the trees were too short. The only option, there, then, was a stick or club swung by something with hands.

I immediately knew what the hell was going on, I just wasn't sure what to do about it. All I had to do was not screw up, not set "them" off, and outlast them ... they'd leave.

What woke me up in the first place was low back pain. I had to roll over but I sure didn't want to set anything off outside. I rolled several times in 45 minutes or so. Once I got a tickle in the back of my throat and manage to unzip my tent, reach out, grab a canteen, and take a drink. I confirmed it wasn't sleep paralysis because that canteen , which had been full, was half empty the next morning.

So ... what happened there? I know WHO it was, but why, for what purpose? My best guess given the overall picture is there was at least on adult in camp (breathing) and 1 or 2 outside camp (breathing continued when the knocks happened) ... probably there was an infant or juvenile there, too ... show and tell, maybe? And I wasn't supposed to wake up. The breathing is suggestive of infrasound generation and the symptoms I experience seemed to fit.

My buddy slept through the whole thing. I know it wasn't him because I heard him moving in his tent a time or two.

The next morning we got up, made breakfast, and moved camp across the creek to a little better site but only 200 or so yards away. It was an old horse camp that had a bunch of nice big flat rocks to sit on instead of that termite infested log.

Hung out the next day ...

During the day we hung out, shot the [bleep], ate way too much, swam a little, napped, etc. The horse camp was nice. He was able to put his tent 30-40 feet from mine. (Snores .. of course **I** would never snore, right?) He'd mentioned a dream of wanting to catch and eat a brook trout there from one of the lakes. About dusk I caught a decent one so while I gutted it he ran back and fired up his camp stove. He cooked it, we split it, and while he cleaned up, I packed the garbage bag back out into the woods again and tied it to a branch. By then it was full on DARK. We were still in that basin bottom, still under timber, the moon hadn't come up, and this time, though we hadn't gotten rained on, some t-storms had passed nearby and the sky was about 50% cloudy. It was so friggin' dark I could not see my hand .. I could hold it up, block out some of the few stars, but I couldn't actually see the hand.

We decided to call it a night. My "tent" was a Cabela's north star bivy, pretty damned small. I'd hit my shoulder on the top when I rolled over. I got in ... seemed pretty hot so instead of putting on shorts I just stripped to my drawers. I didn't climb in the bag, I opened it up to lay on top. The little lantern had been off less than 3 minutes, I was still squirming around getting comfortable, when I heard the footsteps coming. There was something out there, coming our way, from my end of camp. It was clearly walking on two feet. It wasn't just the foot steps in sync, the swishes of the knee-high snowberry were also "two-stroke" as it came in. It was heavy ... the ground did not actually shake but it seemed like it should have. 900 pounds? The ground was broken granite mostly. Our shoes, and the deer hooves, crunched and ground as we walked in camp. This didn't, it had soft-bottomed feet. It was coming fast, not hurried, just motoring along. Despite the weight, it was nimble. It could **see** even though I couldn't. It was negotiating tree trunks at high speed without hitting them. As it got real close, I grew afraid of being stepped on. The last couple steps slowed and it stopped about 4-5 feet from me.

My assumption is, because it came into camp so quickly after lights out, that it'd been out there watching us and waiting.

I laid there. Nothing happened. I was going down the mental checklist of what it could possibly be. My buddy going out into the dark to pee on MY side of camp? No, no light, he couldn't see either, and he wouldn't risk getting gut shot. I had my short Ruger Super Blackhawk, he was carrying a 1911 ... 4 mags ... and a 50 round box ... idiot. I don't need that much ballast to slow me down on the trail. Anyway, that's another story. No way he'd risk coming in unannounced, no way he could do that in the dark, either. Feral humans? Thought about Paulides discussing them in the context of disappearances around the national park system ... but they still have to be able to see. Ishi! Maybe. Mocassins would be quiet, not crunch broken rock / gravel.

So lets see, I either have a feral indian with a 700 pound pack jogging nimbly through the forest in his moccasins wearing night vision goggles ... or that's a bigfoot out there. Occam says ... it's not an indian.

Things were quiet for a few minutes. It thought it might have left without me hearing it. After a bit, the damned fir needles started to fall on my tent from the tree overhead. You know how, after dark, in high mountain valleys, a light breeze will sort of come and go? It had that pattern. Well, maybe it'll stop, but why did I set up under a dead tree? Idiot!! Uh .. y' know, I don't hear a breeze, I just hear needles in the pattern of a breeze. Gol DAMNED squirrels!! What the hell is that GOL DAMNED squirrel doing running up and down that branch knocking needles on me? Do I have to move my tent ... now? Do I want to go out there? Is "IT" really gone? Needle stopped falling after a few minutes. Whew. Right?

Now, I don't remember, something else happened for a while, same sort of thought process. Then quiet again.

All o' the sudden, right by my head, there's this loud scritching sound. The rain fly was made of some sort of cloth covered over with a layer of rubbery plastic. It still had texture sort of like a pair of jeans. It sounded like little rodent toenails sliding down the rain fly. Got to the bottom, paused, and repeated. Seemed to be 2 of them thar rodents 'cause the scritching spot was about a foot wide, maybe 14 inches wide. That got me thinkin' about my old pack out there, it's been a lot of miles and has a lot of salts from sweat in the nylon and ... those rodents might have buddies out there chewing my pack straps .. .I could have to carry that freakin' pack in my arms 5 miles or more if they eat the straps off. So ... I poked my head out to check things out. I have a little flashlight that uses 4 hearing aid batteries and projects a green beam. I used that to look around my pack. Nada. The scritching stopped. I zipped the tent back up. The scritching started again. Driving me nuts. After while the thought of rodents was still bugging me plus I needed to pee so I unzipped ... scritching stopped ... I got out with my little light, walked my underwear-clad ass around a tree, took a whiz, then headed back for the tent.

What's the obvious thing to do? What's the one thing I could not do, could not even think to do? Yeah .. couldn't even LOOK past the tent to see what was happening with those "rodents."

Climbed back in. zipped up, stretched out. Scriiiiiitch ... dammit. I tried shining the light out under the edge of the tent hoping to see the rodents. It was very obvious they were jumping in tandem, sliding down the fly dragging their toenails, then falling to the ground, and doing it again ... right?

I finally lost my temper. I was layin' there with the back of one hand on the butt of my .44. With the other hand I slapped the tent fly from the inside .. hard. I expected to launch those damn friggin' rodents halfway across the camp .. but I never heard them land. A few seconds later ... scritch.

Eventually I fell asleep.

I try to keep a real tidy campsite. As few rocks, sticks, pine cones, etc as possible. The next morning as we were breaking camp I found a dead fir frond about a foot across with all the dried needles pointing the same direction ... sort of like a giant hair brush. The branch on the tree overhead was not dead, there were no dead needles except on the ground beyond where my bivy/tent had been.

It wasn't wind, it wasn't a squirrel .. whatever was out there had been dribbling handfulls of dry needles on me, probably trying to test my reaction. When I didn't react, it escalated. The reason I couldn't detect a "plop" sound as the rodents fell from the rain fly to the ground, and I couldn't detect a "plop" as they landed on the rain fly to slide again, is it wasn't rodents at all, it was something out there stroking my rain fly with the pointy end of all those fir needles on that branch. My visitor hadn't left at all, he was out there messin' with me to see what I'd do.

Kind of an interesting night.

One of the reasons I'm not particularly scared of them now is they've had a number of opportunities to twist my head off if they'd chosen ... but they haven't. I"m gambling that they're not inclined to. They bluff like mother f**kers but when push comes to shove, they stand down.

Well, that's it for tonight.

Tom

Good reading. Thanks.

I grew up in Kenny Lake. This is a farming and subsistence community about 200 miles East of Anchorage in the Copper River Basin. We didn't have boy scouts but we did have the Men's club. Young men from this area learned how to survive and understand the woods with a dose of Jesus and bible memorization mixed in. We decided that we would help a group of young men from Haines Jct build a camp and cabin site at a place called Bonnie Lake in the Yukon territory but towards Alaska in a very remote area about 25 miles off of the road. There were 4 of us from Kenny Lake and I was the youngest at the age of 13, I am 49 now so it was a while back. We also went along with the minister and two very famous backcountry trappers.
Our minister's name was Bob Clawson and he was a MACSOG Marine from Vietnam war. He was from a long line of game wardens and could move through the woods and trees without making a sound. You have to remember that while most of the people on this forum were going to prom and playing football, we were trapping, fishing, hunting and living most of the time outdoors. Bob was a woodsman supreme. He was about 6ft but he had a size 15 boot foot size and he would not make a sound.
We joined up with John Keys who was the old minister from KL. His group of young men was about 22 strong. There was one young man who was 16 years old who was black and who smelled differently. I figured out that he smelled because he smoked cigarettes and reefer. He was nice at first but got more and more troublesome with all of the other guys and refused to do work. We made our way out to the location and started clearing an area for the camp. There were logs there so we started to put in a foundation using pilings. It started raining hard and we decided to quit for a couple of days. We decided to travel as a group further inland towards a valley. We worked our way 10 miles from the camp into a high valley that had a strange red clay material as soil. We found a stream that look like it was completely covered with tracks. These were tracks from 18 inches to more than 36 inches in length and were shaped like brown bear or human tracks. Unlike Brown bears, these tracks had a big toe on the inside not like brown bears. We knew the difference. We didn't see anything. Our group made it back to the camp. That night I heard something that I will never forget.
The boy from Canada was smoking something in his tent. No body else would sleep in his tent. That night at about 2AM we were awakened to the sounds of his screams. Something had ripped into his tent and drug him off into the trees. He was screaming, "help me, help me, and then started sobbing as something was dragging him through the brush.
We were gathered at the center of the camp and it was decided that the older boys and a couple of the older men would march the majority of us out in one day. I was smaller than the other folks so it was decided that three of us who were younger would stay back with the two experienced trappers and the minister who was going get the kid back. He went out with his rifle and pack and left in the dark. The rest of the group marched from 6 AM to 9PM and made it back to the road 20 miles in that day. We made it about 6 miles carrying the camp. That evening we were woke up at about 2AM when Bob came in with the boy. Bob was carrying over his shoulder but had him tied up with 550 parachute cord. We were given the task to wash off the kid who was covered with what smelled like marten trapping bait which is female martin crap in estrus. It was a nasty job and we got it done. He would rock back and forth and whimper and make weird sounds. He had cuts and abrasions all over his body. We got him dressed and he went to sleep. About two hours later during civil twilight, we heard a screeching sound out in the brush and could make out brush breaking. Bob would just get up go out into the brush and shoot his 30-06 Husqvarna 3 times and then return. We got up at 8 AM and went another 10 miles that day before we camped. The sounds would be around camp and Bob would go out fire his rifle and then it would be quiet again. The boy was seriously screwed up. We made it out the next day. We were told not to talk about it to our parents when we got back. I talked to everybody on the trip about 15 years later and they remember the trip exactly the same. The boy continued to have mental problems into adult and moved to a mental health institution in British Columbia. The church in Haines Junction abandoned the camp. Two hunters from the area found that same high valley about 20 years later according to Prof. Brown from UAS who studies Bigfoot as well as being a professor of biology. They had almost the same kind of story and felt that they almost didn't make it out. I am sorry that I am not as articulate as I am most of the time but I lost much of the original story when my last computer hard drive failed.
Have I seen big foot. Nope. Do I believe that bigfoot exists in NA? Yep. There is a lot of recent archeological evidence that has been recently uncovered that could back this up. Have a good night.

This happened in South GA about 12-15 years ago. My wife and her ex husband were driving at night, maybe 10 miles from their house. About 100 yards or so in front of them, a black creature about 6 ft tall ran across the road in front of them. They both looked at each other and asked what the other saw. When they got up where it crossed the road she said it smelled horribly. I'm assuming that was a skunk app that are supposedly in FL. She's never told anyone but me about it because people think your nuts if you talk about this kind of stuff.

That hiking trip was in August 2011.

The next year I went back by myself. The friend / investigator who took me there the first time is a short, heavy guy who packs too heavy and I was going to do something I didn't think he could do with a pack as heavy as he carries. But first ...

The trailhead we used on those first trips is about 5 miles north of camp. It climbs slowly for just under 2 miles to a ridge crest. There's an old trail about 3/4ths of a mile down into the canyon on the other side of the ridge to an area with a bunch of artesian springs that form the head of one fork of a river. I'd read about those and, being a fisherman, decided I needed to check that out. Mid July I drove over early, hiked the trails to the springs, took a few pictures, then headed off-trail down into the canyon. It's dead-end, a few miles down there are some waterfalls where the river drops over bluffs. I fished my way along, swatted a lot of mosquitoes, and didn't even see a flicker of anything with fins. Instead of backtracking, I cut cross-country to hit the trail that goes to where we camped backpacking, then headed north on the trail, to the junction, and headed back toward the parking lot. I was a quarter mile or so inside the wilderness boundary, just before 11:00 am, walking along minding my own business, and something cut loose to my left, so NNW, with a huge loud "roar". The trail forms a notch, uphill to the left, and not far over the edge to the right was a little creek. I dropped left down into that notch going to one knee, put my left hand on the bank, and ripped the retaining strap on my .44 loose with my right. (Bianchi 1L holster with a 4-5/8" barreled blued super blackhawk on my pants-belt, if you care.) My first instinct was I'd been ambushed, I was "got". Even while I was processing that, still mid-drop to my knee, I realized that sound was from a long ways off, probably 3/4ths of a mile. It wasn't painfully loud but it definitely dominated the "soundscape". Everything went silent ... birds, bugs, etc ... except the creek beside me. There was 3-5 seconds of silence, then sounds returned to normal, not all at once, but built back up pretty quickly.

When I say I heard something and I don't know what it was, that was the first of the two times I heard it. My impression of the two instances is a little different. Maybe they were different, maybe it was just distance. Can't be sure. My impression was that sound was drawn out a little longer than the other one, and it had a rise, then fall. Still low pitched. I might even call it gravelly. There was a rattle aspect. You've probably heard a diesel truck coming down a grade under compression. Has some "pop" in exhaust sound. That's my impression.

My check-in person for that hike was pretty well known in the bigfoot research community but had investigated other paranormal stuff in the past. Like me, she grew up outside a small town and has spent a ton of time in the woods. Anything that is out of place, she's interested. I knew as soon as I got into cell phone range, I had to tell her 'bout that. Only I "forgot". Very unsettling. There's a wrongness to that forgetting:out of place, out of character. "Suggestive of outside influence." Whatever that might mean. I hit a couple other side roads on my way down from the trailhead, then called as soon as I hit pavement. She asked me if I'd seen anything, any tracks, etc. Nope. Smell anything? (I'd told her about that fecal smell a couple years earlier.) Nope. Hear anything? Nope. Blah blah ... did you hear anything? Nope. Yack yack ... did you hear anything? Nope. About the 4th time "did you hear anything" came up I started to get a little irked about having to repeat myself. I started out to vent ... "I SAID ..." only then something broke loose. I had to stop. I had a real serious "WTF just happened?" moment. And then I told her what I'd heard and the weird memory thing that was going on. She insisted that I go buy a small audio recorder and run it full time in case something like that happens. I can not only capture sounds in the woods but I can dictate / record what's going on ... a verbal record.

So, back to the hiking trip by myself ...

I took a couple extra days off leading into the labor day weekend. I drove to that trailhead, then boogied for the camp area. My plan had been to get there, camp overnight, then try to hit each of the major lakes in the area the next day. I hit "camp" at 10:00 am so I decided to try to hit the lakes that day, too. There are 5 in a cluster in the "camp" area. I'd hit the first three within a half mile of "camp". I'd been to the first 2 the previous year.

The third was new. It's off trail a couple hundred yards. I found something odd there. Out in the lake, visible, but under knee deep water, are lines of big tracks. I was in a hurry-ish, so I just took a few pictures, then returned to the trail and motored onwards.

The 4th is at the end of a dead end section of trail. Just before I got to the lake, at almost exactly noon, I heard the second of the two "roars". It's more of an "ahhhhh" sound. It came from across the river canyon above me. I was rounding a small canyon behind timber so I'm a little unsure of the exact angle. There is a raised rocky knob overlooking the far edge of the canyon which is about 2-1/4 miles from where I was hiking. Otherwise, to be above me on that side of the river, it's about 4 miles ... minimum. That knob did not seem like it's at quite the right angle, I'd have thought it was off by 30 degrees or something like that, but behind the trees, I can't be sure. I was running the audio recorder my friend had insisted I buy so I have a recording of the sound. Its just a little less loud than the crunching of the broken gravel under my feet as I hiked. It was short, a second or so, and I wasn't able to get stopped, I crunched through it.

I went on down to the lake. It also appeared to have similar tracks in the mud underwater. That lake, being at the end of a dead end trail, gets very little traffic. I'd be surprised of a half dozen people a year go there. I took a lot of pictures from the bluff top overlooking the canyon.

I backtracked about a quarter mile, then climbed over a low saddle and took off cross country for about a half mile to hit another regular USFS trail. My route took me across a spaghnum bog ... really cool. Unusual here. There was a ghost of a trail I bumped into a few places and once in a while I saw flagging ribbon .. someone else is using that route. I hit that other trail and started climbing ... a mile or so to the saddle in the main ridge where it Ts with yet another trail and from there, on uphill toward another lake which sits in a fault atop the ridge. Much of that is a blur. I should have drank more water when I was at the lake. I had 2 quarts in canteens. It wasn't enough, by the time I got to the saddle, I was out. I was cramping, falling ... in a real bad way. A quarter mile above where the trails T together, another spur trail heads off down to another trailhead on the other side. Somewhere near it, I found a possible bigfoot track. While I was out of my head a bit from dehydration, I still had enough mental "stuff" to drag out my little tape measure I use for measuring fish now, put it by the track, and take some pictures. It was 15.5x5 inches. There are a couple features I don't like about it which make me wonder about authenticity, still, it's a something and I have a record of it.

The pond I was expecting to rehydrate at was almost dry, just a little pool of black / green slimy looking stuff that looked like a nightmare out of a cow pasture. It was about 3/4ths of a mile on up to the main lake. I sucked it up and kept marching, cramping, falling. A couple times I tried to sit down but the hornets would swarm so I had to move on. I eventually got to the lake, filtered water, tanked up, and took a long rest break. I probably should have stayed there but I was down to just 2 lakes to go and it was downhill, 1.5 miles to go, so I slowly moved on. Passed the first of those two lakes.

That lake is where my buddy and the other guy were camped in the pup tent when they had the visitors come into camp.

It's a short distance, quarter mile maybe, down to the 2nd lake. I made it, completed the 2nd day of my three day trip by the end of day 1. It was only about 3/4ths of a mile from there down to where he and I had camped the prior year so I staggered down the trail through the woods to the familiar camp sites. Someone was in the spot with the rotten log where we'd camped the first night so I moved 200 yards further to the other camp site, set up camp, got more water, then crawled in the lake to wash the trail scunge off. I can't even begin to tell you how good that felt. I tried to eat dinner but food didn't want to go down, I'd pushed that hard. I couldn't eat jerky, my lips burned ... dehydration results I think. So I climbed into bed. I didn't sleep that night. My legs were on fire ... I could feel the heat coming off them from 6-8 inches away. Just laid there looking up at the stars.

The next morning, just before 8:00, I was sitting there making breakfast and pondering whether to hike out or spend a whole day just sitting. My back was hurting again and hiking out seemed to be winning. As I sat there, I heard something.

Back across the little creek, beyond the trail, up on the mountain, there were a group of somethings traveling along whooping back and forth. Not loud, not like locator "where the hell are you?" whoops, more like ... just loud enough for a loose group moving along to not get separated. My first thought was "cattle drive" because the sounds were somewhat like what I've heard locals make commanding their stock dogs. Wilderness area, though, not legal for cattle. A silly first impression I ditched quickly. I got the audio recorder going and captured 4-5 repetitions of that whoop, which came a few minutes apart. Reviewing the audio back home, I found something else in it which I don't recall hearing real-time. There's an odd two-syllable response to one of the whoops, sort of a hey-ay, with the 2nd "ay" at a higher pitch.

I hiked on out. Interesting trip. Tracks of something unknown in 2 lake bottoms, audio recording of the "ahhhhhhh" sound which I talk about off and on, pictures of a bigfoot-looking track, and recordings of those whoops.

Tom

Thanks guys for telling your experiences. Something I've thought about related to smells, if humans with certain smell or odor are more likely to attract hominids of the wild like bigfoot.. Chewing tobacco, marijuana, or women smells, or kid smells, how do these and other smell figure into an encounter. Folks who go looking for bigfoot seem to not understand, that bigfoot finds them, they don't find bigfoot. In my many years of hunting and fishing in the Rocky mountains, with some experiences I've had, I don't go" looking." I diliberately try to avoid areas of "activity", just like I avoid areas of grizzly activity. If "something" comes to me, I'll deal with it best I can. Otherwise not.. I don't camp in tents anymore.

I don't make assumptions about some big bipedal creature as being a "gentle giant". Whatever it is seems to have sentient and cognitive abilities in addition to incredible strength.
Even grizzlies come in various attitudes and dispositions. We don't really ultimately know how EVERY Grizzly will react to a situation, but we know what they're capable of.
I don't go looking for trouble.

2013 was fairly uneventful. The one thing that did happen is ... weird. I didn't go back into that area with the lakes we'd hiked into. I drew an early deer tag for September, did a backpack hunt, and tore my feet up real bad opening day. Cotton tube socks. Oops. After sitting most of the week letting the skin on my heels grow back, I decided to go explore farther north. Long drive, hopefully short walk into an off-trail lake, chance to see somewhere new.

I started up the road I thought went near the lake. It was pretty awful. It appeared to be 5-6 miles on the map. After the first half mile, there was a water bar every few hundred yards. They were just deep enough that my truck would rub going over, but not so deep they stopped me. 2 mph crawl, speed up, slow down, repeat. Tedious. The road hadn't been used in long enough the alders were growing into it and broken ends were doing a number on my paint. A couple miles in, there was a logging landing the road crossed. Usually those are down spur ridges, but not this one. It was a wide enough spot to get out and look around. I got out my maps and GPS hoping to convince myself I'd taken the wrong road so I could turn around and leave without actually giving up. No such luck. I had the map out on the truck hood trying to orient it to the peaks around me.

Backing up a little .. the road climbed along the edges of a steep forested canyon. The road cut provided the only direct light to the forest floor so the road itself was lined with a wall of fugly brush. Beyond it, if you could get beyond it, the forest opened up and was not too bad. There was no way to see past that wall of brush though. The place I parked was barely into an old clear cut, I was real close to the edge of the timber.

As I was looking at my map and pondering what to do, SOMETHING on the back edge of that wall of brush, maybe 40 feet away, was raising all manner of hell thrashing the CRAP out of some of the smaller trees. It wasn't running away. It had the whole open forest behind it, but it wasn't leaving.

It was the 2nd to last day of that special deer season. I was in a legal area for the tag. I also had bear and cougar tags in my pocket, legal to kill either. The only big game animal that could be present that I didn't have a tag for was elk. I handgun hunt a lot. I had my .44.

I remember thinking "well that's weird" before I folded my map, put stuff away, got back in the truck, and drove away ... oblivious.

In hind sight it freaks me out. I should have been concerned about that bluff / threat display. I should have been curious to see whatever it was. I should have been thinking like a hunter and gone over to see if it was something I could legally shoot, then take it home to eat it. I did none of those. Thinking about Col Cooper's "threat colors", I should have been past yellow and into orange if not red, but I was in condition white.

That freaks me out. Something weird happened there, not just poor judgment, but external influence of some sort I only became aware of after it was over. Oblivious as a bovine at the slaughter house with it's head locked in the chute, no clue 'bout the big hammer about to fall. Unsettling, spooky.

Pay attention when you're out there. When you get home, review your day and look for things that don't belong, things you've done that are out of character.

Tom

I was going to save it for later, put some more stuff down first, but since you brought it up ...

I'm not specifically looking for bigfoot. I look at the report data, talk to local people, and look for places that have a history of odd things happening. Maybe sightings or sounds, maybe less concrete. Then I go to those places, but I do my regular stuff .. scouting, hunting, fishing, taking pictures .. and just keep an eye out and ear open for tracks, unidentifiable noises, etc.

I think the risk varies by location. The behavior, "flavor" of the bigfoot reports varies regionally. I would not do the things I do here if I lived in the desert SW, Ouichita mountains, etc where the "vibe" of the reports seems more confrontational. Looking at those regions from a biological standpoint, any big thing living there is going to live by a thinner margin. Less water. Less space either because of human intrusion or limited plant cover. It couldn't be as "tolerant" there as the same thing could be here where it doesn't have to stand its ground, it can just move over to the next canyon and have the same resources available.

They're not big cuddly forest friends, they're not big teddy bears ... they're friggin' enormous, omnivorous, apex predators. The potential is scary. However, if they were merely thoughtless eating machines, many many more people would disappear and their behavior would have long ago lead to something that proved their existence. They'd have attacked one too many wrong people and there'd be dead ones in the museum. They cannot be just animals and remain unproven this long. They **think**. That makes them both more and less dangerous. In general, they're inclined to avoid, bluff if they can't, and back down when bluffing fails.

I suggest reading David Paulides' Missing 411 books. They're police cases of missing persons which seem to fit a pattern. I think he started out assuming bigfoot but has changed his mind as his investigations have continued. I think something else is behind most of them but there are a few which do suggest bigfoot. I assume that, just like us, they have their crazies, their rogues, which probably account for those instances. There IS a risk to what I'm doing. The brutal truth is, though, that I have the skill set needed and I'm expendable. My kid is 30, doesn't truly need me, I'm not abdicating some responsibility by taking a few chances, so .. might as well push the envelope a bit, try to learn something.

I started out hunting, fishing, backpacking, and bumped into bigfoot. I started tentatively looking into bigfoot and found those tracks in the lake bottom, heard the "ahhhh" sounds, and had a few of those situations where I found myself not behaving like me. I'm still not really specifically looking for bigfoot. I run a string of trail cameras in wilderness locations (uncle sam would not approve .. if found they'll be confiscated) which are somewhat for locating game, hopefully identifying the source of those sounds, and maybe possibly getting a picture of a bigfoot someday. But ultimately, I'm still just a guy out there doing what he loves in the woods ... I just have my eyes open to a little more while I'm there.

Tom

PS: thanks, all, who chime in with your own experiences! I think my next thing "up on deck" is my 2nd sighting, but I have to get some work done first.

... continued.

There was one other thing in 2013 I overlooked ... my 2nd sighting. So maybe it wasn't such an uneventful year after all.

That tag I had which lead to the backpack hunt, torn up heels, and road trip is also valid for regular deer season unlike our other special draw tags. Some time in the middle of the first week of deer season we got some rain. I got up early the 2nd saturday and went for a wander. There's a small lake, more of a pond, on the map and I'd read that F&W used to stock it with trout. I'd been wanting to go check it out. I packed my day pack with a short pack spin rod, some lures, my camera, a little food, some water, extra shells, grabbed my deer rifle, and headed off to wander around ready for mostly whatever happened. It's a couple hour drive and I got an early start. Because of the dust-dimpling on the road from the rain, I could tell nobody had driven within 10 miles or more of the turnoff to the lake ... I was alone up there, had it all to myself.

A little about the lay of the land. A significant river runs roughly north-south. It has two tributaries heading west separated by a high rocky ridge. Each of those, in turn, have tributaries. One from each, one heading south, one heading north, both start at a relatively low saddle in that high rocky ridge. There's a road following each tributary passing through that saddle and forks of the road going a ways up each ridge. Pretty steep so those side roads wind and switchback a bit. Westward above the saddle is a low side ridge and in the valley beyond it, the lake.

To get to the lake, y' come in from the north, climb to the saddle, drive just past it, then take a right (west) which wanders up through the trees to a USFS gate. Park and walk on the gated off road. After a half mile or so, that is blocked by a fallen log. Its got some fence or something on it to keep the four wheelers out but that's been vandalized so they can drive further in where they're banned. From that log, the road is pretty level for a ways. The ridge is on the left. It's dropping from high behind to lower in front. Eventually the old trail / two track road turns hard left crossing the ridge, then drops down into the valley with the pond / lake. It goes about halfway down, hits a small side gully, does another switchback to the right, and heads down to where it hits the low earth dam face. The road continues across the dam face (just a dirt/boulder pile), goes a short ways through a clump of trees, and comes out into a meadow on another spur canyon where there's an old line shack. The cabin is made of 4x12 planks with dovetail ends (not sure what you call it ... like how a wooden dresser is put together) with a galvanized metal roof.

So ... layout done, back to the story.

I left my truck below the gate, hiked up the little bit of remaining hill, and headed around the flat part. Somewhere past the log blocking the road / trail, it passes through some old logging which has sparse second growth douglas fir trees. They're big enough the bottom limbs have died, needles have fallen, but the branches haven't rotted off yet. When I got to the hairpin corner where the road crosses the ridgeline, I noticed something in the left trackway. I don't remember what it was .. maybe a piece of metal off a rig, maybe a big mushroom, nothing wildly unusual. I stopped and bent over to look at it.

I heard a big swish behind me ... branches moving. There were dog-hair firs lining the edge of the road there. They were moving back and forth top to bottom, together, from ground up to 9 feet or so. It wasn't the chaotic kind of branch movement you'd get from birds moving out of sync, it looked like the result of a single thing that tall stepping backwards. I can't know for sure, but I suspect I'd turned my back on "one" which had been frozen unnoticed waiting for me to past and when I stopped she lost her nerve. (By itself, that's weak, but more to come.) Didn't hear anything, didn't see anything, but I couldn't see past the trees. Said to myself "maybe", smiled, laughed and went on about my biz. That was to my left as I rounded the corner. (Oh, that corner is sharp enough that a full sized pickup would probably not make the turn without jockeying it once.) I took a few more steps, 15-20 feet or so, and on that same left side, I heard something. There were a small number of "voices" hauling ass away from me up the ridgeline in the brush. I couldn't make out words. They were sort of high pitched, sort of muffled / mumbly, and kind of giggling. Weird. No thrashing or crashing, just slight sound of brush being pushed aside. I remember thinking "don't chase those, people who chase those don't come back." I don't remember who told me that. Lore from somewhere along my path. So smiled, laughed, and kept on walking down to the lake. I made a few casts, caught nothing but cat-tails, no fish. I went back to the cabin and back meadow and took some pictures. Then headed back toward the truck. I got up the hill, rounded that sharp bend, and started out into the area with the widely spaced second growth firs.

I got about halfway across that and noticed to my right (west now, since I was going the other way) there were a couple sets of old tire tracks, either a four wheeler or truck, heading towards a gap in the trees on top of the ridge which really wasn't far away or much above me. I didn't think about it much, I just thought "photo op", pivoted on one end, and sprinted towards the gap. Sprinted .. why? Because it was a bright sunny day, crisp, and the wind was blowing a bit. Days like that seem to ionize the air or something and it wind me up ... it was just an incredible moment to be alive.

I got about 3-4 steps into my sprint and caught something moving ahead to my left. Something about 7-1/2 feet tall, covered with brownish hair, running on two feet pumping it's arms as it ran. Holy crap. It was going from my left to my right towards the tire tracks I was chasing. As it went under / behind one of those firs with the dead branches it bent at the waist, put it's arms over it's head as if to protect it's eyes, and plowed in full throttle. I expected it to come out the other side and cross the tracks but it didn't, it just vanished. I think it pivoted once it had the tree for cover and went right over that ridge I'd been headed for. That's what made sense. It probably didn't last 2 seconds.

Only a guess, what it "felt" like ... I think that thing that'd swished behind me walking in was "mom." This one was slender as bigfoots go and didn't "feel" like an adult. I think the "little" son of a gun was misbehaving shadowing me through the woods, just practicing, and I did something unexpected by either of us and busted him. I really think he was more worried about what his mom was going to do than what I was going to do. He didn't really act afraid, he just acted like he he'd screwed up and was expecting an earful.

So ... Oct 6, 2013 ... pretty sure. 9:45 am, give or take. "Bluebirds" day, bright sun. Bigfoot. 100 feet away. Exactly no doubt about what it was.

It was just a "well I'll be damned" moment, not scary, shocking, or anything like that, just a sense of having beaten the odds. It's amazing what you can get used to.

(I'm not sure which came first, this sighting or the maybe. The maybe might have been a year later, could have been a month or two earlier the same year. Obviously I should have kept a journal to keep the order of stuff straight. I didn't so I just try to rebuild from the things that happened around them.)

Sort of out of order, but the saddle below that the road goes through has some funny game trails through it. Some are clearly deer trails. Others have dried mud ridges which seem to have been worn smoother, the sharp polished off of them, by passage of soft-bottomed feet. Being the lowest pass over the ridge for a few miles in each direction it would make a good route for anything heading between canyons to pass through. I have a couple cameras set up just down into one of the canyons that nobody stopping in the saddle on the road to take a leak is likely to stumble over them. So far, just deer and bear. I hope to go back some time late this month to retrieve them and see if I got anything "interesting." Probably not but y' never know. Sure won't unless you try.

Tom

Good stuff TOM, thanks for taking the time.

Can you define the general location of most of your experiences (unless I missed it)?

Primarily SW Oregon, but not exclusively.

Thanks. It's kind of useful to take time to organize it to put it in writing.

One thing I have never experienced in the bigfoot world are any of the classic screams, howls, etc that you'll find if you go listen to recordings on youtube. I don't know why. If I were relying on others reports, they seem ... common. Same for tree knocks. I've spent a ton of time in the woods. In all the years, I've heard 3. I told of two in the context of the first of those camp visits. I also recorded one near my truck when I was gone.

Branches break. Acorns fall. Trees tip over. Once in a great while it may be bigfoot but by far, "most of the cigars are just cigars." People get all freaked out over nothing.

Following that first "ahhhh" sound I bought an audio recorder to carry in my pocket which runs full time. When I got a few more $$, I bought one to set up under the hood of my truck because that first "ahhhh" was pretty close to the parking lot. Fingers crossed. It's like the lottery, you may not win, but you certainly won't if you don't buy a ticket.

In 2013 (gee, it was busier than I thought) deer season was a bust. Toward the end, I "felt" it ... I just knew I was eating tag soup so I decided to make the most of the last couple days for exploring instead. I'd heard about a lake in a basin 2-1/2 or 3 hours away so I drove up to look. I had my rifle but mostly I was fishing. I saw a HUGE brook trout but it was spooky and wouldn't bite. On the way into the lake I found a pretty good bigfoot track beside the trail. 5 clear toes, 15.5x5 inches, no claws, wide heel. It wasn't perfect, though, 'cause it was in decaying fir needles over a gravelly substrate. I got a blurry picture of it (I didn't realize how dark it was under the timber, my eyes had adjusted, so I didn't use the flash) and went on about my business. It's a little lower than my favorite search area so I thought the season might go a little longer ... snow free longer. I went in the next fall to set up a couple trail cameras and take another shot at that big trout. I left a recorder running under the truck hood. . The trip in and back was uneventful, I set up two cameras, got fooled again by the trout, walked back out, drove home.

When I got back I listened to the recording from the recorder under the hood. It started out with the normal very metallic pings of the engine and exhaust cooling. Few birds. Camp Robber. . Woodpeckers. I'd parked out away from the trees a little bit, nothing overhead. After a while, I started hearing small pebbles and cones hitting the sides of the truck and the hard tonneau cover. Very different from the cooling noises. There were no sounds of cars going by on the gravel ... I've heard that there other times and it's LOUD. After a while, there was a single loud KNOCK. A sharp crack, high velocity. No sounds of anything bouncing .. that's a dead giveaway of normal debris falling.

I can't prove it, didn't see what made the sound, but my best guess is that was indeed a bigfoot.

One interesting thing about knocks ... the number of knocks USUALLY matches the number of humans. 3 people, 3 knocks, 2 people, 2 knocks. When my buddy and I were out that night camping, 2 knocks. The other one I heard, I was alone ... early morning, after daylight, one knock. That recording ... I was by myself .. one knock. Somebody out there can count.

And on that note ...

There's a lake not far from there in a canyon which older USFS publications mention as having a very creepy feel. It's quicker to get to, go clear around on main paved roads, then come back from the far side. The main trail comes down from above a granite outcropping, a few hundred feet elevation, half a mile maybe. The first couple times I went to it, that's how I got there. The first time was pretty bad, it was close to dark when I hit the short, everything and a really ominous feel to it (impending doom!), so I made a couple casts and left. Got pictures of bazillions of fingernail-sized frogs before leaving. The next time in was pretty different. The first time was prior to getting ticked off and hiking up that one road late so I could come out in the dark, the second was after, when everything changed. Coincidence? Don't know. ANyway, the second time in, I hit the lake shore at the bottom of the trail and started counter-clockwise around the lake. There's a skinny spot at the back where there's just a narrow neck, steep, of dirt, with high elevation firs, real thick, between the water's edge and the base of a rock cliff. 20 feet wide? 25? It's got deer trails through it. They're really crooked but you can get around by pointing your rod straight up.

As I was walking through that, something between me and the wall whistled quietly. Sounded bird-ish but on a whim I whistled back. For the next 15 minutes (not sure, wasn't checking my watch, so that's a guess) I stood there whistling back and forth, keeping count, changing count, taking turns leading and mimicking. It was 15 feet away or so hidden behind one of those trees and I never saw it. I can't say what it was, but whatever it was, it can count, it can mimic, and it knows about taking turns. I'd do 1, it'd do 1, I'd do 3, it'd do 3, I'd do 2, it'd do 2, etc. Then I'd pause and it'd start, so I'd mimic for a while. Then it'd stop and let me take lead. I honestly don't know WTF that was. It goes beyond what I expect of a bird.

Eventually I decided to move on around the lake shore and catch more fish. There was an open area, then back into thicker timber right to the water, but there were big enough spaces to cast and some logs I could walk out on. I saw one suspicious looking track-like shape. Bigger than my shoe would leave, but in dried duff and crumbled in so there was no detail left. Before long I started hearing quest taps close behind me .. 1-2-3. They only happened mid cast where I couldn't look behind me. Whatever tapped followed me on around to the lake outlet. Never saw it, don't know what it was, but that's not a real usual thing.

The place has come to feel like refuge. Yes, it has that creepy feel, but ... not "bad." On a fall morning when it's crisp and clear, it feels like you could be the last person on earth and you wouldn't know it. Isolated, FAR from anything. It's a place I've picked ... if I ever need to run, that's where I will try to go.

Aside from that first time it's felt good, comfortable. 'til the last one last fall. Hard to say why, but I just knew things were ok during daylight but I needed to be gone before dark. Sort of like sharing and my turn was up. Hell of a good evening of fishing though! The brookies were just suicidal. Never noticed any reason for that weird feel. I'm kind of curious what it's like next time I go back.

Pay attention to your spidey sense.

Tom

Pondering more about sounds ...

Sounds are a bit ambiguous. Unless you SEE what is making them, there should always be a bit of doubt. In that context, I'm not saying "it's bigfoot", instead, I'm saying "I'd sure like to know what that was."

Remember I mentioned funny tracks in the bottoms of two lakes I saw in 2012? I refer to that hiking trip where I was out of water, cramping, falling, etc as my "death march." Labor Day weekend of 2015 my investigator buddy and I went for a couple night backpacking trip back to that area to end the year, switch gears from summer, and move into fall hunting mode. We stayed up at the upper lake where he and his buddy had the camp visitor poking at their tent in the '90s. We took a different trail in. He was whupped so he stayed in camp while I went down to retrieve a PlotWatcher camera I'd left observing the lake and shore over the summer. I was hoping to get a picture of whatever left the tracks in the lake bottom. Instead, I got pictures of a few bears including a blonde one that had just a little bit of black showing through on her face, some deer, and one monster bull elk.

When I was down at the lake picking up that camera, I got curious and I got an idea. It'd snowed a little a couple nights before but it was fairly warm out in the sun and the lake water was warm, so I stripped and waded out to the tracks to get a better look. They were a little less than knee deep and the water was gin clear but the bottom was silty so I had to be careful about stirring up a cloud I couldn't see into. They sure looked human-shaped. They were probably about 8 inches deep. When whatever made them stepped down, the mud pushed up and away, then collapsed partway back into the track when the foot was extracted. They had a layer of silt built back up in them.

Backing up ... the lake is not real big. It's about 150 yards wide and about 300 yards long, roughly teardrop shaped. What it is, I think, is a glacially carved gouge in bedrock with soil built up over and around it. It's only about 8 feet deep in the deepest part. The water comes in from the south via a tiny trickle of a creek that is at most a foot wide and 2 inches deep. It comes from a granite boulder field with fir trees around it. The only sediment coming in is "rock flour" and very fine decomposing wood. The point of that is it takes a VERY long time for silt to build up, a very slow process.

There are a number of lines of tracks, probably a dozen or more, out underwater.

I decided to explore one of the tracks in detail by shoving my foot into it and feeling around.

Whatever made them was very heavy. They punched clear through the mud to hard rock underneath. Except where I was stepping in the track, I went maybe half that deep. That means not only was whatever it was heavier than I am, it had more pounds per square inch of foot bottom than I did. The tracks were much older than I thought. There was .. guessing ... about 1.5 inches of that silt re-deposited in the track bottom. Since the tracks are about 150 yards from the inlet stream, I'm throwing out a guess that they were at least 2-3 decades old and maybe a lot older yet. (That says something about the probability of ever getting picture on a camera there in my lifetime.)

The tracks were indeed shaped like my foot but larger. They are at least 3 inches longer than my foot, at least 1.5 inches (so 3/4ths of an inch on each side) wider at the heel, and at least 2 inches (1 inch to each side) at the ball. Sounds good so far, right?

However ... a) I could not feel any individual toe marks at the front, and b) the tracks had a very very high arch ... bigfoot tracks should be flat-bottomed. Looking at it the other way, though: a) I could also not detect any sense of boot tread lugs, and b) that high arch was smooth and curved both front and back, it didn't have that sharp heel edge of a boot. I couldn't span the height and length of the arch with my foot, I could just slide my foot backwards dropping my heel into the heel pocket and forwards dropping my foot into the pocket for the ball of the foot.

I don't know what made them. I know a lot more details but I have no better understanding of what made them. Figuring that out has become a personal challenge. No speculation. Not trying to prove it's a this or it's not that. Just want answers.

So, I headed for the shore, dressed, hiked the mile / climbed the 400 feet back to camp. Sat around for a bit BSing, then headed off into the woods to swap SD cards and replace the batteries in 2 trail cams I was leaving out for the winter. Nothing happened.

When I got home, checked the pictures. One of the cameras had over 6,000 pictures. About 2 dozen had animals, the rest were all triggered 'cause I left the sucker pointed too much to the east and the sunrise tripped the I.R. sensor. I knew I better return and reposition the camera else I'd be wasting it's winter "soak." I hiked back in solo 2 weeks later, just a day hike. It's about 9 miles round trip with a steady 500 feet per mile grade.

I think that was the third weekend in September. I got an early start and got to the camera mid morning. I pulled it down and put it on a tree facing a better direction. I also brought along the PlotWatcher. With lithium batteries and a 128G SD card, set up for a pic every 5 seconds, they last about 3 months before the card fills which is about the time the batteries die. I'm very interested in what happens in that area when the ridges snow shut so we can't get in but the valley bottom isn't snowed shut so it was a good opportunity for me. This a small pond back in there that doesn't completely dry out every year ... a possible water source. Seemed like the shoreline of the pond was a good possibility. I was setting up the camera on a small fir looking along one edge and at the far shore when I heard something.

The 2 campsites, separated by a 10 foot high berm of dirt, sit on a moraine pile holding back a small lake. That creates a bottleneck ... most everything traveling needs to go across the moraine pile and through the campsites. Across the lake, up on the other side, I heard 3 things calling back and forth. They sounded like they were between a quarter and half mile away from me and separated from each other, in a sort of triangular formation, by a couple hundred yards at least. The pitch of the voices reminded me of slightly pre-puberty boys ... fairly high. They were coming towards me and getting closer to each other traveling really fast for the terrain. They converged at the far side of the moraine pile and crossed passing through the campsite together.

They exited the camp area and came up through the brush and timber onto the hidden bench I was on, together, and still yelling back and forth. As they got closer, they seemed to be within maybe 30 feet of each other, yelling back and forth, talking in a language I couldn't make out. I can't even tell you what linguistic family it came from .. totally unfamiliar. In the middle of them, there was another sound which ... best guess ... sounded like elk "cow talk."

They got within about 75 yards of me. I almost yelled back, but since I was hiding expensive cameras, I didn't want to draw attention to my presence. I slipped through the fir clump I was in and tried to look around but I couldn't see them, lot of heavy cover in there. They continued yelling for probably 10-15 minutes. Eventually they moved on up the hill. They yelled less often but still kept up. One of them seemingly stopped about 200 yards above me, the other two split going uphill, one to the left, one to the right.

Once I was done, I hiked back down through the camp area and back to the main trail. There I met a young couple coming in for the weekend. I talked to them a little .. they said they'd heard the voices as well.

It was the last weekend of archery elk season. It could maybe have been kids hunting, but I don't think they would have been old enough to be alone. I can't imagine parents turning 11 year olds loose to bow hunt for elk unsupervised, and have to do a miniimum 4-1/2 mile pack out, and there were no other cars at the trailhead. Doesn't add up. I also don't think any human could move as fast over boulders, logs, through brush, etc as fast as those voices were traveling.

All in all one of the oddest things I ever ran into. The only thing I can say for sure was "damn, that was weird."

Then probably 2nd or third weekend of October, I went back to "refresh" two cameras below the saddle where I had my last sighting. Late morning. Nice day. While I was changing batteries, from a half mile or so down deeper into the canyon that points north, I recorded 3-4 yells. The creek canyon was logged long ago and has grown up to the most incredible, essentially impenetrable brush patch imaginable. And it's really really steep. It's so bad I haven't even gone in there and I love hunting brush. The yells weren't words that I could make out on the recording. Didn't see any rigs on the road for probably 10 miles.

Another ... I don't really know what that was. It's hard to imagine a person going **there** but it's premature to conclude it was anything else. Just have to stamp it "huh" and hope for answers someday.

Last year was even more uneventful. I chased trail cams around, didn't get anything. Didn't hear anything. I found one partial track on the hill above that bench when I was refueling a camera in late august and a complete track in september when I was setting up a camera in the river canyon below the waterfalls separating the lower canyon from the bowl or basin we backpack into. Both were older, made probably in late spring when the ground was damp and feet would sink in. The complete track had that same 15.5x5 inch size I've been finding up there. They were old enough that time had dulled the edges, sharp parts had become muted.

At this point, off the top of my head, I'm running out of events to share. Hmmm ... I found a roughly 17 inch track on sand bar along the upper Rogue River trail a mile or two above union creek. It'd rained during the week a little. I was there on a Saturday. The whole track was visible. Two toes were in the shade so the sand hadn't dried, the rest was in the sun. The sand had dried, the edges collapsed, so the rest was just afoot shaped sort of depression.

Uh ... what next? Any questions? Details I might have left out? Help ... I'm sort of grasping for what's next, like I need the "wrap up" or "conclusion" or "punch line" or something?

Tom

What's your ideas on migration of these creatures, migration routes, seasonal or yearly, versus resident groups. in areas of repeated activity? Are there still herds of big game, elk, deer in the area during the activity, in your estimation? Smell wise, notice an increase in smells, pungent etc, at any particular time of year?

Migration ... I think it varies with location, I don't think there's a one size fits all answer.

I think the deer/elk populations / locations are a good model. If there's a lot of elevation difference, some of the deer/elk seem to stay low year around, most migrate vertically to some degree. In my area there seem to be a steady low number of reports from low elevations year around. There is a seasonal fluctuation of reports at higher elevation. I think that is genuine / accurate, however, it pays to remember that a report necessarily has two components, something to see and a witness to see it. The witness aspect has two variables .. first, present or not, and second, some groups of people are more likely to file a report than others. To understand what is happening we have to consider all of the pieces.

A couple examples:

There's a small wilderness not real far away that only has a handful of published bigfoot reports over many decades, but every stinkin' one of them was in the last week of June of whatever year. WHY? My theory ... it's about HUMAN behavior. That wilderness is slightly lower than the Cascade range. I think people get into it a couple weeks earlier, but as soon as the Cascades are accessible, people go there instead. No witnesses, whether there are bigfoots or not, means no reports.

The other is in regard to my favorite spot. There's an increase of reports in late August, continues into September, and absolutely STOPS at Labor Day. I used to think the bigfoots left. Nope. What happens ... the increase reflects humans having one last late summer vacation before the kids return to school. By 4:00 pm or so on Labor Day, the family vacationers are GONE. The total human numbers drop a lot but there are still people around. Different people, though. They tend to be more local, tend to be rural, berry pickers, hunters, fishermen .. tend to be less inclined, on average, to talk about seeing or hearing a bigfoot. Either they're more used to that being sorta normal or they're less willing to risk ridicule.

One additional factor ... there seem to be the ones that stay roughly in one place, the ones who seem to follow the food migration, but there also seem to be occasional groups that just ... roam. Some people in rural-ish places say they have bigfoots around on a long term basis and come to recognize individuals by behaviors, etc. They suggest that some of the late adolescent / young adult males will form small groups and take off on a "walk-about" which might last a few months or might last for years, but often do return on some cycle.

Heck if i know ... I'm still trying to test some of those claims, see if i can prove or disprove. The difference ... truth or untruth ... is significant.

Smell ... I'm not sure. Based on that first location, I'd have said seasonal. Gorillas )(reportedly) have a scent gland up their anus which they use in intimidation displays ... hard to fight when you're trying not to gag, or something like that. I had wondered if I'd stumbled into a nursery area and was being told to leave. That's Sept-Oct. However, since I've run into that smell in July twice now, I'm less sure. It could still be a defensive reflex. Or it could just be plain old incredible B.O. Or .. maybe it's not even bigfoot. I didn't smell them the two times I saw them so I have to be careful about over-connecting dots.

Geez ... to share TMI or not to share TMI? Sure. This is about biology and science. One time I was out of town training. I'd walked about a mile to and from training in hot weather. When I got back to my room I bent over to take my shoes off and I 'bout gagged ... got that same incredible stench I identify as fecal. There was nothing on my shoe bottoms so the only logical thing left was I'd somehow [bleep] my pants. I hauled for the bathroom to check ... of course. No problem. Whew. But ... ? When I kicked my shoes off, I found out. Foot sweat, into cotton socks, fermenting inside nylon shoes, produces that same smell. So .. eh, maybe it really is B.O., not fecal.

Tom

I am enjoying this!

Thank you so much

T O M, thanks for the response to my questions. Things I had thought and wondered about over the years, you've given some interesting perspectives on.

I stand corrected. Nice save T_O_M. I for one do not believe in Big Foot/Sasquatch/Yeti, etc. However, I have always enjoyed these and similar writings. By the way T_O_M, when I say that I don't believe in these creatures, don't take it in any way as me challenging the veracity of your narratives above. I have no reason to doubt they occurred exactly as you described. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

I am also intrigued by your findings. please continue, I really enjoy reading about your experiences. I think just about everyone has had unexplained experiences in the wild, your perspective truly puts a different spin on what might be out there. Thanks

Thanks for posting this, I enjoyed reading your experiences.

I'm not gonna say I'm a believer or not but I have a friend who had a run in with something of this nature. After reading this a.m. I went for my usual run before sunup and let's just say I was watching the trees ...

Tom, thanks for the great stories. I particularly appreciated the fact that you weren't trying to convince any one of bigfoot as much as laying out your experience and let people come to their own conclusion. Yes we've all heard things in the woods we have nothing personally to relate them to, who knows? But the fact that so many people have seen them, or tracks or smells, etc, There has to be some explanation. Not sure what.

I don't want anyone to "believe" just 'cause I said so. I'm really not in the cool aid dispensing biz. There are a lot of popular misconceptions about what data we have and what it says. Some are flat out deliberately misleading. You can be generous with the people doing the misleading and say they just don't know any better or you can suspect they are deliberately lying figuring nobody will make the effort to bust them.

My hope here is that some someones will start (politely) asking me hard questions 'cause there are some. Unless you're a "true believer" (someone who hasn't seen one, has no personal experience, but believes with religious conviction) or a denialist (someone who insists there can't be anything to see, without looking at the information themselves, and is sure of that with religious fervor), if you're interested you should be asking questions.

Things like

-- where are the fossils?
-- where are the current bones?
-- why are there no trail camera pictures?
-- where did they come from?
-- where do they fit in terms of dna?
-- where do they go in winter?

... and a bunch more.

If a person has not seen a bigfoot, these questions might seem to bear on the question of existence itself. For someone who has seen a bigfoot, they have a different context ... how and why ... but they're still damn good questions that should be addressed.

Tom

Well.......

-- where are the fossils?
-- where are the current bones?
-- why are there no trail camera pictures?
-- where did they come from?
-- where do they fit in terms of dna?
-- where do they go in winter?

Are they so intelligent that they can consciously avoid the first three and last questions?

Some things just can't be explained.

Here in SE Oklahoma, we have a guy who is part of a bigfoot club, research group or whatever. I don't know the guy but he is a level headed business guy from what I've seen and keeps his bigfoot stuff quiet for obvious reasons. A few years ago somebody did a tv show with him and another guy from around here. They never seen anything or even any possible eveidence except for a dark object way off in the distance which was later identified as a cow. The way tv is, they sensationalize everything and there just wasn't much to it. Then you have the goofy finding bigfoot show that turns most anything that might be something into a joke. It wasn't long ago some cops claimed to have shot one and had the body but were holding out for money and it was proven to be a fraud. How can any of this can be taken seriously?

There are scientists down in wilderness and forestry land that are seriously hunting with high tech, high dollar equipment, somebody believes something. A buddy who shared camp with them while bear hunting a couple of years ago said that listening to their "evidence" and seeing how serious they were, made him a little uneasy going to his tree stand with only a bow the next morning.

I was working on a tractor late one night in the middle of nowhere by myself when a 5 gallon bucket came flying through the open hay barn I was in. Things like that make you jump to all kinds of ideas. It was probably someone who worked on the ranch but I don't know 1. how they could've got there without me seeing or hearing them 2.how they could've thrown it that far 3. it was 11:00 at night and cold, why would they be out there? No one ever fessed up but I never did really react so who knows?

Then you run into a guy who actually saw something step over a 5 strand bobwire fence. I won't tell his story but after talking to him over the years, his story never changes, the events are well documented and people I know and trust, know he saw something and it scared him enough that he packed up his wife and baby and left without a place to go. He is not a guy to be taken lightly. He called his dad who came over the next day, they looked around and his dad told him he was seeing things, dismissed it and left but before he got to the main road, something (spidey sense?) got to him enough to turn around and go back. It got late and his dad was going to leave again when they both heard and saw something that made them all leave in a hurry. They returned the next day, packed up and moved out.

I believe that he believes and that's good enough for me.

In addition to the above questions, my questions are not so much about the existence of the "unexplained", i.e. ghosts, allies/UFOs, bigfoot..., but why certain people have multiple contacts/sightings when others who spend as much, or more time, in areas or places where such things occur, have none. Is their consciousness set to a different "frequency" as the rest of us?

There are differences in consciousness, yeah. I'd put it a little differently because, worded like that, someone might think I've gone off the "woo" deep end. I'd say there are differences in awareness.

Most here hunt (I hope). We all probably have some hunting buddy who is always the first to see game and another who about has to be lead to it ... even though it's right in front of both in plain sight. Right? It's the same thing. It's not simply a matter of eyesight, it's a matter of brains having different capacities for perceiving what the eyes see.

A non-hunting example: my boss and I generally go for about a 2 mile walk at lunch for fast food. Co-workers drive by and wave. We're walking side by side on the sidewalk. I see them, she doesn't. Same thing, we have a lot of deer in town. We're walking along ... way over 80% of the time, I see them long before she does.

Some people are aware of their surroundings, some are not.

It goes a little farther I think. Some people are mentally more flexible than others. Some people ave a very narrow, very rigid view of the world. Anything that challenges their views is incredibly uncomfortable. If beaten alongside the head with it hard enough, they may notice, but as soon as the beating ends, they push it aside as if it never happened. Ask them about it a week later and they'll look at you like you've grown a second head.

I don't think "this stuff" is happening more often to some people than others. I think it happens with pretty much equal frequency to everyone who is in the right place at the right time. The variables are us, are in our ability to become conscious of the thing out of place, our ability to truly notice it, and our willingness to remember that we saw it.

Taking it a little farther, though, I think the ability to "see" grows over time. Like walking, you never take your third step 'til you've taken the first two. If something causes us to see once, it becomes slightly easier to see again if confronted by the same thing. There's a learning component. The best analogy I can think of is tracking. I'm not so sure it's an innate ability, it's just an informally learned skill in some.

... at least, those are my operating assumptions for now 'til something happens to make me change my mind.

Tom

And some believe their own bullshit whilst others are just too polite to point it out.

I think they all live with Marie LaVeau...

I think I'll start with avoiding trail cameras 'cause that ties to the eyes .. I think. To me the eyes are the only thing truly out of place. They seem to have incredible night vision. The ability to see into infared is known in some animals. A tapetum lucidum is known in many animals but not in any higher primate ... so far.

Absolutely, without the faintest hint of a doubt, whatever walked into my camp the 2nd of the 2 nights in August 2011 could see in the dark. Probably the several that came in the night before, as well, but I HEARD that "guy", coming in faster than I can walk, changing directions to miss tree trunks and branches. Again, we were down in a bowl, under fairly heavy tree canopy, and the sky was about 50% clouds from the t-storms that passed nearby earlier in the day. It was literally so dark I could not see my hand at arm's length. I could find it by holding it up and blocking out any of the few stars showing but I couldn't see the outline. "Whatever that was" (heh heh) it could see well enough not only to not run into a tree, it could see well enough to see me, slow down, and stop about 5 feet away rather than step in the middle of me. That's not normal.

I've played around with trail cameras using their infared flash to take pictures of each other. The camo that works pretty well to fool color vision in daylight doesn't do much to obscure them by I.R. So ... if bigfoot can see into lower wavelengths, that might be part of an answer. Most modern cameras use a passive sensor, they don't have a beam that would be visible to something that can see I.R., so that commonly made leap of logic doesn't work. The reflector for the I.R. LED bank may be shiny like a piece of mirror is to us. That's possible. It could be that they see the I.R. flash of the cameras taking pictures of other normal game animals which give the camera location away and allow them to avoid the cameras. Maybe.

I think the avoidance of cameras is mostly based on something else. Most cameras are put out by hunters and most hunters visit their trail cameras every couple weeks, sometimes more often yet. That's a lot of boot tracks. I assume if bigfoot is the awesome stealthy forest ninja they get credit for being they're probably also some seriously skilled trackers. It may well be they see those boot tracks we don't think about leaving. If there are a lot of trails converging on a single location in the forest for no apparent reason, if I were a paranoid forest ninja I'd approach that spot on high alert .. if at all. I think with their senses keyed in to whatever us sneaky bald pink monkeys are up to, the odds of seeing a camera out of place goes way up. They don't have to know what it is or what it does, they just have to know it is ours and avoid it.

So ... nothing "woo." Odd eyes for a higher primate. Otherwise, just at home in an environment we only think we're at home in.

... always subject to changing my mind if sufficient verifiable new data comes to me of course.

In the mean time, because it supposedly can't be done, I take it as a challenge to get trail camera pictures.

One further thought on trail cameras. I don't know why this is, but there are older trail cam pictures and security cam videos that look pretty good. They may not be public domain, maybe not on youtube or on the web at all, but I've seen some. The vast majority of that was shot on film, not digital, despite there being a lot more digital trail cameras out there in a lot more places than there ever were film trail cams or security cams. I hope someday I understand what the mechanism for that difference is ... 'cause everything that is real happens via some mechanism.

Tom

Sorry but that's a crock, I'd agree that people have different abilities to see things including game. Most aren't very good at it. A good hunter can be driving his truck and see game before most of his passengers do, because he's always looking for it. And I know a lot of really good hunters who've spent a lot of time in the backcountry and not seen "these things."

It's not because they're unable to.

I am not a believer. And here is why. It is the trail cam thing. The theory that they see the tracks to me doesn't hold up in that there are 360 degrees of where the bigfoot could come from and typically only 1 direction from which the trail cam owner comes from. Also, many people leave them out for months at a time, thus tracks would disappear. Even more, some areas aren't conducive to tracks or there is a big rain right after it was checked. Millions of trail cams and no clear pictures? To me that adds up to doesn't exist. To say nothing of cell phone cameras and other cameras. No clear pictures. Not one. How about bigfoot tracks? Dont see them either. at 900 pounds, they should leave a lot of tracks.

Interesting read, appreciate the effort put into the post, and don't change your opinion because of me, but I don't for a second believe in Bigfoot.

The calories required to support a 600-900 lb animal would prevent anything from being too secretive. Grass/greens are not going to cut it.....even in mild climates. A bipedal that would require almost the speed of a cheetah to meet its' substantive protein requirements. All while leaving no sign and on the lookout for game cameras.

I will say this one thing about trail cameras. I have a friend who knows someone in South Al with 1000 acres high fenced. They found an old buck that died of old age and they never had one picture of that deer and they ran alot of cameras. Just food for thought. Ive never seen or experienced anything I can attribute to big foot, but whatever my wife saw cannot be explained by any animal we know about.

Just reading the dramatic narrative cast doubt. "I smelled a foul odor and checked to see if had chit myself. Nope, not this time. Must be a Bigfoot!" Geez...

Tom is a credible observer in my book.

However, I'm a skeptic in general. Here's another question: poop! Where's the poop? Caloric intake aside, they'd have to make MASSIVE poops. If they bury them, that'd be obvious. And dogs would find them.

Here's an interesting notion though. A while back, within 25 miles of where I sit, they were excavating the skeleton of a tree sloth that stood over 10 feet at the shoulder....... about 11,000 years ago! That's a blink of an eye. Maybe we are looking in the wrong place for these. Maybe we need to look UP.

Thanks, Jeff.

"Poop" is another good question I should have put on the list I haven't gotten to. You're right, there should be turds found. Diet-wise, they compete directly with black bears so turd content isn't much help regarding identification. Because stuff passing through critters' guts scrape off epithelial cells, there is testable DNA but without a type specimen, there's nothing to match the DNA to. It's circular ... can't really prove a turd belongs to a bigfoot without proving bigfoot exists first. It's a dead end. All you can prove, via DNA, is the turd leaver is unidentified. All there is to go on is size and structure.

I haven't found anything myself that seemed to out of the ordinary, nothing that makes me think "that wasn't a bear." I've talked to a couple people who have found turds that look bear-like so far as content, human-like in terms of structure, but they're coke-can diameter and 2-1/2 to 3 feet long. Seem like good candidates but ... without a known bigfoot turd to compare them to, the best you can do is guess and interpret.

Tom

edit to add: regarding WHERE they poop ... there aren't a lot of reports related to location, but most I can think of involved pooping into streams. Maybe funny but no joke ... seems like a REAL good reason to use a water filter.

I know I'm always surprised by how much "up" there is in the Oregon woods. I'm actually out in my own woods right now, looking for fir to cut down... there's some kind of disease or stress killing 10-20% of the mid-aged firs up here in the Willamette valley; I've dropped 4- 5 of them in the last week or so. It's a real pain figuring out who needs dropping though because they start to die at the top and that's REALLY hard to see. Anyway, in the process of this, I've spotted a crazy number of nests I'd never noticed, way the heck up there.

I remember hunting one time up near Hidden Lake (Tom knows where that is, it's a secret) and a giant crash in the brush just about gave me a heart attack. I stood perfectly still waiting to see WTF. I've seen a big bear in that area... so I start to move again after a while and CRASH! This was getting weird. Decided since I was, after all, armed to the teeth I'd go towards the noise. Anyway, cutting to the chase, it's old-growth around there, and way the heck up above me, so high I couldn't ever see or hear it, a squirrel was nipping giant green fir cones loose, which must weigh 8-10 lbs, which were then plummeting down.

I think a whole herd of Bigfeets could've been up there and I'd never have known. That said, there's logging... birdwatchers... and spotted-owl spotters all observing the tree tops in one way or another. So that speaks against my descendants-of-sloths theory.

Aight. Found a dying fir. Time to get to work. If there's a Bigfoot in it, I WILL report back!

Great stuff Tom, keep talkin'....

Where are the bodies? Immortal?

Jeff -

Indeed, Hidden Lake is an amazing place. I was only there once. Ironic, after you telling me about it, that "Mizz A" took me up there to fish. She heard at least one wood knock up sort of in line with the slide behind the lake, but closer in the timber. I missed it, I was too bad kid-wrangling. Small world. I really need to go back.

battue -

Immortal? I doubt that. If you'd been paying attention to what I said before, I grew up in a bear preserve. One thing we did not find were dead bears despite having them around by hundreds, maybe thousands. When they get sick, old, with death approaching they climb into incredible [bleep]-holes ... brush, rocks, logs, places nobody in their right mind would go voluntarily. If bears aren't found, numbering hundreds, maybe thousands of times as many as bigfoots, it's totally unreasonable and unrealistic to expect to find dead bigfoots just laying around dead.

Tom

It's not about bodies. It's about body parts, parts that are moved to the surface later on. Dinosaurs and such died thousand of years previous, yet parts still are being discovered. Parts that have DNA unrelated to anything else recorded.

So, if you never found dead bears, how is it that you are so sure of where they go to die?

Just curious. Seems that if no one ever found dead bears, we'd have no clue about where they go to die.

BF best not find your cheap whiskey cache. He will be stumbling into people everywhere. I hear they are weak for the alcohol.

The breeding population required to sustain this species to the current day....would have to be in the thousands.

All the while, burying (without any trace) their dead......killing the thousands of animals required for sustenance......leaving no tracks.....leaving no hair........and always avoiding us (sometimes armed) mere-mortal humans.

It appears those with BF experience....often have more than 1 encounter. If you hunt hard enough, you'll usually get what you're after.

Standing in a remote wilderness area at midnight can often be very creepy.....after watching the "Legend of Boggy Creek" DVD the week before.

It's the adrenaline rush from the (possibly huge/dangerous) unknown. It simply wouldn't be there if you were pursuing an undiscovered insect species.

Read the last couple posts. You should understand the hesitation now.

I was going to get into the DNA evidence, fossil record, report distribution, statistics, etc. [bleep] it. I'm done. Should never have started. I knew better. Should have listened to myself.

Ignorance has a way of preserving itself.

Tom

I've seen and heard things that, to this day, I still don't know what they were. Maybe if I was convinced that sasquatch exists, I'd be convinced that's what I saw.

But I'm not convinced and my brain did not make that connection. Everyone is familiar with the classic optical illusions where you see a few lines on a drawing and your brain fills in the rest to complete the picture. Only your brain fills in details that aren't actually there. Like the line drawing that can represent either an ugly old woman or a pretty young one, depending on how you look at it and what you're looking for.

So rather than conclude that sasquatch exists and some people just can't see it, I tend to go in the other direction. I think people see things they can't explain, and their brain fills in the rest with what they want to see.

Just my opinion.

So, if we all chant "Shallow Hal wants a gal.".....they will snap out of it?

First time I heard a Deer grunt was years ago. Pitch black before daylight broke and right behind me. Footsteps, then a couple of those nasal growls. Hmmmm, I didn't know what it was, but it got my attention. Years later I heard it again in daylight and a Deer was the source. Pa is one of the top States for BF encounters, I could have thought it was BF.

For decades, maybe 3-400,000 Bear hunters in the wood on opening day and no BF have been taken to the tag station. 800,000 plus Deer hunters? Hmmmmm again. Coincidence I guess.