I Watched Bigfoot for 8 Minutes | Mt. Hood

0:00 You're listening to bigflet 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, Bigfoot Society, welcome back to this show. We've got the privilege of soaking to mister Gary Allen today. Gary is a field researcher from the northern coast of Oregon and also some of the Cascades as well. You may remember he's got a Bigfoot themed YouTube channel that had some really interesting stuff on it and it's called Bigfoot Research Project. But Gary has had some incredible things happen over the years. We were just talking about it and I really excited to see where this conversation will go today. So welcome to the show.

1:04 Gary. How are you doing, sir, doing pretty well? Pretty well? Thank you? Awesome. Oh my goodness. I'm going to have the show the link to your show channel in the description, and there's some fascinating, fascinating stuff in there. I want to make sure all my listeners check it out and make sure they're subscribed to it. But Gary, yeah, we've got some interesting conversations to have, so let's get right into it. You know, you were saying it's probably best to start chronologically, so you know, how did this all start out? For you? Man? I have notes, so if I look down, I'm not trying to be rude or anything. I'm just sure there's just a lot to cover here. So basically, when I was a child, I'm sixty three years old.

1:52 When as a child, Patterson Giblin film came out, it was on local TV, and my mom, who's part Native American, uh told me that, uh, you know, she's she's been around them and and had activity when when she was growing up, she grew up in a logging camp in northern California, and and uh on her way to school, Uh, she'd see these oil drums that were full of oil thrown across a river and just crumpled, you know. Uh, I mean some forklifts could barely lift those. And here's you know, five or ten of them across across a creek. She said there'd be tracks all over and and her father told her never go into the woods alone, never go out at night, uh ever alone and you know, to be safe because the the forest giants will get you.

2:47 And uh so, so she was always told, you know, beware of forest giants. They're not they're they're not friendly. So I think, I think that's what you know, parents tell kids, just to keep them safe. But not a bad idea with all the bears and cougars and stuff running around out there. So anyways, it progressed from there to My first sighting was in I want to say the mid eighties. I was riding a bike home from a buddy of mine's house on the road between Forest Grove and Gaston and there's a big field there, and back in the day there are virtually no houses, but my friend had a farm out there. So I was riding my bike home about one o'clock in the morning in July and on a moonlight night, and I noticed some movement out of the side of my eye in this field I'm riding next to and there's a creature the size of a horse running across the field, but horse legs narrowed down towards their feet, and this thing didn't narrow down at all, look like tree trunks. It was running on and the moon was pretty bright that night, and the road was like no cars whatsoever. It's kind of a back road. And the more I looked at it, the more I could kind of make out a little bit better. It was, you know, a black figure, but I could I could see the silhouette really pretty well, and I can see it didn't have any ears. I could see it was looking right at me while it ran, and it was effortless. It was like galloping effortlessly at

4:21 you know, twenty miles an hour or so, eyes on a ten speed pedaling. Once I saw it, I booked, man, I was moving, and it's it paralleled me for about about three quarters of a mile, and then at the end of the field there's trees across and it comes right up to the highway and kind of a ditch and then the highway. And as I approached the end of the field, I was afraid that it was gonna come right at me, because it had nowhere to go but into these trees or towards me. And it had been paralleling me the whole time. And I kept looking over and it's it's looking at me, and I'd say it's about, uh two hundred feet away, maybe maybe two hundred and fifty and uh, just moving right along effortlessly.

5:08 And the more I looked at and I noticed it didn't it didn't have ears like a bear, didn't have ears like a horse, didn't have a snout like a horse. But it was about about the size of one thousand pounds horse, maybe a little bit maybe a little bigger. It was. It was just huge. And I didn't know what I was looking at. I just knew I had to get out of there, and kept booking. I got to the end end of that trees, and I waited for it to cross over to the road, and uh, it went straight into the trees. And the trees are only like on one hundred feet thick right there, and then you pop out into another field on the other side, and and it didn't pop out the other side, thank god.

5:50 And then not far about another half mile up the road as the turn off to the town I was going to, so that that was my first encounter, and that one, that one kind of terrified me, but it kind of I don't know, I I kind of forgot about it over time, kind of in a way. I was interested in it because my mom talked about bigfoot and as a kid, and I saw that thing and uh didn't know exactly what it was, but saw on a funny bigfoot show that they run on all fours and I was like that, and they showed a picture like a you know, cartoon in one or whatever they you know, however they make those, and it looked pretty much just like what I saw, and I was like that that that's it. That's that's what I saw. And uh, at that point I started to be kind of driven to to want to learn more about about what what I saw, what there was and and you know, how to investigate these things, how to how to how to get to it. I grew up in a family of people that hunt and fish. My uncle's a guide, my brothers are guides. They bow hunt bear. I grew up trapping and and you know, hunting and stuff. So I'm really pretty adept in the woods. And so when I saw that thing, I knew it wasn't a bear. I knew it wasn't a horse. I you know, I'm trying to put it in a box, and I just couldn't do it. But funny Bigfoot put it in a box for me, so then it is okay, let's look at this box. In twenty fifteen, I bought a motorcycle. Hadn't

7:20 ridden in years. I bought a street bike. A bought a Harley. And my girlfriend's like, yeah, yeah, that's great, nice, this will be really fun. You got a bike that's good for you. And I thought she would tell me, oh, I don't want you on a dangerous bike. So next day she goes bought a horse. Yeah, so I didn't even know she was shopping for a horse. I guess she didn't know I was shopping for a bike. But she bought an endurance horse. She grew up around horses, had had participated in dressage and a bunch of other things. Trained horses. She's owned like ten or fifteen of them, and anyway, so she bought a durance horse who wanted to try out this new hobby and endurance racing. You train your horse to run twenty five fifty seventy five one hundred mile races. The races that you compete in are up in the mountains. They're not like in a city or on a track. There is no track. It's trails.

8:16 It's mountain trails a lot of time, deer trails, elk trails. Whatever. The host who's running the event maps out. They put little ribbons on the right side of the trail and you run along to the colored ribbon for the trail you're supposed to be on, and you go out and come back and they have vets. It's a pretty big deal. There's you know, thousands of people nationwide compete. In twenty nineteen, my girlfriend got first place in her class out of four hundred and some riders, so she did really well. And her horse was just a beast. I used to call him beast Mode because that guy he was fearless.

8:56 He'd see bears, cougars, herds of elk right in the path and just go right at him and and those things just scatter. Uh. He was he was just he was fearless. And another thing about the horses before I move on, one thing people don't really know about horses is their hearing is just amazing better than a dog's. They can hear a tree branch break like two or three miles off. I mean they're you know, they can hear foot footsteps of another horse two to three miles off. I mean, they're just amazing hearing, just amazing. And their eyesight is is like three times better than ours. They can see in the dark pretty well, almost like a black and white TV would be to us. Is is what what they see at night. So, being on a horse up in the woods, if there's a predator, they'll look right at it. And so as you move by, it'll be staring at the predator until it's not there anymore or it passes it. Uh. So you know one of the ultimate predator finding machines, you know that that we're just running up trails trying to get them fit to begin with. So anyways, I say all that because I've had since we've gotten the horse, I've had gosh, eight more sightings, and we think it's the horse that brings it in. And uh a lot of people agree.

10:20 You know, Patterson Gilman were on horses, gosh, what's his name that that got this year sounds they're on horses. Ron Morehead yeah, and sorry, Ron didn't anyways. Uh, but but all these people are on horses. They're having all this activity, and I'm kind of getting why. There's something about, uh, you know, the pounding that the horse makes going up the trail or something there. They just they don't seem to be afraid of it. And I don't know if they just equate, you know, people on horseback to be harmless.

11:00 I'm not sure. I'm not sure how that equates to them. But they're extremely curious about the horses. They come right into camp to see them. In twenty fifteen we got the horse. In twenty sixteen or seventeen, we went to a horse camp. It's called Rear's Horse Camp. It's just outside of Timber, Oregon. It's really close. What it was was when the Ptomac burn happened, right after the Feds send in replant cruise and so they set up this big campground. I mean there's one hundred plus people living there that would go out each day and plant trees to reforest the Pteoleomac forest. And this is the main campground they spearheaded out and it's like five miles out of Timber. It's my guess, but it is on a dead end rud. There might be some logging roads that come off of it, but they kind of dead end out there. There's nothing that really loops around. So anyways, off of this creek next to the tell them up to Banks Railway. Uh there's uh there's a campgroun called Rears Horse Camp and so uh we we go out to all different horse camps and all different uh horse trails to to train the horse. We try to get it someplace new all the time so that it doesn't get fixed in a in a certain uh you know, state of mind. It needs to be able to jump stumps just you know, boogie right along in about twelve miles an hour everywhere it goes. So anyways, uh, we

12:30 brought the horse up to train there, and we got there on a Friday, and uh by then I was pretty into you know, finding Bigfoot. You know, Cliff and and everybody with you know, they're all heroes. To me. I was like, Wow, these guys are so cool, you know, with what they're doing. You know, wouldn't that be great to you know, to to see another one and wow, this would be Yeah, you think that until it till it happens. But anyway, and maybe you do after I don't know, but uh so, anyways, we go into this campground and it's it's down down in some some ridges and and if you follow the ridge and the campgun's on further down. There's a creek in this bottom and the railroad tracks are right above it. The road's up here and heads out to Timber. Above the road. Is this really tall ridge. I mean it's it's a couple thousand feet tall, heavily old forest. I mean trees are you know, four or five feet around, they're they're they're big, a ton of old growth, ton of ferns. I mean, it's just green, lush, beautiful, beautiful place. The trail there, it's about a I want to say, it's about a six mile loop. And the horse just loves it. There's a couple of creek crossings and it's just really cool.

13:45 So we went there to go train the horse. We get there on Friday and we get the horse. They have big wooden corrals to keep horses in. We put the horse in the corral and we start making dinner. Well into the camp. Next to us, another rider comes in another pickup truck, with a camper and a horse trailer rolls in and after a while we walk over and because my girl's riding by herself on her horse and she would like to ride with someone else, so we go introduce ourselves. We invite them over for dinner or a glass of wine after dinner or whatever. So so they take us up on our invitation, and they brought some some like cake or something over, carrot cake, I think. So anyways, we're sitting at the table and it's twilight, it's starting to get a little bit dark, and I'm I'm just all into, you know, finding out as much information as I can from anybody I can.

14:40 And I ask them, hey, have you ever seen anything strange while you're riding? And and they're gone, no, never, no, nope, nope. I go, oh, so you ever watch Funny Bigfoot? You haven't heard any noises anything like off of that show or anything? Nope, nope, never. I go with it. You wouldn't mind if I did a few tree knocks, would you? And they're gone, yeah, shoot, they're laughing, and go ahead. That sounds fun. Great. So I have a baseball bat Louisville Slugger with me, and I walk over to a maple because you want to you want to hit a hard surface a soft surface. It's just not going to carry. So I walk over this maple and I just crack it. I broke my bat right in half and just a big loud pop. And they're just laughing at me, you know, just dying in. About five seconds later, pop from way up on that ridge above the road, and that ridge is probably at least fifteen hundred feet above us, probably closer to two thousand feet, but near the top. And we're like, is there a road up there? Yeah, what's going on here? So so we're kind of laughing about a little bit, and I look around and I find somebody had been cutting firewood and they delimb this tree and I found a nice, big thick branch about four feet long that I could swing and hit it again.

15:57 So I said, well, I'm going to do a triple knox. So I do it triple knock and then a triple knock off the hill answers back, anyways, I'll speed through this. That kept happening. We did it like five times and uh, and then all of a sudden a tree got pushed over and it's like halfway down. It was coming down the hill towards us. A tree got pushed over about halfway down the hill, and I mean it was. It sounded an old growth when it hit. I mean it was. It was. It was a bang when it hit, and you could hear it popping and stuff splitting when it when it started to get shoved over, and I mean it was we all just went to silence. We're like, okay, well and they're going, you know what, it's getting late. We got to go feed our horse and we're gonna go to bed and we'll ride with you in the morning. Great, looking forward to it. That's gonna be fun. And my girl goes, well, I'm gonna go feed our horse and and uh, you know, she I asked, you need any help?

16:48 You want me to go with you? She's like, now, you know, I'm all good. So so she goes back. She's fearless, dude. I have the most fearless girlfriend in the world. Anyway, she walks back there and is getting getting water and stuff for the horse. I told wal Mac dessert and I went in the camper and I took the carrot cake. We had ice cream and it made up a couple of plates, and about ten minutes later she comes in and she goes, they're they're whooping. It's it's coming down, it's coming close. It's it sounds like it's up on the road now. So it's one hundred feet away, not you know, not a fifteen hundred feet up this hill anymore. It had come down the hill. And she goes, I'm I'm I'm just going to stay inside, you know, and uh, well, and you know, we'll just call it a night. And I was like, great, let's eat and you know, and I have the windows open because it's you know, summer, and I'm listening and I can hear owls hooting, you know, the the the burrows owves, you know, off in a distance, but they don't sound right.

17:50 They're number one, they're too loud. And then they're dragging out the goo like they're just dragging it out normally go go go, you know, way faster, so not that fast, but you know what I mean. So anyways, I'm this is strange. This is strange, strange times. But you know, hey, you know, maybe i'll get it, get some audio with my phone. You know, I didn't have any recording devices or anything. At the time. So so anyways, we go to sleep. I wake up about two in the morning and uh, to the burrows als And now there's two of them, and they're out in front of our truck. It sounds like a couple hundred feet away coming through the campground, and you can you can tell ones on one side of the campground, ones on the other, and they're they're coming towards our truck. And they passed down both sides of our truck, you know, making the that drawn out, you know, And I didn't hear any footsteps or anything. But I was normally fly up higher than our truck. They're they're not like ear level. So anyways, they went by back to where a horse was and I was like, uh, crap, I better, you know, So I'm peeking the window open. I'm shining a flashlight on the horse, just to make sure that, you know, he's going to be okay. But beatmode he's like, yeah, whatever, you know, he's stomping around a little bit, but he's not.

19:13 He's not just that distressed. When they get distressed, you know, they're distressed, they start kicking and jumping, and I mean they're they don't they won't have it, you know, they're just fed up and they're done with it. So that actually happened to my neighbor's horse a couple hours later. So so in the morning, I wake up and I look over and it's like first light, and I make I start a coffee. I pop up in our door and I see the neighbors are almost completely packed up and they're leaving, and I'm like, what, what, what's going on? You were supposed to ride, you know, with my my, my girlfriend, and they're going, we're getting about of here. If you called him in last night, and I was like, what they're going, Yeah, you know, bigfoot finder. You brought one in. And we woke up at three o'clock in the morning and the thing was reaching over the top of the crowd, trying to touch our horse. They said it was about eight feet tall, probably about four foot wide in the shoulders, solid black. They said that he stepped out with his forty five because he thought it was a mountain lion, because his horse was just not having it, kicking, screaming and dancing around, and and so he walked out with his forty five in a flashlight, and the thing was reaching over the top trying to touch the horse, and then it looked up at him, turned and just walked off right through the trees. And it kept the horse between it and him when it left, like it almost like it knew what a gun was or knew you better. You know, I don't know. I

20:45 just knew linus to keep keep the horse between line of sight. So so anyways, it stomped off. He said, it stomped off, and you could he could hear it go across the road and stomp up the hill, and he said he they started packing. They're like grew this place, you know. Yeah, come to find out they do exist. So so anyways, I'm and he's he's really mad at me because I brought that thing in, you know. He's like yeah. So anyways, Uh, they they left and and uh we stayed and went and rode that day. We were going home that night. Anyways, we just stayed the one night. We we have a we own a farm, so we have to take care of stuff. So anyways, so fast forward, uh to uh one year later, we were at Northrop Creek, Uh horse camp. Beautiful. Both Rears and Northrop are like brand new. They're just beautiful, really nice well made campgrounds we're at We're at Northrop and about one o'clock in the morning, I wake up to a scream and it sounds like sounds like a woman getting stabbed today. And it didn't really change octaves, it was just but it lasted for about forty five seconds.

22:07 And I know it lasted for forty five seconds because it woke me up. I had time to pull on my sweats, grab my forty five and jump out the back door. And with a flashlight, I thought that a cougar was probably attacking our horses, and I was just gonna I was going to decaffeinate it. So I pop out, I got the flashlight the forty five, and there's there's nothing there. But the scream came from right right just it sounded like about fifty feet away from the horses, across this real narrow campground road that we parked on.

22:48 And it's the force is so thick there. I mean, if you throw a rock, it'd go like ten feet in and hit a tree because there's so many and it's all old growth. It's all you know, four or five foot round trunks. I mean they're you know, to two hundred and fifty foot tall trees. I mean they're freaking huge, and uh, I just couldn't see anything. Well, the horses were staring right over at that area, ears up, staring right at it, and whatever a horse's ears or or on, look at that spot because you'll, you will, you'll you'll see what they're seeing. They're like parabolic dishes. They just hone in on anything. So they're staring at those trees for I just sat out there with them and calmed them down. They were they were moving around quite a bit, but they they weren't screaming or anything.

23:33 You know, they weren't kicking and screaming. They were they were upset though, you could tell. So they stared over towards those trees for about ten minutes, and uh to the point where I just walked over the flashlight in the trees. I was just gonna, I was gonna put an end to this, and uh, nothing there nothing. After a while. The horses just went back to eating, ignored, just ignored that spot. So I knew, whatever event that was, it's over. And you know, it's three o'clock in the morning. I'm dead tired, So I just went back to bed. Next day walked over to where the trees were. I mean, this spot walked around a little bit and no tracks, no cligne, no nothing, and whatever it was was gone.

24:15 But the scream was so loud I could I could almost feel it in my chest through the camper. It was it. I mean, I don't know, it sounded like a freaking air raid siren loud. I mean, it was just loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, loud. And I've heard cougar scream and you know they go for like five seconds, so I've never really heard one go past that. This one was like big winded, you know, thirty five forty five seconds scream. It was still, it was still screaming until the point my door came completely open and the light shined towards those trees. So anyway, so that happened.

24:55 So at that point, I'm I'm still you're thinking, you know, it'd be kind of cool to see one of these things again. You know, I saw the one run across a field. You know, it didn't attack me. I'm probably you know, nothing so far has really come at us, so we'll probably be just fine. I just I just really had to drive to see one, so that all changed in twenty nineteen. So I've had multiple sightings in the coast Range and mainly around Mount Hood. We found a spot I call it Scucum Ridge, but there's multiple trails all the way around Mount Hood and they're on these ridges, just you know, first ridges around the mountain and we go to a place it's by Lolo Paths.

25:44 There's like multiple campgrounds in there, and and we we had trained in there before. We like mountains because it really puts muscle on a horse. It really makes them strong. And in race season, the more muscle you can get on them, the better, you know, the more wind they can move through efficiently, the better. And that's just it's almost like cheating running them up hills. It's you know, compared to people that just train on flats. So we we took them up there the year before and just didn't wasn't really paying attention to anything, didn't didn't really have any activity, wasn't wasn't trying to you know, I don't try to go have activity. It just kind of happens because we're out in the forest every other weekend all summer long, all over the Northwest. So you know, I've been up by Mount Rainier, been you know, all over coast range, all over you know, to Prineville Bend, you know, just everywhere, just all over the place. And we get invited to go to races all the time.

26:45 We get invited to go stay at friend's house that have ranches like we do, and and we do, you know, so we train all over the place. So anyways, we go up to uh we go up to Lolo Pass and we're we're training on these these ridges. We have corrals are portable, so we can set up our corrals anywhere. So we're set up and it's it's I think it's like on a Friday week. I got off work early, we went up and still light out. We got set up fairly early, and so there's about five hours of daylight left. And this one, this is going to take a bit to describe the siding because we saw multiple bigfoot So I hope your listeners, you know, buckle up.

27:29 So basically, I carry a forty five everywhere I go in my camper in case somebody tries to break in and hurt my girlfriend, or hurt the horses, or take our stuff or whatever, and to protect us from Mountain lions and that sort of thing. I don't carry it though, when I'm riding my my my e bike that I built, and I can show you pictures of the bike I got. I built a fat tire bike, put a one horse motor on it and a heavy capacity any battery. So I trained with the horses. I ride with them at twelve miles an hour, and I can go uphill, downhill, I do river crossings, all kinds of stuff with it.

28:09 So I ride with the horse. I'm like, it's best friend. We're we're we're hurt. And when when our our Mary gets scared, she wants me out front. When our when Marcus, our big male runs up a trill, he he doesn't get scared. He's he's just a beast. I've seen Elk run from him. I've seen bears run from him, mountain lions. He nothing scares this guy. But you know he's he's eleven twelve hundred pounds of solid muscle and will river dance on anything that that makes him mad. You know, elk or what's seven hundred pounds. I mean, so, so he's bigger than than most anything will come up against.

28:51 So I think I think that takes the fear out of him. I don't know, he's kind of crazy. Anyways, he's amazing. But anyways, uh we so we roll in. It's uh, it's like i'd say, five hours before dark or so. My girlfriend says, well, hey, let's do a quick ride. We're going to go up the trail and just do do this. It's like a seven miles up this hill, seven miles back, you know it. You know, five miles an hour up and you know twelve back. We'll be back in no time. And she's been up this trail before, has terrible sense of direction, Like I don't know anybody that has worse sense of direction than she does, which is which is bad when you and durance race. But they again have ribbons on the trail, so if she's safe. But so anyways, she says, let's just do a quick ride up the trail. So I carry a machete on my bike in case there's like blackberried or something crossing the path on one side has a saw on the other side, it's a machety. It's you know, three feet long, and I usually carry a three eighty with hollow points for cougars. Lady got killed up there, like two years prior, she got mauled to death by a cougar. And people, I'm telling you, you're fool if you don't at least carry some kind of spray with you, because those things pounce, especially women when you're alone. A bad idea, and I've heard of them pouncing on women riding horses for some reason. They leave

30:23 men alone for the most part. But I'm not chancing it. I just carry. It's just safer. You know, my driveway, I have bears that live just down below our house, so I see wildlife a lot, and there's cougars just mauled five goats like a mile from my house, our neighbor's house. Unfortunately they lost five. We have guardian our livestock guardian dogs, so the cougars leave us alone. But anyways, so she said, yeah, let's do this quick spin up the trail. And I'm sorry, I'm dragging this thing out, but so we take off. It's about it's about i'd say four o'clock and it's in July around my birthday. I I'm a mid July birthday, and so it stays light till you know, visible light, probably till about nine thirty or so i'd guess. So anyways, we take off about four and I'm thinking, you know, we're gonna be at the top of this ridge. He says it's seven miles.

31:17 You know, at five miles an hour, we should be up there like an hour half, right, It took three hours to get up there. The trail is like this, and it just has switched back after switchback. I mean, I lost track of how many switchbacks. There are one hundred more, I don't know. And then you're crossing over different ridges. It's not one ridge that you go up, it's multiple ridges and you switch them back, and finally you pop over this ridge and there's a lake up there, and it's this just sapphire blue little lake. It's maybe all of six seven hundred feet across, and we can see it from the ledge that we're on. And on the other side is Mount Hood right there, and it's just right there and just gorgeous. Sandy rivers down down in the valley way down below us about I think it's about a five thousand foot climb maybe six, from the floor up to where we're at. The horse is just not a problem. He's such a beast. Me On the other hand, I've been I've been on a bike dodging boulders and trying, you know, getting bounced around, and you know, my shocks are are okay, but they're not awesome.

32:28 And you know, four inch tires do pretty good, but it's it's not a cushy ride. So I'm kind of beat up. But we get up there and get the view of Mount Hood and take pictures, and you know, we have our phone, so we're taking pictures and stuff. And so anyways, there's a crossing there and one heads to Rhododendron and the other one loops back, supposedly down to where our campground is. That my girlfriend thinks that that's the trip she took before, and she did. So if we go that way, it's faster than if we go back the way we came. Because now now we're about you know, three hours have passed and so now it's like seven or eight, I don't know, something like that, probably closer to eight. Anyways, I'm telling her, well, you know, I want to get off this mountain before dark because I've never been here before. I'd like to get out of here and back at camping, you know, eating those steaks we brought. So so anyways, she goes, well, let's let's go up. We got to go about another thousand feet up this ridge, up up this trail, and then it drops off and goes down the backside, and then it's just switchbacks all the way back down, kind of like what we came up, but it's a lot more of them, and it's steeper and the narrow and the trail is way more narrow. Up the front side, the trail started out about eight or ten feet wide and it narrowed down to about four feet. On the back side, it's about a foot wide, and if you step off, you're you're going to go. Probably if the horse fell, it'd probably fall about four or five hundred feet before it stopped rolling, and it hit a lot of trees

34:00 to stop to say, you know, people, you could grab onto stuff, but you're going to go at least one hundred feet. So anyways, so we head up. We head up to the top of this peak, and this part's kind of critical to the rest of the story, but we're going up in it and she has this trail and it looks like a washed out creek bed and it's boulders that are like, I don't know, three and four foot tall, so I can't ride my bike across. I got to lift my bike up. So it's wearing me out. Man. I go on a thousand feet over boulders, sucked and and as I'm dragging it, I keep hitting my brakes and my pedals and stuff against the rocks. So I smashed my brakes so they by the time I hit the top of this peak, I didn't I had no brakes and I got to go downhill seven miles with no brakes in bigfoot country. So so anyways, uh, we get up to the top of the hill and uh and all the way up that last thousand feet, I was not a gentleman at all. In my speech, I've swore I I'm surprised that dark clouds didn't come in and lightning hit me because I was a cussin oh man, because I kept falling over trying to lift the bike, and I get all cut up in my legs.

35:10 I was wearing shorts and they're all cut up, and I'm bleeding out and smashed and bruised and not happy. I was not a happy camper, and I was letting the world know. But she was riding far enough ahead of me, I didn't think she hurt me, so I thought, well, I can you know. I heard somewhere that yelling helps relieve pain, so I was yelling. So I get to the top of the peak and she's like, yeah, I heard you come and did you I have no idea why, and oh before we got to the top of the peak, one last thing. It narrowed down so narrow is like six inches wide in one spot, and my freaking bike hit a rock and the whole bike went off the cliff, and I had to choose whether to push the bike away.

35:55 And I just built this thing, and I spent like two grand on it to just push the bike away and watch it go off a cliff or hang on to it and try and grab some brush. So I tried to grab some brush next to me, and the bike went off anyways, and so it kind of drugged me down with it, and I went off the trail started sliding down the hillside, but I grabbed some brush on the way down, and I went down about ten feet before I finally was able to stop holding onto roots of something. I got the bike in one hand and that and the other and by god, I wasn't going to lose that bike, and I drug it, you know, you grab foothold with my feet and push and drug and I got it back up on the trail and I did not stop cursing for a while. But my girlfriend has a picture of me with the bike upside down on the trail and the horse is looking at me like it looks they're both laughing at me, and she's got her camera out. I got a picture of that and it's on one of my videos on a Bigfoot research project. So so anyways, that finished off my brakes right there. They're toast at that point. So I get to the top of the peak and we start going down. We get to the peak and amazing view and there's no trees up there. It's alpine, so like the last probably two hundred feet of cliff that went up, it is just all alpine. So we drop over to the front and you can see the sandy down below and you can see probably the tree area where a campground is. We're like, sweet, there's downhill, there's camp We're gonna be everything's great. So we drop off the peak

37:28 and go down about on one or two hundred feet and it's kind of windy at that point. Is a sunny day, slightly cloudy, but a little bit windy up there. So we're like, well, let's drop down a couple hundred feet and eat once real quick. So we'd drop off the hill, and we brought sandwiches, so we're like eating a candy bar or a sandwich or something. And the horse all of a sudden cocks its head and is looking downhill behind us, And it's not unusual for a horse to look around, but it was fixated, and I mean, like, I've never seen it lock on to something and be that fixated prior to that, and it wouldn't stop staring. It was like something was coming up behind us, up this ridge, but more in the trees. And I told her it's got to be a bear or a cougar.

38:15 Something's in there. It's probably a bear because it's making enough noise that you know, because cougars are soft footed. But it's probably a bear in the horses here, and it rolled rocks as it's coming up, and it's got to be right in those trees, just you know, two three hundred feet below us, up behind us, and I got a picture of the horse staring at it, and I took pictures of with my phone camera. I took pictures of what it was staring at just in case I could blow it up and see a bear in there later. You know, I knew something was up because it stared at while we were eating our sandwiches for about ten minutes and it didn't take its eyes off it. So that was the beginning of it and beginning of the encounter. So so she says, well, due to your foul language, I'm gonna go ahead and roll ahead of you, and I'll stay about one to two thousand feet in front of you, so you know you don't run my horse over with your no break situation. And I told her, well, I'm gonna I'm going to try and take the bike and i'll because it's it's so steep uphill off the trail and such a drop off it. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the front tire and scrub it into the hill. So I'm taking speed off by rubbing my tire against the bank, and I mean brush and rocks it, shit or flight all over me. But at least it slows the bike down because otherwise i'd be doing, you know, two hundred miles an hour and like a couple hundred feet. So so she takes off and gets out ahead of me. I start to come down the hill, and I didn't get two minutes down

39:46 the hill, you know, maybe maybe a thousand feet, and all of a sudden, I hear a family talking, and it was crystal clear. It was a mother a father, and it sounded like two kids, and the kids sounded excited, but I couldn't understand the language. It sounded like the parents like they're going to freaking Disneyland. I mean, the kids were and another one, you know, just I could hear two different pitches of voices talking, so I knew there were two young ones and then the parents. You know, the father had a really deep voice, you know, and the mother was you know, but they were all talking, and they were behind me on the hillside where the horse was looking. So they might have still been coming up out of that valley, I mean, you know, several thousand feet up the hill. Well at the time, the horse was listening to them. But they came around the ridge below me, and I'm going, I'm going, I'm going down the ridge camps way down below, seven miles down below.

40:56 I'm going off this ridge and about to hit all these switches, and my girlfriend's out in front of me, and they're circling on the hillside below me through this old growth and they're close, man, I mean they're well I could. I could hear the voices clearly, and they weren't screaming. You know. It wasn't nothing like run moreheads thing, not not even not not even close. I would say morehead to me after hearing these moreheads they were screaming up a valley at them like they're pissed off. These weren't pissed. They were happy. They were chilling. I mean it sounded like a family, like I said, talking about we're going to Disneyland, you know, and I guess you know, Disneyland is me and my girlfriend. So anyways, so I hear them moving along the hillside and so I speed up because they're catching me, and they're catching me, no freaking problem. And I'm thinking, well, there must be a trail, you know, one hundred feet below me. But the trees are so freaking thick, I you know, old growth, I can't see anything. So I speed up to where I see this rock slide. So the rock slide is like a thousand feet it's probably three hundred feet wide, and I'm thinking, at a trail that's one hundred feet down, I'm going to see it at the rock slide. I mean, there's no way I can't see it and get I get there, and they had already crossed it. But I looked down and there ain't no freaking trail. There's nothing there.

42:25 And that's that's when I knew, Okay, this is this is not people. Plus at the speed they were moving, I couldn't move my bike that fast without brakes, and I was scrubbing off speed. I was probably doing ten miles an hour. I was pretty much haul an ass, like wrecking pretty much every time I scrab up speed off. And they still went right around me like I was chained to a tree. And they kept going down the hill towards my girlfriend, who's who's down, you know, down slightly to my right. They were on my left and they were on an intersect course. I could hear them come out around the hill. They were still talking. They went around me, and uh, and that's that's when the fear kind of hit me, because I realized that that's not people talking, that's not people. No, no, nobody can move that fast. Not possible, and uh, I started getting a little bit scared, and I just, uh, you know, I just told myself, well, you know, you got a a sheddy, you got a bike, you could throw at him.

43:25 You know, it is what it is. But I better catch my girl because I don't want I don't want her in danger. So I tried to get down that hill as fast as I could, and like I said, there's about one hundred switch back, so I get at that point, I was probably ten percent down the seven miles. So the path is really narrow. I mean in some spots it's it's like it's like eight inches wide, and then it's just drop and the hillside up. My elbows hitting the hill on the upside, and it's old growth, really deep dense forest, and the tree just trails like get a forty five. I mean, it's as steep as hell, and it's loose gravel, so my tires are kind of slide around a little bit, and I'm just thinking, oh crap, better not go off this cliff. I'm screwed. So I get is it about? I was about ten percent down the hill at the point where the rock slide was.

44:21 So I go a few more minutes down the trail and then I start hitting these switchbacks, and they put switchbacks in because it's too steep just to go straight down the hill. So you got switched back after switchback. And it's not an old cat road. It's it's definitely like an elk trail that got improved for horses. And in some spots it's it's you know, three feet wide, but for the most it was about a foot wide. And they'll have trees that fell over the path. They cut out about about a foot wide of it or two feet wide of it so the horse could pass through, you know, so it doesn't have to step over it. And then sometimes they leave them for a while and have the horse step over them. Those ones have to lift the bike over. But anyways, I'm going down the hill and about five minutes after I left the slide, I've gone through maybe six switchbacks, and all of a sudden, I hear a horse behind me, you know, stomping, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, and I'm thinking, crap, there's a rider on this narrow trail, and I have to I have to move out of its way because horses have the ride away. So I dragged my bike up on the bank and the stomping stops and it's just around the turn that I just came around, and I'm like, okay, you screw with me, Okay, I'm going to go. So I put my bike back on the trail, I start going down again, go around one or two corners and stomp, stomp, stomp stomp, And

45:51 I'm thinking it's it's a horse. I mean it's it's like a thousand pounds if it's an ounce. And I'm around horses all the time, I know what they sound like. Sounded like a horse coming up and drag my bike up. You know. I I've been kicked at and bid at and stuff for not having my bike out of the way before, so it ain't happening again. So so I do that a couple of times. It happens a couple of times up up on the top like fifty percent of the hill. So I get I get to about the halfway point and the stomping stops, and I see my girlfriend and I ask, have you been hearing anything in the trees at all? Anything? And she says, I've heard some some whoops, both up above me and down below me. And she says, they're close. I mean they're they're within one hundred feet of me behind logs or behind trees or something, but they're really close. And I said, well, let's stay closer together. I'd like to keep you an eye sight. And she goes, no, you keep racking and I can hear you. She goes, I'm gonna stay a little further out. She's fearless, so she's she's not afraid of these things. But I said, fine, you know, I mean, what choice do I have. She's on a horse that works, and my bike has no break, so it is what it is. So so she takes off. We're about worried about the fifty percent down the hill mark or seventy five percent down the hill mark. She takes off and then I get not one hundred feet from where we

47:25 just talked, and I up just right above me out here whoop, and just below me out here whoop. And then get further down and then I hear whoop and then whoop like different tones. So it's either different you know, different force people, or or it's you know, the same one doing different tones. I didn't see anything though, I just heard them and they were close, and I'm I'm just thinking, oh crap, it's almost dark. I mean, it's it's I mean, we're we're half hour away from Twilight, an hour away from Pitch Black, and I don't know where I'm at because I hadn't been on this trail before. We're we're still at that point, probably three miles away from camp and and the bottom is about two miles down and and then you got across multiple rivers, which I didn't know which sucks out of e bike. So anyways, uh we we As we go down, I'm I'm I'm hearing brush cracking and stuff off to both sides of me as I come down the ridge and I finally get down to the bottom of that last that last bit, and honestly, I don't I don't remember looking around for you know, sign or anything. I was more like, get out of here, so, you know, get back to the camper, you know, make sure that she's safe and the horse is safe. So so anyways, we get to the bottom.

48:54 There's a river there. I got to cross it. It's all on video. I have several years of me crossing those the there's three. Two of them are pretty tiny, but one's pretty good size. So I had to do the crossing. I was so beat up I could I could barely walk. Man, I'm fairly athletic, bucket and do all kinds of stuff on the farm, but that just tore me up. I crashed probably thirty times. So anyways, I can't. I'm worried about getting through the water because it's about three and a half feet deep and it's about fifty feet wide, and it's moving pretty fast. And I told my girlfriend, I'm gonna drop the bike and if I do, it's probably gonna burn the whole thing up, you know. Can you give me a hand here? So she's like, yeah, yeah, no problem. So she ties the horse off on the other side of the river, walks back through, and helps me walk my bike across. So she gets back on the horse and we start to head up this trail and she still doesn't know where she's at. You know, I don't know how far camp is.

49:50 I can't remember the trail and she's like, what you know, am I supposed to remember this? Yes, you took us out here. So anyways, uh, we go through this kind of swampy area with skunk cabbage and stuff. And then just on the other side of it's this meadow. And it was a fresh burnout meadow that I I have tons of video of this area, but it's a burnout area. The burn must have been fairly recently. There was no undergrowth in there to speak of. I mean it had to been recent. There's just a little bit of ferns and stuff is only like two feet tall at the time. Now it's like, you know, eight feet tall. So so anyways, and a lot of trees are filled in. But so anyways, we get we get to this this opening in the meadow.

50:36 It's about, I want to say, a quarter mile from the rivers and and she goes, oh, crap, I left my riding crop at the river. I gotta go back and get it. And I said, well, leave it, I'll buy you a new one. And she goes, no, this crop was given to me by a friend that entrusted me with it, and I'm not going to take the tone lashing. And I go, well, you know, you heard the wop and uh so it's you you know what's going on? You know, She's like, you know, I'm gonna go get that crop. So I was like, fine, she goes well, and she should have rode the horse, but she had me hold on to the horse, and she walked it because she thought it was closer than what it was. So she takes off walking and the horses, you know, watching her walk off, and I'm holding my bike up, so I put it on the kickstand, and I'm holding the horse, and I see some grass off to one side of the trail, and there's this kind of open meadow there from where the trees burned, burned out, and and I'm trying to get the horse to eat this grass right there, because you know, they it's good for him to have something on their stomach when they run.

51:42 He just had a bunch of water at the river, so some food would be good. So he starts eating, and then and he just looks up and he's just fixated across this field, and his ears are like pointed right at it, and you know, point it right at it. And so I'm looking down the you know what's he looking at? You know, And all I see is these these burned out snags, you know, tred and fifty feet away, I don't see nothing. So I'm tried to pull his head down to eat, and he he had looked up, saw that, and then he turned and was looking for his rider, you know, my girlfriend. He's looking for her and he wants her, I mean, he wants that of there.

52:24 And he spins around real fast, almost came out of my hands, and is staring back at that field. And I'm thinking, well, you know, there must be a deer or something, you know. I don't know, So I tried to pull his head down to eat, and he won't eat. And this horse loves food. He lives for food. If he's not running drinking, he's eating. So anyways, he won't eat, so I know something's up, and he keeps staring it across this field. So I finally see what he's looking at. And at first I thought it was a burdmark on a tree because it was way too big to be anything else. Way too big is you know, nine ten foot but what it looked like as a man in a hoodie with I'd say probably probably nine foot tall at least and about half as wide as he was tall at the shoulders, not like a solid block down kind of like veed in a little bit to his at his waist, but his legs were the size of telephone poles, and his arms were near that big. And I'm thinking, is that a person in a hoodie? And all wearing all black and a hoodie. And at this time, the sun was coming down right behind the trees he's

53:54 standing in front of, so I'm looking into a sunset. The sun had already gone over the ridge, but it was still it was still fairly bright, so I could I could, I could clearly clearly see the black figure, but I couldn't see any features on it. But and I'm just thinking, well that that what is that? Is that a human? Is that? Is that a burnmark? And then all of a sudden it started rocking. I'm all busted up. My bike has no brakes, it won't run, the battery is dead on it, and by then so I have to push it anywhere it goes or leave it.

54:35 And I'm holding on to a horse and my girlfriend is gone the opposite direction that we need to go to go get a riding crop. So I'm holding on to the horse and it's anxious and it's it's it's it's fighting me. It wants to go back to hurd I'm holding it back and because I don't want it to just run off down a trail. So I'm standing there and I'm watching this thing and and it's moving towards me, and it's moving really slow though. It's taking like a step and then it rocks back and forth, and then it takes a step, and then it rocks back and forth, and it the more I look at it, the more I started feeling terrified. And like I said, I got buried my driveway. I throw rocks at him.

55:25 You know, I'm not really not afraid of much, but seeing this thing, it terrified me. And I was just kind of stunned, and I felt like I couldn't move. I'm holding onto the horse, and I just like and I caught myself going, you know, breathe, move, you know, and I you know, think, you know, what do you do? Well? My woman is down that trail and I ain't leaving her, and she expects me to be right here. So I'm going to be right here because if I'm right here and it's staring at me, it's not staring at her. So I'll be the bait. I'm just going to stand here until she comes and I guess if it comes in close, I'll do what I can, you know, try and pull my machete or whatever. But I'm pretty screwed actually, so yeah, not trying to be a tough guy or anything, but I just had limited options. So I'm there. I am standing there petrified. I could see the horse is pretty upset. And the closer this thing gets, the more upset the horse is getting. It's it's it's starting to dance around a little bit, and it's getting harder to hold because it's pulling me around with it, which kind of shook me out of my out of my you know, being petrified with terror, you know that I felt at the time. Now, remember I'd been taking pictures all day.

56:45 I had my cell phone. It was actually in she had put it in one of her saddle bags. She has like these bags that go across the neck of the horse. But I don't know which pockets in and I'm not going to take my eyes off of this thing to find the phone. And honestly, I was even thinking photographs, yeah, just like I wasn't thinking, you know, about shampooing it up or something I wanted to I wanted or comb in its hair, I'm just like, what, you know, what is this thing? And I know what it is, but my brain's telling me this, this can't be. It's this just And I'd already seen two of them by then. So I saw one looking over a log at at at Rears horse Camp, Horse Camp, but it was uphill. All I saw was the shoulders and head staring at me for about five minutes, and then it moved away. But when they're moving towards you, it's different.

57:42 And this thing kept rocking, and about every third rock it would take a step. It's its hands came down almost to its knees, had long arms. They were they were massive, massive, bigger than my legs. Its legs were like I said, telephone poles. You know it's it's it's it's chest shoulder to shoulder. I don't know, four four and a half feet across easy, no neck cone head. Can't see the facial features because the sun's behind it, not in front of it, and it's getting dark and it's walking towards me, and I see it. It's getting ground.

58:28 So it moved from about and I'm guessing here in distance, but about two hundred and fifty feet to about two hundred feet maybe maybe under that. And then here comes my girlfriend up the trail. So she comes up the trail and she's got a riding crop and she's all happy as a clam. She got her ready crop crop. And I'm kind of I'm looking over at her, and I go, honey, look out in that field. Do you see anything out there? Because at this point i'm you know, I'm not am I seeing something? You know what's going on? So she looks out there, she goes, there's a bigfoot standing out there, rocking back and forth. Yes, there is.

59:11 Let's go. She goes, well, don't you want to stand here and watch it for a bit. Nope, I'm good. I am good. I've been watching it for eight minutes. Yeah, I'm all caught up on wanting to see one. I've seen one now, so let's go. So she's so kind hearted. She said, well, I'll push the bike, you take the horse, because the bike was much harder to move. And we start going away from it, and I keep looking back and it stayed in one place. Thank god, it stayed in one place. So we get about fifty feet away and she goes, by the way when we're hearing whoops up the trail. She said, I saw two above the trail and two below the trail. They were standing behind trees and they had their arm around it, and they were looking around the tree at me from about fifty feet away. And one of them was down below a log and it was looking over the top of the log at me. But yeah, they were looking from around trees and watching me go by. And the horse stared right at him. That's that's how she knew they were there to begin with. The horse looked right at him, and you know, you look right between those ears on a horse and you see what it's looking at. And she says, yeah, just all of a sudden, they just popped right out their jet black. And you know, by now it's twilight, it's not bright out, so and by the time we got down to that meadow, I mean there were it was it was starting to get starting to get to where it's hard to see. You know,

1:00:44 I could see across this meadow and stuff because it was kind of open, but it wasn't real bright. So we're going up this trail. We know it's camps that way because we could see it from the peak up above. But we don't know how many miles we are out and and we don't know how many more water crossings if we had to cross the Sandy River, you know, or who knows. We've never been there before, well she had, but you know, no sense of direction. So we're going up the trail and there's a few cross trails, but I'm seeing horse tracks at this one and multiple tracks going in one direction. I said, that's got to be the main trail going back to back to camp. So we take that trail and it gets it's pretty much almost pitch black by the time we get to the end of this trail, which is only like another half mile three quarters of a mile from from where we had our siding, and it pops out onto the road and I recognize the road because of a sign that's right there, and it's right by our campground. I'm like, oh, thank god, because it's dark now, and I didn't hear anything, you know, on either side of the trail or anything coming in, but had seen quite enough and sure it was a day. So so we walk into camp and earlier that day I had gathered we're the only people in this camp gun there's nobody else. I'd gathered wood from all these other campsites and had it stacked about

1:02:14 five foot tall. So I carried it all over to the bonfire area and just lit it all at once, and I had the biggest fire. It was huge. And I'm like, okay, I feel a little safer now. And I got my forty five with hollow points out of my camper and I'm carrying it in my pocket, and I'm cooking dinner just as fast as I can outside on our cookstove. And we're like, huh yo, getting late, we should probably go to bed. So we have the camper, you know, with you know, thin middle walls make you feel safer, you know that, and you know the forty five. But before we finished dinner, we're sitting there just about done, and and off to the left, about two hundred feet away, you're here a whoop. And then off to the right about the same distance, whoop. And then straight out in front of us, down the hill, big tree gets pushed over. Crash.

1:03:07 I mean really big tree. You know. I don't know if they've been waiting for somebody to come in to push that one over, but it's like they saved it up for us. They were like, yeah, bed time, let's go. So we we we had taken our dogs out. They were we had them in a kennels in our truck. We took about we have this small outside kennel that they could run around in and and swooped them up out of that, threw their butts in the camper and called it a night. Nothing else happened that night. You know, they probably I mean that we know of. They probably came in and you know, got a close look at our rig and everything. But the horse wasn't distressed, didn't hear any weird noises. Nothing woke me up. And you know, I slept with the curtains pulled and uh and our top vent open, which creates kind of a ball like dishy pick up sound pretty well. And it was kind of pointed towards our horse corral, so if the horse got upset, I could jump out with the forty five or whatever, you know, cougar's bears or whatever. So anyways, that that was. That was the end of that odyssey.

1:04:15 I had something even worse happened later on, and some other sightings in that same area that we could touch on another time. But what I want to get to on this one though, is that I was so scared, uh half, I was terrified that I didn't want to go in the woods anymore. I was done. And it took about a week or two of my girlfriend coaxing me to go, you know, a little bit in the woods with the horse, and then further further, and then I was back in it. But in that two weeks that I was terrified and wouldn't go, I contacted Cliff Berrickman at his museum and it's on the way to Mount Hood there and boring, and I told him what happened, and and you know, for people to be aware up there, to watch out there in there and be careful. And I just wanted, you know, for people's safety. I was just thinking, these people need to know these things are doing this. And and he said, oh, yeah, you know, the Lolo passes full of them. He goes, he goes whereabouts where you and I told him, you know, whereabouts we were. And he went up that trail and casted about three or four cast of He thinks they're juveniles, the ones that he caught. I went there two weeks later and I didn't cast anything. I didn't know how to or what that even barely knew what it was.

1:05:28 But I took a photograph and I laid my sunglasses down across the toes and they're about nine inches wide. So as a gift for doing a solid for Cliff, I did a TV interview when he was first opening his museum. They wanted somebody that had an eyewitness siding that was recent. In mind was like two weeks before that, but so did. I did an interview. It's on YouTube for KGW six, channel six, I think. But for doing that, he gave me a laired meadow cast like like, I'm not sure, I think third generation. So it is a copy of a copy, really nice one. It's beautiful. It's seventeen inches long and it's about about six and a half or seven inches at the toes. Well, the truck that I found is about two inches wider on each side, and the big toes like I don't know, three quarters bigger.

1:06:22 And I got a photograph of it with my glasses sitting in front of it. So they put that on the news channel and I showed them, you know, here's the toes and my glasses are crossed to show the width, and they took the picture and inverted it the wrong way and said, yeah, here's a cast, and they're trying to show the length of the cast as a whole foot, and it's just the toast. So anyways, the only impression that was in the soil was I found a track down by the river we had crossed. It was not on anywhere near the trail. I found it in some brush next to the trail, paralleling it on some soft dirt that was going up this ridge where you'd normally think to even look for something, but I just want to proof. So so anyways, I got a picture of that, and so so that that, uh, one more thing came of that is I had previously talked to Joe Bee Lart.

1:07:16 I bought his book Bigfoot Highway, Oregon Bigfoot Highway, and an amazing book. That guy's probably the best writer of any big Foot book I've ever read. He's funny, he's great. I mean, if you want a funny outlook on this, and he's not making fun of this of people, it's just fun stuff he says about the situation. You know, he's just real. So anyways, I had talked back and forth with him a little bit in emails because he signed my book for me. I was like, hey, man, I had a siding. You want to you want to see it? And he's like yes, So I brought him out to where I had my siding. We walked out there and he and I have been going back to that area every year since. So so I hang out with Joe every summer. It's pretty cool. He knows a lot.

1:08:03 He also has some friends that you know, Tom Powell and some other people that I've camped with, and I invite them. I have I go up to this place every summer and we take our horse trailer in the horses. But it all started with that odyssey in twenty nineteen. We found that area. And I've seen him in other places, but they're they're in the summer, they're they're around Mount Hood pretty heavy, so so we know, you know pretty much guaranteed you're gonna have some activity. But that was twenty nineteen. Like I said, we've been going back every year ever since. I've made go pro videos. I finally got a camera that runs, so when I'm scared half to death, I don't have to remember, and I have I have video of one standing in the meadow. The next year, I got video of one pushing a tree over on a on a ledge up above us that had been spooking us all the way up the trail.

1:08:56 I have video of rocks thrown, tree structures you wouldn't believe, and I can, I can get into all that, But chronologically twenty nineteen kind of set off the first terrified to Now, I'm you know, we're gonna be out there anyways riding. I'm gonna I'm gonna look into these things really deep, and I started to take a deep dive. Do you any questions for me? Gary? It's one of the most intense encounter stories I've heard in my five years of doing this show, Like honestly, and I know this area is crazy because I've talked to people that have also had things happen in Lolo Pass, and I mean the area it's in is wild. I mean it's right next to Bull Run right.

1:09:42 Like, yeah, it's a few miles down the road exactly. Am I gonna thank you for walking us through that, But man, it sounds like this is just the beginning of the story, really, and I would love to have you back on if you'd be willing to, you know, if there's a there any other things you could share since that time, or you know, just yeah, it's it's an incredible, incredible account. When you were watching it for eight minutes, What was the sound like in that area? No sound, Yeah, that's how you know they're there. And and if you if there, all of a sudden it goes silent, you have a chance of an encounter. If it's noisy, they're unless it's brush breaking if they're not around.

1:10:30 But but everything every time I've seen one, and I've now seen I've had nine sightings now you know, with the horse around. But I've also heard them talk. On four different occasions. I've heard them talking. I've heard one, uh screaming like a deaf mute, really close to camp, walking around. And these these are all, you know, stuff I can I could talk on another show. But I've seen tree structures where they take limbs this big around and they shove it through tree trunks. I have photo. You know, no man can do that. They've shoved him in straight in up and down up this trail. And then the US Force Service goes in and cuts those trunks off. Well, they're already trunks. What do you need to cut them again? For well, they have these branches shoved in it that you can't pull out. I have signs that are all twisted up and put in wrong places, all kinds of tree structures. I have video, I have photographs.

1:11:22 I have terror bytes of video of me and the horse going up the trail's just us and going you know, way out and back. And I have a lot of fun video of just us and the horse in places where they're not at because I try to video all of our rides just for fun. But I have so much, so much data. And then I have friends that have had conversations with them while they're walking by. One had a conversation with my friend. Didn't understand what it was saying, but he tried to talk to it, and it was a female who said it was the most beautiful voice he's ever heard, most beautiful female voice. And it had walked up a trail by him and Joe be Lart and was within ten feet of him. He said it was about an eight foot tall female and he was lit by moonlight, but it was talking to him as it came up the trail, just a real quiet voice.

1:12:15 And he said it was just real pretty voice. And he said Hi, how you doing, How are you tonight? How's everything going. He tried to carry a conversation, and he would pause and it would talk, and then it would pause and he would talk, and it talked to him for about a minute or two as it walked by, and Joe and his wife were asleep in a tent just across the path, and it walked between them, and Joe was so pissed when he walked up. He missed that. You know, but I hang out with John. John's the guy that heard that. John's a really good friend. We hang out a lot and we have good times. There's trails. I won't go up anymore. It's too dangerous, only because they shoved trees down towards us and I got that on video. But yeah, a lot has go on. I would like to come back and and it feels good to get everything out in one place. I haven't talked about this stuff in a couple of years, and I've just been going up and field researching. It's what we do.

1:13:12 We just go out and ride and it's just part of what we do. So your encounters are incredible. Gary, thank you so much for coming on. I mean, I definitely would love to have more future conversations with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and again, listeners, go check out Gary's channel. I'll have it linked in the show notes and subscribe to it. There's so much to watch there that is really fascinating. Bigfoot research project. Yeah, yeah, I bought the name from one of the four Horsemen used to be up at Mount Hood has a big research project. Yeah. That symbol on the side of his truck. I bought, Yeah, Peter, Yeah, I bought the brand. So so I owned the I owned the business name.

1:13:58 So that's got to be a story in itself. But man, we will be in touch Gary. Thanks so much to be continued. What a conversation, all. Right, Well, a pleasure talking with you and look forward to hearing from of you again. Have you ever heard all the accounts of bigfoot activity around Oakridge, Oregon and you think to yourself, Man, I would love to get out in those woods and experience it for myself. Well guess what this year you can If this is interesting to you, stay tuned because it's pretty cool. Sasquatch Summer Fest is coming up July tenth through the eleventh, twenty twenty six. It's going to be even better than the previous year's. Reason number one. I'll be one of the speakers. It's gonna be wild. I'll probably I'll say this. There may be stuff you haven't heard anywhere else, because let's just say sometimes it's well, you just got to be there. We'll leave at that.

1:14:58 More about looking for Bigfoot in the Oakridge Woods. Now check this out. You may know Jason Kenzie from his documentary series Searching for Sasquatch. Well, this year you can not only go to the festival, but you can also sign up for a track deep in the wild forest outside of Oakridge with Jason Kenzie to the Bigfoot Spots to look for Bigfoot. There's only eight spots to sign up for this, and yes, this will also be filmed for the next chapter in his documentary series, which is Searching for Sasquatch. This is a once in a lifetime deal.

1:15:41 It's just it's going to be a wild, wild experience. To get a ticket, head on over to Sasquatch Summerfest dot com and listeners can use the code b sp like Bigfoot Society podcast in order to get a two day pass for the price of a one day pass. So thanks to Priscilla for giving me that code so that you guys can can get a little help with the cost there. Appreciate that, Priscilla. I hope to see you at the booth in Oakridge this year. We can talk about your encounter. Was able to talk to so many people last year and the year before. It is an incredible time. You're not going to want to miss it, and I'll see you there. Before we wrap this episode, I want to say something directly to a very specific group of listeners. If you're in the military, any branch or forces, and if you've seen something that no one can explain, or if you're a National park ranger or forestryt worker who's been told to stay quiet, or if you're a pilot who's seen something strange down on the ground, or if you're with the FBI a federal agency, or working intelligence and you stumbled upon something you're not allowed to talk about. And if you're a firefighter, paramedic or search and rescue responder who's heard screams or found tracks that didn't make sense, if you're in the logging industry

1:17:11 on a remote oil field, or a trucker with government contracts and you've had something happen that you've never told a soul. And if you're a biologist, a wildlife specialist, or a field researcher under contract who has found evidence you're not allowed to report. If you're a pastor, a missionary, or someone on a spiritual retreat and you saw something that shook your faith, or if you work in the shadows CIA, NSA or anything with clearance, and you've seen what the public hasn't, then I want to talk to you, even if it's anonymous. You can reach me at Bigfoot Society at gmail dot com. The world needs to hear what you've been forced to carry alone, and you're not alone.

1:17:57 You've got the story, We've got the mic. See you in the woods. 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 Bigfoot sighting, please I'd love to hear from you, 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 societypodcast 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.