Bigfoot in the Meadow — And He Had No Idea We Were Watching | Oregon

0:00 You're listening to BIGFA Society, and I'm Jeremiah Byron. In this show, we go beyond the campfire stories to bring you first hand encounters from people who say they've seen something impossible. From backwoods trails and remote mountain haulers to quiet farms and crowded highways. The stories come from everywhere, and each one leaves us with more questions than answers. These are the voices of the people who've lived it. To settle in, because today you'll hear another account that just might change the way you see the woods forever. So stay with us, all right, Big for Society. You've got the privilege of talking to Jim today. Jim is a hunter who reached out to me from the Pacific Northwest over email. He has been out there quite a bit, that's an understatement, and he's had some really interesting things happen.

0:47 Areas will be talking about today have definitely come up on the show. If you're aware of the Oregon Bigfoot Highway, then you'll probably be familiar with a lot of the areas we'll be talking about today. But welcome to the show, Jim. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing great. Thank you how are you doing doing good? We've already had a little chat before you went out and and went hunting. I think it was maybe a week or so ago, and that was that was an enjoyable time, and I've been looking forward to chatting with you again because you are definitely an individual who I mean, the amount of time you spend in the woods is incredible. Do you mind sharing a little bit about how much time you're actually out there every year?

1:30 I'm out there a bunch, you know, on on my busier years, I'm probably in the woods maybe three hundred days a year. You know, people people have a lot of things they do for entertainment. I scout around and take drives in the mountains and you know, try to try to get out and venture and keep on top of what the animals are doing and so on and so forth. So I hunt virtually almost year round. I bring bear hunt, do quite a bit of scouting leading into that, and then from you know, spring bear we go right into we go right into the summertime, which then it's time to start following the elk and keeping an eye on where the bucks are, and and then we turn around and August first we open up fall bear season, and then September first or right about there, we open our archery elk season, and then October first we open our black tail deer season, and then and then that goes all the way into the first week in November, and then the second week in November we start our rifle elk season, and then if we haven't gotten fall bears yet, then we you know, continue to hunt bears all the way till the thirty first of December, depending on weather. But typically the only time that I'm not there regularly in the mountains is is you know, probably you know, Christmas up through February first or so,

3:02 and then we go snow wheeling. So we go four wheeling in the snow because you know, that's that's what you can do at that time of year. So and then my kids. I have four boys, and and they two of my boys or nephews that I raised, and they all hunt different seasons, so it gives me the opportunity to go with them on all the seasons I don't hunt. So we're hunting archery elk right now. And I do a lot of calling and that kind of stuff for them, and tons of scouting and and when we can't find animals. We go separate ways until one of us gets into them, and then you know, we get together that evening and come up with a plan to go to the area where the animals are. And so that's why I get to hunt all these different seasons.

3:48 Is pretty much between my you know, my immediate family. We have we have tags for every season there is, so I guess that's kind of the kind of the the store on how I spend so much time up there. And I'm also thirty minutes away from the mountain, so you know, I can be in thirty minutes, I can be up the corridor in Malala thirty minutes, I can be well up the Clockmas River outside of a stacata and then everything in between started to start it up there. When I was a little little kid, my dad took me camping up there and he started dragging me around hunting with him when I was about eight years old. We can't hunt here until twelve years old. Well we can now there's a few new things going on where you can mentor kids and let them hunt with your tag and that kind of stuff. But that was, you know, when I was growing up that wasn't the case, but my dad wanted me used to it, and he loved the mountains, so he he, you know, gave me my first hunting rifle, my thirty add six, and when I was eight years old, he had me start carrying it around in the woods. Well, I followed him deer hunting and el hunting and that kind of thing. So that's kind of the story of how I am end up spending a ton of time there.

5:02 Wow, Jim, you're one of those guys. I could imagine you know every creature that's in the woods of this Clackamis County area, you know every sound. I mean, you've got it just locked down in the in the knowledge category of this area, which is extremely active Bigfoot area. Do you remember was there a time when you realized, Hey, there's something else going on out here. Maybe you had an experience or an encounter that really kicked things off. I'd had ton of a ton of experiences from age thirteen all the way to date, but you know, I wasn't you know, I really didn't have a lot. I don't know, I was on the fence. I you know, I didn't not believe that, you know, there was there was a creature out there that people call sasquatch. I did not believe it, but I was the type that would if you believed in it, I'd argue, you know, against you, And if you didn't believe in it, I'd argue against you. So I just, you know, it was just kind of on the fence and didn't really think much of it. Later on in the late nineties, when I actually saw one that changed everything, it was a very interesting feeling. I spent a lot of time. For example, you know, I'd find elk a day or two before the elk season would open, and I just follow them, and wherever I spent the night in the woods, I

6:34 could be, you know, miles from the truck I could. I'd just spend the night there and wake up and be with the herd in the morning. And not many people are are It's it's spooky, especially the first handful of times you do it spooky just to go to sleep out in the middle of nowhere in the timber when they're you know, you have none of your typical securities. I mean, I was armed, so that's that's a security. But you can be armed and you don't and not feel safe. When things can come at you from any direction and you don't have any way to see it. Once you see something like that, those nights of hiking miles and miles and and laying down in the woods become few and far between. It definitely changes. I when I was young, I had fear of you know, noises I didn't recognize, and those kind of things, and you probably a fear of getting lost. And that was that's you know, I kind of point that to why I know that country so well pretty much from you know, Mounta Hood to Detroit, and I know a lot of other country in Oregon, but that, you know, that's my stomping grounds. That's when we were kids growing up, you know, as soon as we had driver's licenses, you know, me and my buddies would head up there every second we could after school, after you know, on the weekend, you know, you name it. That's that was our That was our stomping grounds. And we were constantly exploring. And I went

8:04 out of my way to learn the country is good or better than probably anyone out there, because I had a kind of a fear of being lost. And that was about the peak of it. And you know, the when when I had actually seen one of these things in person. It it it changed everything. I sat and watched this thing, and I was so afraid with a rifle in my hand. I even had a friend with a rifle in his hand right next to me. And we were hidden in the hidden in the in the woods, watching this little meadow that was you know, kind of at the kind of at the top of a deep, dark timbered canyon and small little meadow. And and when that thing, when we saw that thing, it neither one of us moved. In fact, we we were so afraid to move, we didn't. I mean we didn't. We kind of looked at each other. We never said a word, and we ended up not walk We walked out of there probably an hour and a half after dark. It took us that long to get the nerve to move because we were afraid to'd see us. And in this case, this thing didn't see us. It had no idea we were there. So it was, you know, the fear of it realizing we were there, that that was just climbing inside of us. It was. It was pretty crazy.

9:27 Oh wow, So this entire time you're having this sighting, it doesn't know you're there. It's kind of like you're almost observing something at the zoo, but I mean it's you're out there in the woods. Are we able to share where this took place? I think I have it in the email here, but I'm just taking. Yeah, that that took place. The creek bottom that the meadow sits up above is is last creek which comes off It's it's south of PV Mountain and actually the road that goes to the top of p Vine Mountain, it was within within the road that comes from Tevine the top of p Vine Mountain. If you follow it to the south, it comes out and tees into a road called forty two ten, And maps maps can be confused.

10:21 Some maps will say that that's forty two, but it's actually forty two ten forty Unfortunately, map these maps for this for the Bigfoot Highway area, a lot of them are not after it. The road placements are accurate, but the road number names and things can be wrong, even from the Forest Service. So if you tee into the forty two ten road and you were to go west, within two hundred yards is where I actually had my truck parked and and and had it you know, walked, you know, south, directly into what would be you know, it's about all forty year old timber now, but at the time you know it was it was just basically very large breed grow or a reprod and there's a couple of little hidden meadows in there. It's very thick, but there's some hidden little meadows and some old skid roads from when they originally logged it, and we usually sneak down the skidder roads and then it goes into heavy timber right as you kind of break over the edge and draw and you start heading down to the creek.

11:32 It's pretty steep, pretty deep, and pretty steep, but there's not real bad if you're used to the area. If you're not used to the area, it would be very steep and dark and scary, but if you're used to the area, it's about you know, five on the difficulty, you know, level of the timber and how dark and steep it is. And there where we were sitting, it was kind of funny because we were driving in and we were the highway was still closed down. In nineteen ninety six, the big flood washed out a bunch of a bunch of the Highway and the only way to get into like Highway sixty three going up the calaw Wash River and all that was to go up over Mount Hood and come in on Highway forty two, which is Skyline Road, and then you'd have to basically, you know, come all the way back in you know, probably I don't know, fifteen fifteen miles or twenty miles, put twenty miles at least, yeah, and then you'd have to drop down to the Highway forty six and work your way through the road which was very in very bad shape also, and then down to sixty three and go up to calla wash. And we intended to el kint up there the night. This was the night before before Cascade elk season, which is the third Saturday of October, or was until the last couple of years. We were that Friday night.

13:01 It's about one in the morning, and we were using down forty two ten and a giant bull elk ran across the road and a young raghorned bull was following right behind them, and they were scared out of their wits and they don't usually move, you know, like that at one in the morning unless something's on them. Well, they ended up crossing the road. So we changed our mind and decided we were going to stay there the rest of the night, and we'd sneak into where the elk ran and you know, first at first light, And oddly enough, we wait till first light, and the elk were there, but we never saw them. And we had come back around lunchtime, and and we're sitting at the truck bs ing and all of a sudden, out of the blue, this great, big bull out comes running out of the woods and runs is running down the road away from us, and we're all sitting there, none of us even have our rifles in our hands. They're sitting in the back and on the back of the trucks and this and that, and we're we're looking at each other, going well, and that bull takes off running in there, and then we decide, okay, well, we'll figure out a place to camp somewhere nearby, and we're going to go ahead again in the evening. And we had been visiting for probably another hour, and all of a sudden we hear this rustling in the woods and a mountain lion comes scrambling out of the same place that that big bull elk came running out of which was you know,

14:33 that last creek area in there. It came running out across the road with its tail between its legs. And I've never seen a mountain lion under any circumstances with its tail between its legs. No matter what they're going through, usually you can tell their demeanor by the way their ears are, whether they're going to attack, or whether they're, you know, curious, or whether they don't care about you. It's all about how their ears are setting usually, And unlike a dog or something like that, where you'd watch the tail, and this thing scrambled across the road just like the bull el did. And we thought that was one of the strangest things we've ever seen. And we ended up hanging out and deciding to go in a couple hours before before dark, and we hiked down this little little skidter road. It's overgrown, but it's a nice little trail, and me and me and one of my buddies that my my boy and my buddy's wife ended up going the other side of the road where it appeared that the herd was and we got down in there and and found that little meadow and well, we knew the meadow was there. We just were going to read, you know, we just needed to relocate it. And we found the meadow. Instead of walking into the meadow or anything, we kind of fish hooked around off of that you know, little trail and or skidter road and got ourselves back in the brush where there was nothing backgrounding us, you know, to where we weren't We weren't silhouettes of any way.

16:04 We were hidding really really well in a nice quiet place where we had a good shooting lane into that meadow. And oh maybe at thirty minutes went by, and we could hear a couple of little sticks break, and a cow elk comes walking out of the timber into the meadow and is walking from right to left to me a lot pretty much within a couple of yards of the timber line, and walking through that meadow, and the elk starts to turn to go into the woods, and all of a sudden, here comes another one right out of the exact same place the cow walked out, walked out of the timber. And it ends up that this is not an elk. It's on two legs, and it followed right behind that cow elk just very slowly walking.

16:56 And that's when we looked at each other and we looked back and it was insane. It' I think what was going through our heads after talking about it a lot since then, is that neither one of us could figure out what it was or why or was it? You know, and it it was very much like you know a lot of people say apes, they say humans. They say it had more human characteristics than anything. I mean the way it walked, and it was deliberately following that cow elk. I don't know if it was practicing its hunt or if it was getting ready to hunt, or I mean, who knows what was going on there.

17:40 It appeared that he was hunting that elk. Can I say he? I don't know if it was he or she. It didn't have breasts, but you know, it's it's interesting because we were so scatterbrained looking at this thing that people talk about their eyes and their colors and this, and that the face on this thing was a blur. It literally was so well put together in natural camouflage that there were no highlights on the face at all, absolutely not. You couldn't see details of the eyes. It definitely had a very flat face. It did not have you know, any kind of a you know, I call it a dog's nose, a beak. It didn't have any kind of beak whatsoever. It was it was just similar to what a human would be. And the other thing that was really different compared to you know, the thousands of stories I've heard, is that at the tallest, this was maybe seven and a half feet tall. I would say probably closer to seven feet. I'm six three, and it wasn't It wasn't a lot taller than me. It was big. It was very scary, so it had to look to it that it could do whatever it wanted.

19:03 I would say in this case, I you know, some people, some people say, gosh, you know, my gun wouldn't have been enough to kill it. I would disagree with that. I could have killed it, but I didn't know what it was. I even at you know, I was thirty yards away from it, and I could not verify what it was. I was. I mean, my mind was going on thousand miles an hour trying to figure out what the heck this thing is, and you know, the thought kept crossing that it was like a human in a suit, you know, I mean, there was no possible way that was the case. But your brain is still you know it, you know, And maybe maybe I wasn't prepared for it because I've never gone out looking for it. Could be that maybe my mind just wasn't prepared. But my mind couldn't settle it just you know, and I couldn't focus on any part of it. It was really, really weird.

20:01 I find myself looking up and down it, like you see somebody stunning and you naturally, without you know, without putting an effort, you'd naturally kind of look up and down them. And it was like that. I found myself going up and down and up and down trying to figure this out, and it was it was interesting. It was very scary. I did feel like, you know, if you shot it, you better kill it because it'd probably rip you apart. And knowing how fast bearers move in the woods, from the appearance, it looks like this thing would be pretty fast and the bear can close the gap of thirty yards and just I mean it seems like a second they're so fast, and yeah, that was kind of kind of it. We stayed there until until dark, and then we went ahead and stayed up there the next morning, and we've seen exactly where it walks. So my friend drove back to town. The friend that was was with me. And by the way, that friend was one of the total when any of anybody ever said anything about Bigfoot or sasquatch, he was absolutely no possible way in heck that such a thing exists, absolutely no way until that moment. And that moment changed his life and his beliefs. I'll tell you it was. It was probably more devastating for him because I was kind of

21:32 open minded that there was a possibility of something like this, but you know, he was completely close to the whole idea. And so he went back to town and got plaster and came back and casted an absolutely perfect print that you know going through that meadow. And we saw him standing, we saw him make the print, we saw him standing in it. So there's no question whether that print was real or not. And the funny thing is it is like a few years back, this is clear back, and lately in the late nineties has happened. And a few years back he took that he took that casting into the North American Bigfoot Museum. There the Cliff character and they glanced at the at the track and said it wasn't real, and I'm like, yeah, well when you see it standing in it, you know it's real. Yeah. So that was kind of something else that it kind of makes you know, I don't there's not you know, I don't follow really, you know, I'll watch YouTube stuff. I like, I say, I'm not and not going to be a researcher.

22:46 They're just there's way too much controversy over that. And I like to hunt. I don't, you know, I don't like to go I don't. I don't like to go out there and chase, chase, you know, critters that you know, some people believe in and others don't. It's just to me, it's kind of a waste of my time. It just happens to be the areas that I go in. I seem to have a lot of activity. But again I'm you know, when you hunt down many years up there, you go to the places that you rarely see anyone. And I think that that's very much the case. I heard your interview with Oh, the guy that a lot of people think is crazy that I think his last name starts with the oh, my goodness. Anyway, he's talked about Scookum Lake and that kind of stuff. And I've actually seen that guy up at scook Them Lake. Had no idea until.

23:45 Oh Henry Franzoni. Yeah yeah, oh yeah, he's no longer with us, but that's incredible. That's where he had. Okay, so, oh man, there's this This interview is going to be nuts. There's a few questions I want to ask before we leave this the Pvine Mountain area. But I'm going to make a note about Henry Franzonio. Yeah, he's a what a guy. I'm gonna make a note about that. Okay. So you have the sighting and it doesn't see you, So you're saying that it pretty much just it keeps following the elk cow and then it leaves the area.

24:25 Correct, yep, had followed that that cow right into the timber exactly where that it basically followed that elk's footprints, and it literally right behind it. I would say that, you know, inside of inside of twenty feet behind it, following along. It was very very close to that elk, and the elk, you know, didn't didn't respond to it at all. So it was really really interesting because you know, elk are pretty spooky typically want an elk smell it's over. You know, they can look at you, they can hear you. They won't put a lot of a lot of stock into it, but if they smell you, it's over. And I don't know anyway that you could be twenty feet away following especially, I mean it's things not walking in a straight line into the wind. It's literally kind of come out of the woods a little bit of a straight line and made a bend and now going another direction.

25:26 There's no way you could make that loop without getting wind of it. But the cow elk just walked on and that thing followed it. And you know, there was never any breakout where the elk took off. You can definitely hear once an elk gets spooped and it runs, it makes a lot of noise. So yeah, it was. It was. It was crazy and that thing never took its eyes off. That never took its eyes off that cow. And maybe that's why, you know, we I couldn't tell you, you know, really good details of the facial I remember thinking how well the face blant in and it was shocking to me that I remember the hands definitely being they were they were clearly bald on the bottom of the hands. There was hair on the back of the hands, and then it seemed that the that the hair kind of started about halfway up the side of the hand or the finger. But the hands definitely looked like an old working man's hands, just you know, probably you know, twice his fingers twice as bulky as what you would consider for something that size. The you know, the arm length was. It was right in the middle of what you know, some people say normal length, some people say down around the knees. His arms definitely, his fingertips definitely did not touch his knees. I would say, you know this, His fingertips were three quarters the way down his thighs.

26:59 And yeah, he never never once looked at us. So that may have been why we couldn't get your or why I didn't see any details to his faith is that he was focused on that cal the entire time. Absolutely. Who has the track. Cast, my buddy, he's over in Montana. Okay, very cool, very cool. That's cool. He still has it, and the sounds like it did really affect him. So tell me about you know, the Scookum Lake area. There's a lot of history to that area. And it sounds like you had a time where you actually ran into Henry Franzoni at that area. I'd love to hear about that. Yeah, I mean, I had no idea who he was, and quite honestly, I thought that he was a little bit crazy. But you know, I have quite a bit, you know, I have a much more open mind now, you know, to what was going through his head. But you know, I'm not saying I'm, you know, hundred percent sold on his whole ideas and all that. But you know, they who's to say, you know, But yeah, I spent a lot of time up at skook theming up at a lake called Surprise Lake, which is just west across the canyon from scuok Them Lake, which is very Surprise Lake was probably had less guests than than scook Them Lake, and either one, we're just so far off the beaten path, you know, you could you could hike into scoop Them Lake.

28:29 You still can't hike into scook Them Lake relatively easily. You can even ride a motorcycle in there, that's how good the trail is coming from the Walla side. But Surprise Lake was, you know, higher in elevation west and up at the top, and I heard some crazy stuff up there and spent tons of time. But like I say, it's so far out there. Once you leave you know, Highway forty six or Highway two twenty four, whatever you want to call it. It's actually Highway forty six right there. But once you leave where Fish Creek comes off of Highway forty six, it's fourteen miles up to up to Scookum Lake, so you can't and it's not it's passable pretty much only by foot now. They never fixed it after the ninety six floods and and all the all.

29:21 The there's probably fifty creeks in that fourteen miles across the road, and every one of those colverts is ripped out, with some naturally some they went ahead and tore out. But it's so there's really no way you're going up there now. But even back then, we go up there, you know, half a dozen or more times a year, and I don't recall ever seeing more than I saw one other guy on a motorcycle one time, and saw a couple of a couple of young people camping in a subaru or something one time, and I saw I saw him maybe twice but I actually talked to him once, and you know, it's just so weird to run into somebody up there. And when I was hearing him talk about his van and this and that, then I ended up digging a little further to get it get a look at him and on the TV, and I'm like, yeah, that's the guy. Wow.

30:24 So he was just hanging out up there, just was he just sitting around trying to see if you can get any interactions. Or well, you know, he he had said that, you know, he was walking around and mostly interested in hearing what goes on at night and that kind of stuff. But you know, when i'd seen him, he was just hanging out. He wasn't, you know, fifteen yards from his van and and just hanging out. So it was just, you know, there's very few people to do that. You really like the mountains to, you know, just get that far away from everything and just around. So you know, as far as I was concerned, he was just a guy that needed his peace and quiet and had no idea he was that serious about the whole big foot thing. He mentioned the big foot thing, Oh okay, it it. You know, it was kind of going into one ear and out the other because you know, it seemed like he was kind of pushing more of the alien thing than than and I was really really open to you know, it could be a could you know, there could be certainly a creature that was somehow left behind or managed to keep itself at hiding. You know, you got tribes in South America that you know, had just recently been noticed, and other ones they didn't notice until the nineteen eighties, and you know that had never had any kind of communication with man. So there's some big woods up there, and if something wanted to stay hidden, if I wanted

31:55 to stay hidden out there, you'd never find me. So imagine something that's you know, lives in that you know, in that type of type of environment. So yeah, I did. I didn't take him real seriously, but you know I did run into I did see his rig multiple times over the years, and all in very very rural places that normally wouldn't see anyone unless unless you were hunting and been very serious about hunting. That is so cool, and. Most of the hunters don't don't get very far away. Absolutely, was that late nineties as well that you had you stumbled upon him? Yeah, Yeah, Actually it was. It was about a year before the flood, so it would have been about nineteen ninety five.

32:40 Okay, it checks out. Yeah, wow, Oh it's so cool. So, I mean it's it's not seeing Bigfoot, but it's something for me just as cool, which would be, you know, stumbling upon Henry Franzo anyone who's trying to do Bigfoot research out in the woods. That's so cool. Yeah. I didn't think it was cool until just recently when I figured out who he was. Yeah. Absolutely, you have. I'm looking at your email. So you also have a second confirmed sighting, which is up on hillock Burn Road. Correct, Yeah, way up hillock Burn up where well hillock Burn goes up. Basically hillock Burn turns into forest service for a service road forty five, kind of like the s Ticada two twenty four to forty six thing. As soon as you enter National Forest becomes a forest service road and then and then it's forty six, and in hillock Burn's case, it becomes highway forty five and makes the big loop around the mountain. It comes back out at Memelus. There's a bridge off of off of forty six that they call the Memeluse Bridge. And that's where you know, basically the road comes and goes. Now, the Memelu's Bridge has been closed out for a lot of years, but back at the time, I think it was still open.

33:55 But you get up, you get way way up, and oddly enough that the place that I saw. The second one was if you go all the way up up forty five, and then you you basically you make your first turn heading up South Fork Canyon and it takes you up to a place called Helen's Lake, and there's a couple of different ways. If you continue on the road past Helens Lake, it'll take you up to the road I saw him, or the way I typically go is I take another rite and go up and and kind of come out at the top or the brim of dead Horse Canyon. And then there's a road that drives around dead Horse Canyon and taps back into that.

34:39 The road that goes past Helens Lake. It may be forty five forty and you know, it's the it's there hasn't been a road signed up there for years and years and years and years, and I don't they could be forty five, but there's only one road that pretty much goes from from we're dead Horse and and and kind of Memaloose Lake. There's Memblus Lake. Hast has an access trail on top also, so from that access trail on top and from Dead Horse they kind of meet together, and then they head south in between the head of dead dead Horse Canyon and then over the top of Luken's Creek. On your right side and on your left side is basically you're at the very highest point above at the west side of Wash Creek and Wash Creek and Fish Creek. If you go up the Fish Creek drainage like you're going up to Scukam Lake or Surprise Lake.

35:40 The Wash Creek is part of that huge basin, so there's kind of a finger that splits the two drainages, but they meet together for the bottom you know, five or seven miles of the Fish Creek drainage. So Wash Creek, going up Wash Creek and going up Fish Creek are just very similar things. And really, as you know, terrain wise, you're just you know, like Wash Creek is only you know, a couple few miles from Scukum Lake and Wash Creek burned out that there was a there was a big fire up there and then the flood of ninety six washed one of the bridges out completely, so that shut that whole road down. And this was in around twenty ten, twenty eleven, and I was it was virtually the same day.

36:29 This was Saturday morning, third Saturday October, opening day elk season, and I was hunting pretty much in south the head of South Forlork Canyon, and I wasn't get getting even close to anything, and so I thought I'd take a run way up Wash Creek and maybe drop into Luken's Creek. And I got up there in the snow. We had a lot of snow the night before and a lot of snow that morning, and the snow was kind of dying off. It was this sky was clearing up a little bit. But I'm driving along and I'm, you know, several miles up there, and the snow is about maybe ten ten inches deeper, so maybe twelve. And I hadn't seen another rig all day, so I there there was nobody else up there nowhere, no one even close. And then when I got into about four or five or six inches of snow, all of a sudden, the track's vanished.

37:24 No more deer tracks, no more elf tracks, no nothing, and I'm cruising along and it's getting deeper and deeper and deeper, and I'm thinking to myself, well, I hate to have to, you know, walk to a place I can call a buddy to help me get out of this if I do get stuck. And you know, I had a big, big, big truck that was in good shape with the right kind of tires, and I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna you know, I haven't seen a track and you know probably you know, two miles and the snow's getting deep. So there's a wide spot up here. I had my girlfriend with me at the time. I know this wide spot ahead. So what I'm going to do is, you know, in that kind of snow, especially when you're breaking the path, you don't you don't just you know, stop and back up and turn and back up and turn. You want to you want to probably try to pull a cookie if if you can, to get you most of the way turned around so you don't get stuck trying to turn around.

38:22 So I'm heading for this flat spot, and I hit that little flat spot, and I pull a cookie and get turned around and start, you know, get back in my own ruts and start heading back down the mountain and I come around the very first curve and I can see something standing on the right side of the road, and I'm like, am I confused? You know what was that? Because I can the timbers in the background, because it's not standing out in the road where I can see the you know, see that where I have a silhouette. It's standing on the right side of the road where I've got timber behind it, so it's really blending in well. And though I was only you know, I got within one hundred yards before I watched it jump off the side of the road and right that particular spot there's a rock slide there, and the rock it was either a rockslide or they could have brought a ton of rock in when they were building the road originally, so it could it could be a base that was built.

39:21 It may or may not be a man made There's a lot of rock right there, so it could. It may or may not be a man made rockslide. But whatever this was jumps off and I hauled. But you know, to close up that hundred yards real quick, because as far as I'm gonnatarned, it's probably an l and it's big and dark in the wrong shape, but you know what else could it be? And I jump out of the truck and look down immediately, and I'm looking at footprints. And you know my dan or Elk hunter boots or size twelve, and these footprints were perfect footprints, and they had come up out of the rock slide. So it was about I would say, forty yards from the road to the to the thick timber and just this rock slide in between the two. And when I got out, I see this footprint and it must have been waiting for me to get down the road. It must have hurt me coming waited for me to get down the road so it could cross or whatever. And I get out of the truck and I the first thing I'm going to do is look at the tracks to see, you know, whether it was a bowl or a cow or whatever it was. And it was there's a human like foot and it's you know, a barefoot, and it's at least three inches maybe three and a half inches longer than the soul of my Dianner boot. And so I run over the edge immediately, and then I realized

40:53 I don't have a gun, so I yell at my girlfriend to grab handing my gun, and not because I was looking to shoot it, but because I was looking to make sure I was protected. And I'm looking and I can't hear or see anything down there. It goes straight into dark timber. But what I could see is that forty yards was covered by two jumps, and it was it was certainly very steep, so you know, a human probably could have done it in you know, maybe five to ten jumps and you would have been at the timber. Depending on how athletic you were, maybe you could do it in five. But there was it was. There was two spots where it had jumped and hit a third of the way, and it jumped and hit just before the trees, and then it walked off. And the tracks coming up to the road were absolutely perfect.

41:44 It they walked up out of there, they stepped, they crossed my first rut, they walked in and stepped into my second rut, and walked down my rut for about oh, you know, under twenty feet fifteen twenty feet, walked up my rut and then must have heard me coming and walked over to the edge. So it wasn't you know, the prints were perfect. They weren't scrambling footprints by any means. It was just walking very casually. Had to have some weight to it, because the prints were even good in my tire tracks. So you know, my truck weighs eight thousand pounds and and naturally it spread over four tires, and and you know, the tires are soft and not rigid, and so you know, it's possible. You'll see elk tracks in tire tracks where they leave a deeper impression, so it's not you know, it doesn't have to be crazy heavy, but it had to be pretty heavy to leave those perfect prints, even in my rut. And I kind of investigated for a few minutes. Was a little bit you know, surprised, and you know, I guess the thing that surprised me the most is that and now I'd seen one before, okay, ten years earlier, so this wasn't a surprise to me that they exist, but it was very shocking to me for it to be that far up, because the animals seemed to be much lower. You know, I hadn't seen an animal track in two miles, so maybe it was moving down at that point, I don't know, but it

43:14 was in some pretty deep snow. You know, ten twelve inches of the snow is pretty deep snow to to, you know, try to gather. And then I told my girlfriend, I said, well, do you believe in Bigfoot? And she said I don't know. And I go, you want to see if it's real or not? And she says, I don't know. I said, come here, you come out of the truck. I want to show you something. And she walked over and looked at those tracks and jumped back in my truck and started screaming for me to get her off of that mountain. Oh. She was so scared just by seeing the prince. And I couldn't. I couldn't calm her down. It was crazy. I ended up having to drive. I got to hunt the rest of the day, but I had to drive fifteen miles from there to hunt before she before she was like, okay, I feel okay enough if you want to stay up here. It was it was It was pretty crazy.

44:07 That's incredible. This was around was it twenty ten or twenty eleven around there? Yeah, twenty ten or eleven, I'm not sure which. But one of the two. You had said something, I just want to see if you can give a little bit more detail about it when you so when you say bear footprint, can you maybe describe what. You mean by that, I meant like human footprints with no clothes on, Yeah, like you know, naked footprints. Yeah it Yeah, they don't look anything like a bear, let me tell you that. And there's they don't look anything like a bear. Even when a bear tracks over itself. You know a lot of times you'll see a bear, you know, step almost to his front paw, and so you take a rear foot and a front foot and combine the two together, and you know a lot of people will you know, say that's a you know, a sasquatch track or whatever, and there's nothing further from it.

45:05 You know, bears, bears can't retract their claws, so they're always going to have those claws sticking out. And even a black bear's clause or you know, an inch and a half plus long, so there's there's really just no confusing that. And the pads, you know, the bears have pads and different pads on their on their rear feet versus their front feet, and it's it's for a trained eye, it's there's no mistaking when a bear has stepped on its own track. It's it's that cannot be confused. However, I I've heard a lot of people, you know, and and even seeing pictures where somebody said they got a picture of a of a sasquatch track and I glanced at it and I'm like, yeah, no, right, yeah, I gotcha.

45:49 This this area of the hillock Burn Road area, I mean, it comes up a lot. There's been a ton of activity up there. A lot of it is not public, but it's been told to me. And there's somewhere if you start searching for Hillockburn Road bigfoot activity, you're going to find it on older websites, and it's out there. It's definitely out there. So that's some very very interesting area that you were up there. Now this is up near Goat Mountain. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So you literally when you get up, oh goodness, you're probably four miles above where you enter into National Forest. Is the road that splits off that goes up to Goat Mountain and it goes and dead ends. The road goes up. It's tricky to get up to Goat Mountain. You've got to really know how to do it these days. But the roads are virtually cut off. Right where you hit, you hit private land.

46:50 So the towers, the Goat Mountain Towers, and the and the Williams Lake Towers, which you know, I call them all the Goat Mountain Towers, but they're two separate humps a few hundred yards away from each other. Those are both actually public land, but they're accessed from from Warehouser, which is private timberland. Okay, Yeah, I'm looking at it on on X right now, and it's just it's so weird because you know, you're right, You've got it's got Warehouser and then mount Hood National Force and just I don't even know how you would get up there. Man, it would be awesome if someone from Warehouser was listening with and they had Bigfoot stories.

47:30 I can always just dream about that, but you never know, right. But yeah, I don't know, you know, I don't know what those guys say about it. You know. I I ran and I had a lot of Warehouser property. I go both in and out of, you know, public and Warehouser. I try to put in for it every year. I have Malala Warehouser this year and the last ten years or so. I've been hot in Esticada warehouser and prior to that I had a Malala warehouser. But it's really interesting as you're going up when you turn into national forest coming up Highway forty five or Hillock Burn, the left side of the road is all National forest and pretty much the right side of the road is all all either BLM or private. There's a little bit where national forest kind of crosses the road, but the higher you get, the less national forest there is. So once you get up a certain point, like you know, up around say, for example, Williams Lake, Williams Lake's really only you know, it's not very far from the main from the main road, and there's a there's an actual crossover road that's on BLM land that has a trail coming from public to get to Williams Lake. That's you know, it can't be more than a half mile long. It's really a short trail to get to Williams Lake. And you can drive to Williams Lake at the other end.

48:58 So Williams Lake part of it's on and part of it is on public, and then the public is up in that higher country is all BLM land, and which is the I don't know why it is, but BLM Land just holds a ton more animals than the regular National Forest says pretty much anywhere you go, the BLM Land is just rich with you know, deer and elk and bears and so on and so forth. But yeah, it's and it's a complicated road system. It takes you a long long time to learn it from either side. It's you know, I remember years ago the county sheriff had a this has been a long long time ago, twenty five thirty years ago, the county sheriff had a supposed had supposedly found a body up you know, up Pasco Mountain. Somebody had found one in the rocks or bones or something that they thought was a body, and it wasn't a body, but they there was a whole bunch of deputies that had were up there, six or seven of them, and they were up there half the night.

49:59 They ended up coming out in the middle of you know, in the middle mid hours of the morning because they were lost up there, and they were just on the public side and there was two ways out there. So it can be pretty complicated. Oh my goodness, that's that's intense. So Goat Mountain is another area that really comes up. If you search into this area for bigfoot stuff comes up a lot. The Oregon Big for Highway book. You can find a lot of stuff in there. Have you had things happen around Goat Mountain as well? Never at Goat Mountain, Okay, I've heard some crazy stuff. I'll tell you one of the craziest things that I've never been able to explain to this day. All right, and this was prior to me seeing you know, that living creature the first time I was at a lot of people anytime they're on Highway forty five, it's they go up Hillock Burn once they once they get up in the national for us, a lot of people from that point. In fact, even hillock Burn Road people, anybody that goes up there, they say they're going up Goat.

51:03 So from there all the way up to the dead Horse Canyon, which is kind of the highest point of that road system, people refer to that all as Goat Mountain. So when people tell you they had a sighting at Goat Mountain, it probably wasn't on Goat Mountain. In fact, Goat Mountains it has so many you know, that's where high school kids go up and drink beer, and it's you know, kind of a party place, and it's really not You're probably not going to have any sightings right on goat Mountain itself. It just but you get over, you know, you get within a quarter mile any direction of it, and it's very very possible. And and then I would bet most of the references are, you know, higher up above, you know where you would pass goat Mountain on the main highway or the main roads. I say highway, but it's literally, you know, only the first quarter of it is paved, and even then it's barely double wide, and then it instantly goes to single gravel and it's very rough and and it's but it is a main it's considered a main through road through the four service. It's got it. It's got a two digit number.

52:15 It's a main road. So it's yeah, you'll find that most of the most of your sightings of people pinpointed or they knew the road they were on. It's going to be it's going to be a four digit or a seven digit digit number, which is yeah. So the four digits means that it connects, it'll it it has two ends it'll come out somewhere and then the seven seven digit number. So basically have the four digit number, which is going to start out with say forty five, Touse it's Highway forty five. So say you have Highway forty five forty Okay, you know it's going to go through. It's going to come out at another end. Maybe it comes out to the same road, maybe it comes out to a different road, but it goes through. And then say a spur road off of that that just goes and dead end. That's going to be forty five, one twenty or one thirty or one fifty or one seventy, you know, and they continue to climb. The three digit number gets higher as you go further up the road.

53:12 So I was on I was in Southport Canyon. I was above Southport Canyon taking Nice, Nice and two nephews with a sister in law up to a place they wanted to camp, someplace rural, way out of the way, someplace it was going to be more like being in nature. So I thought, okay, well I can take them up goat again, I'm referring to it as goat when it's not. I can take them up goat and and give them a nice place. It's easy for them to find their way home, and they're not that far away from things, and they might even have cell service because they're so close to the towers. And I take them up and help them get a camp set up on a little a little, tiny, little dead end log landing road, not an actual road, just the little skiter where they have the log landing in the yard or at one time when they logged it. And we're above. We're above where the west side of South Fork, the south fork of the Placmus River, which is South Fork Canyon, is where it comes out of the out of a spring, and we are What went on elevation wise was a few hundred feet lower than Helen's Lake, not to the forty five road, kind of between the forty five road and the next road that would be to the south or uphill from it. I heard a fight of some sort that you know, I can't confirm what it was the

54:43 only thing that I could ever tell you back at the time is it had to be some kind of a bear that I've never heard of make those kind of noises before in a all out fight with a mountain lion. It was the scariest, loudest most of Knox. You know, you could picture the hair flying just by listening to the noise. It was unbelievable, and it went on for probably a good ten minutes straight before either somebody surrendered or one of them got killed. But you know, after kind of experience and what I have now, it makes me feel like that could have been a sasquatch, not a bear, because I've heard bears, and I've heard all their noises, and they make some incredible noises. They can even sound like human, but this was just different.

55:33 It was just deeper and more throaty, and just it was just vicious, not just not like anything I've ever heard from a bear. And you could clearly tell them ounta lion was the opponent because they make such crazy, high pitched noises and such a different range of vocals, and you know, every once in a while throwing in one of their nasty you know, rowls or rowels or you know, whatever you would call it. It was pretty clear that there was a mountline fighting something, and whatever it was, it was a worthy opponent because this, I mean, this was it was unbelievable, So that that's kind of the only thing other than hearing you know, weird sounds in the night that I've actually seen up goat now at at Williams Lake a week ago Sunday, spending the night at Williams Lake, I heard some pretty incredible stuff there.

56:34 At two thirty in the morning there, I heard something woke me up and I something, you know, within fifty yards of my tent and mine and my nephew's pickup trucks, just up on the hill in the timber. I mean it was very close. I definitely could have thrown it and thrown a rock to where the sound was coming from. But something was mumbling, very very loud, very very deep. And I think I told you about this before. It was mumbling kind of like you hear those Sierra sounds. But it didn't have any of that weird high pitch, massive elevations in high verse low. This was all just really low but somewhat aggressive, and definitely it sounded like it was trying to talk, except for I couldn't tell you a thing it said. It didn't, you know, none of them made It was totally foreign to me. But the crazy thing was this thing goes off and then across the lake which would be just you know, a couple of acres away. It's probably not one hundred and fifty yards across the lake at that particular point. All of a sudden, there's something talking exactly like that back at whatever was on that hillside. And they went back and forth, which seemed like a half an hour, but it was probably five minutes, maybe ten at the max.

58:03 But they had a conversation back and forth almost like you. You know, I've heard a lot of times being way up in the mountains, especially like up around like oh Loy Lake and the o Lolly Wilderness area. You hear a lot of owls around those lakes where the owls can make some incredible noises too. They don't just make the average a little who and they make loud noises, and you hear them up in those A lot of times. I've heard them up around. I've heard a lot of owls, but up there, it seems like they'll talk back and forth all night long, and you might even get two or three of them from you know, even a half mile away from each other, and they just they're so loud you can just hear they carry back and forth.

58:46 It was a lot like you hear them conversing, except for it was way more mumbly not it wasn't. It wasn't as sharp and crisp as the detail of the noise that the owls make. Even when the owls do their weird you know, you know where they don't sound anything like a hoot, but they have multiple levels of you know, their vocalization. This was just not consistent like that. It was. It was pretty creepy, I'll tell you what. It kept me up the rest of the night. I did not like having something I didn't know that close to me. And it's very dark down at that lake at night. There's you're down in a hole and it's you know, thick brush and timber three hundred and sixty degrees around that lake. Other than that very narrow little trail road that is so narrow you couldn't turn around on it if you tried. You have to back out to a spot to turn around. Or there's one little tiny place right out the lake you can turn around.

59:46 But if you're down there, we have our vehicles down there, and we turn around way up the road and back in there. And then otherwise, once one rigs down there, you don't have room to turn around, and then you put a tent up, you know, back in the tree is no anybody that comes in has to back back out, So it's very dark and a lot of noises around the lake. It's really weird because the moring the evening started out that we were hearing a bunch of elk bugle, and well not a bunch, there were two bowls that were bugling. But it seemed a little crazy because every time the elkuld bugle this happened, sometimes the coyotes go crazy, and there was probably a half a dozen coyotes up there, and they make all their yipping and screaming and and you know, everything from from mildly high pitched to extremely high pitch weird. You know, they they even can sound like monkeys. But that night or that next morning, there was something on the other side of that lake that was sounded exactly like chimpanzees screaming at each other like they're going to go on the war path, which really topped off the fact that I hadn't slept, hadn't slept since you know, since those things woke me up, and I only went to bed like an hour before that.

1:00:57 So because I like to listen to the noise, and the elk were bugle and so I was just listening and yeah, that's that was a pretty interesting experience. So that's pretty close to Go Mountain. That's within the within I would say it's within easily within two miles of the towers, not by road, but by a crows fly easily within two miles maybe a mile and a half to the towers. And that was you said it was around like September seventh, five, so very recent it was. Yeah, it was Sunday a week ago. A week ago Sunday. Okay, it was Labor Day weekend, so yeah, the yeah, that's right, yep, Labor Day weekend. So yeah, as much time as I've spent up there, you know, up around Go Mountain and and all the places beyond, you would think that, you know, I'd run into something by accident. But remember I'm also not looking for it, so when I find it, I it's entirely by accident. I'm not comfortable around him, you know, I'm not if you wanted me to go on an expedition, I'd be heavily armed. I just you know, I don't want anything to do with those things. They just happened to be in the areas that that I spend a lot of time, and I've just stumbled into them, and and if I never saw one again, I would be very pleased.

1:02:21 There was an interesting account that you had shared with me in our first chat, and I believe it was around I want to say it was like around forty six I do with the bear that was, Yeah, is that something you'd be able to share on this call? Sure? Sure, Yeah, that was this spring that was in May. This I probably I could probably tell you the exact date. It was May tenth, just because I have a punch tag for that date. But yeah, I'd been watching this bear for a couple of weeks and he'd show up and then you know, he'd disappear. And but for some reason, like this hillside and and it's you know, pretty heavy timber bordered on heavy heavy reprod that goes down into a canyon that's been pretty well protected from logging down near the creek for a long long time. So we were we were down there messing around, and there's an old road that comes in from the opposite end that that that I was on the on May tenth, So I kind of experienced this the first time, walking in from the other side on a on a dirt road that got pushed in and they were logging, and then the Forest Service was logging, but they were cutting through Warehouser to get to get to get the logs and to get in there and do their stuff. It was right literally logging right on the border of Warehouser and

1:03:51 the National Forest. And I couldn't figure out for the life of me why they punched this road in and they took all these logs out of there, but they left like there must have been like six or seven log truck loads all stacked up on the side of the road, and they just abandoned them. They were good, full length logs, not like they were scrap ones. And and they literally threw a bunch of trees and pushed some boulders and to block the road from going in. Long before you know, they got all the all the all the lumber out of there. So had a curiosity, Me and my nephew decided we were going to go down to the end. And we walked down there and we're just looking around. We have our binoculars with us constantly.

1:04:35 If you don't have them, you're not hunting. And I'm looking through the trees up the end of this thing, and I'm looking through the tree tops trying to see the mountain on the other side to see if there's any open meadows or any place I can see through the trees to see what you can't see from anywhere else. And this technique is very, very good for hunting. You should be you know, you got to you gotta look everywhere because you just might be surprised at what you see that nobody can see from anywhere else. So I was looking through and all of a sudden, I caught like this huge clump of branches and not really, we won't call them branches. We'll call them fur boughs, because that's what they were. They were branches that had still had all the fur boughs on them. And I'm looking at this thing and looking at it, and I'm it's like a hundred feet up in a tree, and I can see the tree pretty well at different places. So it's an old growth tree. It's you know, six eight feet in diameter Douglas fir, and it's like one hundred feet up in there. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, I can see the detail of this, the bottom of this nest, that this is weaved like in and out, and it's not you know, older branches. I mean, there's a lot of alders around, you know. Being at a you know, near the base of this trees, very close to the creek bottom, you know, within fifty yards of the creek bottom, it was it was a very strange, weird thing that caught my eye. That was different. It

1:06:07 was wrong, nothing was right about it. And so I met up with my nephew a short time later and said, you got to come look at this. And so he pulls up his binoculars and he's got he said. He says, holy smokes, that's like weave. And he goes, is that a nest? And I go, well, if it's a nest, it's like at least eight or ten feet wide, maybe wider. You know, it's hard to tell from the distance what the real width is. I go, that's you know, it looks like a giant nest to me. And he goes, well, let's go down there and look up. So we went down to the base and if you get down there, it's like one hundred feet up and the canopy is so thick you can't see that nest at all at the base of the tree looking up. But I investigated the tree thoroughly to see if there was any any spike marks from you know, a logger climbing up there, if there was any any any claw marks from bears or lions going up there, cougars, and there's just there's really no tear marks or no distinctive scratch or marks on us. So you know, in my impression, something had to you know, physically grab it and go up at like a bear, except for without claws, because the bears just run up at like a cat. You know, they use their strength, not necessarily their claws, but their claws getting the way, so they leave all kinds of scar damage when they go up a tree, especially on that size, and there's just no damage to the base of the tree. So, you know, we went back up until you know, we could see it again, which was almost to the exact

1:07:40 spot I spotted it to begin with. We couldn't seem to get any closer to look at it, but you know, we have very high quality binoculars and we could clearly see that this was all weaved out and this and that, and you know, we're sitting there talking about going, is this like, you know, some kind of a sasquatch nest? And I said to my nap, I'm like, there's no bird I know of that can lift those branches and fly into that canopy and then come up with fingers to be able to tie those you know, to weave those things in and out. And he's like, I'm totally with you. He's like, there's this is there's no way that this is there, but it is. And so we kind of, you know, left it alone. And you know, in the back of our minds, we were thinking, well, maybe the forest servers ran into this, and maybe they just shut off their logging because of it, you know, so it wouldn't stir up any attention or or you know, there's there's a lot of rumors around there. I know that a friend of mine reported a bigfoot sighting to the Esticate a Ranger District, which is no longer there now.

1:08:45 They operate out of a building in Sandy now, but a few years back they up until a few years back, they had a office right at the right as you come into Esticate It and he reported it and the gal at the desk said that. He said, well, have you got other people say anything? And she said, yeah, we've had quite a few reports, but we don't talk about that. Really. I've Oh my goodness. Yeah, she she flat out and said that to my buddy. He goes, you don't talk about it, he goes, She goes, yeah, that's just something we don't talk about. So it makes you wonder, you know, how much they know? If the if the gall at the desk, you know, here's a lot of this. You know what what have those forest service guys stumbled into over the years. Hard to say, but anyway, it appeared that they kind of abandoned their operation.

1:09:43 They didn't leave a mess, they didn't do they just it's like they picked up all their equipment, went home before they finished taking their logs out that were already cut, stripped, stacked, ready to load right onto the log trucks, and they just left them sitting. So it really made sense, and I think that's where my curiosity came from originally to walk down there to find out why why did they stop? You know this? Does you know they're not leaving a pile of logs for habitats for bunny rabbits, that's you know, they they do plenty of those kinds of things, but bunny rabbits like brush piles, not not stacks of perfect logs with no branches. So back after this, we kind of, you know, let it go, and we talk about it a little bit amongst each other, and about a week later we're back. We're back in there, but we're in from another direction and just because you know, we'd seen some out cross the road, so we decided we'd go down and investigate. And we were kind of following that brick bottom down which is tree, and it we found another one of those nests, except for this one was all dried up. The needles that were still up there were completely brown. Ninety percent of the needs had fallen off.

1:11:01 Half of the branches had just kind of crumbled. I guess once the you know, the fur boughs dry up, maybe that's what was kind of holding some of the joints or whatever. But you know, down on the ground, you know, between the tree and the creek, the downhill side of the creek, there was there was all kinds of branches that that you know, were broken off, that had fallen out of that other nest. So I don't I don't know what why? How I don't you know. I was talking to another friend that said, you know, well, there's no reason they'd go up and live in a nest one hundred feet up in a tree. I said, well, what about if they had young, you know, and what if they had young what if what if mom needs to hunt and there's there's you know, an infant version or a small one that's you know, in danger to be around all the barriers that are in here, and all the mountain lions that are in here, and even people, you know, which there's not many people once you get off a road anywhere in the in the in the mountain hood area. But you know, but the only thing we could figure is maybe maybe you know, they shove their their youth in those things while they you know, while they're out hunting, and you know, it doesn't seem like it just doesn't seem normal for I don't know, but it's hard to say. There's a lot of unanswered questions to that. But anyway, I ended up hunting in there and from the other side, and I spotted this bear over and over and he was a giant. He

1:12:34 was an absolute giant, and yeah, I'm watching him one day and this might be my final opportunity, or this might be my opportunity. He's it looks like he might, you know, end up stepping someplace that he gives me a chance to take a shot at him, and the out of the out of the blue. After watching him for hours, and he just disappear. And then he comes strolling back by the areas where I could pick him out, and he's just feeding and wandering and eating berries and all kinds of different stuff. But all of a sudden is like sitting down with his nose straight up in the air. So I'm thinking to myself, well, he must smell me. But I'm not close enough to him to really be a threat. And the wind's come in my way, so there must have been a swirl in the wind.

1:13:24 And he's kind of looking he's facing downhill, and I'm kinda kind of half side hill downhill away from him, and all of a sudden, he stands all the way up on his hind legs and he takes off running away from the area that I lose him every time I see him. He disappears into the stick stuff and he goes downhill. I can hear him, you know, when he's walking. I see where he's going, and he never ever goes out where he's exposed, which he takes off running like something's going to eat him out through the open tim and I can't get him to walk in that open timber, so I can get a shot at him, let alone have him take off running across it. And then coming out of that timber, he has to run through a clear cut beyond the timber, and puts himself in sight of everyone, you know, anybody driving down the road would be able to see him. And he vanishes.

1:14:21 And then I, all of a sudden, here's some you know, here's some noise down below. And basically, if you follow the tree line that i'd been watching him, the big timber that he ran away from, all of a sudden, I see a bear go running up a tree and I'm thinking to myself, well, that was crazy, and I'm looking at him, and this bear is not near as big. He's more like a better than average size bear. And he's up that tree and he's panicking. He's running around this tree. And this is an old growth tree also, and so it's really massive. In diameter, and he's running around the tree, and he goes up to the first big branch, which is, you know, quite a ways up, you know, thirty forty feet, and he gets out on this limb and he's looking and he jumps on the back of the tree, and he's peeking around both sides of this tree, looking downhill, same direction that big bear was looking. And it seems like he gets comfortable and he starts heading down the tree. Well, he gets down the tree and at the very base of the tree, I can't see where the tree meets the dirt. I'm missing the last couple of feet because of the branches and brush and stuff kind of blocking my view. And this thing starts what basically, it comes out of the tree and it starts sneaking down the hill, and it's staying a little closer to the timber. If it gets close to the reprod, I can't see it at all.

1:15:49 But if it gets near the timber, then I can see it. You know, it'll show up here and there on its way down to the creek. And it's staying up near the timber. Well, all of a sudden, I see it. It whip around and I can hear it take off back up the hill. And the next thing I know, I see him going up that tree again. He's going up the tree next to it, I think, and he starts taking off up this other old drove tree, and I'm trying, I'm looking down with my binoculars, trying to figure out what the heck is going on down there, And all of a sudden, in one of those low spots, in one of those spots that if you're near the timber, I could see you. If you're near the reprod, I can't.

1:16:32 I can see this black hair, dark thing that's not not in the timber, it's in the it's near the reprod. But I can see this black thing go across this low spot that's only a few yards wide, so I kind of only see it for a split second then it disappeared. So my immediate thought is, is there must be giant black bear because that the chocolate bear I was watching was just unbelieve I mean, he was probably close to five hundred pounds and just a giant, just a pig with big fat rolls and just huge head just looked, you know, like a basketball. And so this other bear would have to just be huge or just wicked, mean and huge. So I'm watching this bear, and this bear, the bear that's in the tree seems to calm down a little bit, and then it kind of comes down to the bottom, and I decide, well, I only have, you know, a week left of my hunt or whatever, and so I'm going to go ahead and shoot that bear.

1:17:35 And he's about, you, I don't know, ten feet ten feet up in the tree, and I shoot him and he falls and and I'm pretty sure that you know, I kill him. And then all of a sudden, I hear this horrible screaming, just nasty, loud screaming, just stood the hair up on my back, and it's going down to the creek and it it keeps screaming all the way to the creek, and then I can hear it splashing down the creek, screaming at these unbelievable levels. I mean, it was loud, and it kept screaming as it ran. It probably got at least a half a mile down the creek before the timber and the brush and everything completely dampered the noise out. And whether it stopped screaming at that point or whether it just completely faded out.

1:18:25 I'm not sure, but I've never heard a bear make the noises that this thing was screaming, and so it kind of left me, you know, to believe that there might have been something hunting those bears while I was hunting those bears. But I don't know that. You know, It's like I say, it could have been just a vicious bear. It could have been maybe they have a scream that I've never heard before. But you certainly don't hear them screaming and running, you know, at top speed. You know, they would they wouldn't be running at top speed and bellowing, you know, at the top of their lungs for you know, I mean, it seemed like it lasted a minute. It probably didn't. It probably lasted, you know, twenty seconds, but it was. It was pretty creepy, we thought at first, my nept So my nephew met up with me before we go to go to get this bear, and I said, you know, I don't know what the heck's going on.

1:19:23 He goes, well, maybe you didn't hit it right and maybe you wounded it, and maybe it was making some blood curling roar that you've just never heard before. Because it was wounded and trying to get away. And I said, you know what, we'll call it that. So let's go over there and see what's going on. And we hiked to that tree. We drove to another road so it was a lot closer to get down to that tree. And we hiked down in there and my bear was laying on its back dead right where it fell out of the tree. Oh my goodness, Wow, what a wild story. I mean, that's it's as crazy as the first time I heard it. Just it's awesome. It's that area is so intensely wild, and you know, any of these places that have been coming up today, I mean, you got to be careful when you get out there. I mean, as it says in the book Oregon Big for Hiway, you got to make sure you got a full tank of gas, you know, safety safety supplies, and extra tires. You could easily, you know, mess up a tire up there. It is you don't mess around when you're going out in these areas outside of Estacada and Detroit. For sure, Jim, it has been awesome talking to you. I do have one last question, kind of a one off, and it doesn't hit no problem, but have you ever heard of anything weird happening over by the let me look at my map here, it's the Warm Springs Reservation.

1:20:55 Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of people, you know, claim that they've seen stuff where where I told you my original story that was above Last Creek there south of Pvine. That's only a couple of miles from Warm Springs Meadow, which is kind of almost borders the Worm Springs Indian Reservation. Yeah, there's there's a lot of country that really Pinhead but a lolly butte, you know, the Pinheads that you know I ran into I'm sorry, I can't keep his name, but the guy from Scuokum Lake, I saw him up it up at Pinhead once. Wow. So yeah, it said, that's one of the other places that I'd stumbled into him. So I'm going to say there's probably an awful lot of activity there. I know that if you're gonna if you're if you're going out there looking for these things, you need to make sure you're in a place where there's lots of alk and lots of bears because they they either you know, that's a food source or that is well, Like I know of one place of the Calawash River where there's been a ton of activity, and I've had some really weird things, never personally seen, but I've had some incredible stuff that could be a whole nother story going on up there, and that is just filled with deer. There's hardly any elk in that particular pocket, so it's not always elk.

1:22:20 They've got to have a good source. So it seems like everywhere I hear of a sighting or I've heard somebody say, oh I saw one of these, or so on and so forth, it always seems to be where there's a lot of elk, and there is a ton of elk on the reservation and back towards. I actually saw a footprint in Badger Kirk Wilderness Area one time, which is kind of the other end off off reservation, kind of the other end the mountain, you know, very close to just basically directly east of Mount Hood. But I've never heard of anybody seeing anything over there. Every time I've heard of somebody saying, oh I saw one or I heard one or this or that, it's always been kind of where Skyline Road get gets to kind of the headwaters of Cabin Creek and then through the timber back towards Pinhead and then east of there. There was an Indian guy I used to run into all the time up on forty two. His name was Rodney, and he lived on the reservation, and he had claimed he'd seen him multiple times and they were always right in that area.

1:23:26 Also, it's incredible. I mean, how cool is it. You know, you're out there as an outdoorsman, as a hunter, but you keep having these interactions and weird things happening, and I'm just, you know, thank you so much for reaching out to the show and for sharing what you've experienced over the years. Jim has been delightful conversation. It's always fun to talk to someone who really knows the area around the Oregon Bigfah Highway. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show. I just want to make sure that you were able to share everything that you wanted to talk about today. Yeah, I think we covered plenty. Maybe we'll have another conversation down the road and I can tell you about all the things I can't confirm absolutely.

1:24:11 Yeah, feel free to reach out and we can definitely set that up for later time. I'd love to have you back on. But thanks again, sir. You bet, thank you, thank you for. Listening to this episode of the Bigfoot Society Podcast. Every encounter we share reminds us that the world is bigger and stranger than we think, and that the truth is often hiding just beyond the tree line. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the channel on YouTube hit the bell so you don't miss the next episode, and share this with a friend who's into mysteries, monsters, or the unexplained. And if you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple Podcast, please follow the show there and leave us a five star positive review because all that helps more people discover the show. And remember, if you or someone you know has had a big Foot sighting, please I'd love to hear from you, so so email me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com and let's start the conversation. If you haven't gotten a chance yet, check out our membership community over at www dot Bigfoot Society podcast dot com and that's where you can hear tomorrow's episode today early in ad free and members only episodes every week. Also, it's a place to connect with other people that are into the Bigfoot subject as much as you are. Thanks again for following along with the Bigfoot Society until next time, keep your eyes open, trust your gut, and never stop asking what else might be out there? And see you in the woods.