Something Is Following Us on Skookum Ridge | Mt. Hood

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 got the privilege of having Gary Allen back on today. Of course, you remember Gary was just on very recently talking about the things he's experienced over the years around the mount Hood area of Oregon and a little bit out to the west as well. But Gary's got some more very interesting stories to share from his years researching around mount Hood. So we tried to get him back on as quick as we could and Gary, welcome back to the show.

1:03 How are you doing today, sir? Thank you doing great, appreciate you let me talk a little. Bit absolutely you know we are going to we were talking a little bit off before, and we're going to try to it sounds like start this up, just go through things chronologically, because there's so much stuff that has happened to you and other researchers that have been with you in the area, and it really sounds like, I mean, so far, it's been fascinating, and there's some I went through and watched all the videos on your channel and it's some crazy stuff that's happening in the mount Hood area.

1:43 Feel free and go right ahead, all. Right, well, thank you. So I have notes here just because there's there's a lot to cover and I want to make sure I do it correctly and try to give you all the facts that that happened. So so basically in part one that was episode ten two on your channel, it was called I Watched a big Foot for eight minutes. That happened in twenty nineteen, and up to that point, I'd sighted three of them up to that point, and I don't know if I if I mentioned the second one. The first one I saw on a running across a field by my friend's farm down down here by Gaston, Oregon. The second one was up at Northrop Creek. It's a. It's a campground, brand new, really nice. But I heard the scream up there. And then the next year we went back because we trained in there quite a bit with the horses. The next year we went back, we actually sided one while we were cooking dinner. It was looking over the top of a log that was falling way up the steep hill.

2:51 Really thick forest, but you could see it's silhouette right at twilight, looking over a stump at us. I'd gone up the next day and there's no tracks, there's nothing, but you could see where something was sitting in the brush is all knocked down on the other side of this stump. And from downhill, you know, the stump was a couple hundred feet uphill, and it looked like it was maybe, you know, two three feet tall. I'd get up there and it's like three or four feet, I mean, And so this thing had to be huge to look over the top of that, to sit down and look over the top of it. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it was squatting, but anyways, that was the second one that I saw. The third one I saw was the twenty nineteen I call it the Odyssey. It was the fourteen mile trip round trip up up over I now call it Scukum Ridge, and then back across the three rivers back to camp. So that's the one that I saw for about eight minutes standing out in a meadow, rocking back and forth, kind of slowly walking towards me while you know, I was pretty stunned and waiting for my girlfriend to come back from the river where she had left some of her gear. But we made it out of there safe and sound. I didn't know if it was going to happen safe and sound or not, but here I am. So anyways, that brings this pretty much up to date, and I just wanted to touch on this because this is probably gonna have to be broken into three different segments just to get all the content here.

4:11 But I've had six more sidings. I've seen six more of them since then, since twenty nineteen, and I've had rocks thrown a rock the size of a basketball. I saw it go at a forty five up and hit a tree about one hundred feet in there and then break every branch down. Of course, kept going. Shouldn't have probably, I don't know. And then I've seen them push trees over and i've had trees pushed over around me. I actually physically saw one push a tree over. Some people think that they make that noise without pushing a tree over in another dimension or something. I saw one physically push the tree. You know. Of course, heard whoops, alcohols.

4:57 I've never besides the one woman scream at at Northrope Creek, I haven't really heard them yell or scream at all. They just the ones up at hood. They whoop or they talk, and I've heard them talk on three or four occasions. And they have a language, you know, I don't understand it, but they have one almost sounds a cross between Arabic and Asian to me. And then of course I've seen structures, stacked rocks I have I have video and I have photos of them them going up to like a twelve foot tall stump that the tree was cut off the top of it or broke off the top, and they rammed a stick right through the side of it. So imagine taking a stick that big around and shoving it through a three foot wide stump that still look fairly healthy to me, and it's sticking out both sides. I don't know anything that can do that.

5:57 Wind can't do it, that's for sure. And then there were stack of rocks on top of it, and then lots of little stacks of rocks across the trail from it on the uphill side, like like twenty or thirty of them. You know, I don't know if kids were playing or what. But is the strangest thing because it's way up this hill. Hey, there's now you're not going to hike into it. Most people wouldn't want to hike there. It's just just too far to go. But so anyways, let me get back to my chronological order on what happened. So after the twenty nineteen odyssey, I call it first odyssey, we went back and I decided I'm going to try and get a picture of one if I can. You know, but I knew that my phone camera, you know, pulling it up, because they they put so much fear into you or you're just your natural instinct is to fear these giants when you see them. That it's hard to think in the moment and you know, set your camera up and zoom in and do all that. So what I did is I built a mount on my hat.

7:06 So I put a mount on my hat and I carry a GoPro on this, and when you're wearing your hat, your head actually keeps a nice balanced axis, so it's not real bouncy, and the GoPro has built into it has the ability to balance out the picture so it's not all jittery. So I thought, this is gonna be great. I'll just wear that and I'll just keep replacing batteries as I go up and down the trail, and if I see anything or I don't, I still have video of the trail ride. Plus it's fun to wear with the horse. I can take the hat and spin it backwards and you can see the horse come up behind me if I'm out front, or you can see me following the horse as we go up trails, and we wear it just to see the movement and the horse in case they have an injury. We're watching if the injuries healed, how they're moving, all that, So it works for that as well, and that's that's the main reason why I wear it. Anyway, I was wearing that in twenty nineteen, we decided to go back. Let's go back to Scucum Ridge, So we go back up Lolo Pass to Mount Hood and we have this camp site you know, we carry corral so we can set up anywhere. But so we're all set up and h and we said, well, let's, uh, let's go do a twilight ride up the hill real quick and and have some fun. You know, I'm gonna What I wanted to do was I wanted to make a video of what happened the year before. I wanted to show, Okay, this is the meadow where we had the where we both saw the thing standing, and you know,

8:37 this is what the forest looks like, the trail looks like, you know, the rivers that we crossed all that. So we're we're heading out. This meadow is you know, within a mile a camp or so. And uh so we we head head down the trails and we're we're about I don't know, a thousand feet before you get the meadow is on the right hand side of the trail, and got a bunch of you know river off the left, and we're about a thousand feet from it. And I decide I'm going to stop because I'm pretty far ahead of the horse I was. I was going at a pretty fast speed on my on my e bike. I got a fat tire bike with a one horse motor on it. Anyways, I was pretty far out in front of the horse, so I was letting it catch up, and I leaned against a tree and I saw a branch on the ground. I took the branch and I hit the tree and made a really loud knock, and h not five seconds later, there's a whoop comes back from the meadow and that's where the year previous we had seen one. And I was like, oh, wow, hey something here, you know. I told my girlfriend. She comes up and said, hey, I heard a whoop in the meadow.

9:49 I mean, we're we might might get some action up here, you know, And and she's like, okay, sure, you know, happy birthday. So ex it's my birthday weekend. So anyway, we go. We go up the trail and get get closer to the meadow and I see a silhouette standing on the far side of the meadow and it is big. I mean it's really big, like like nine ten feet tall. Big, looks like a guy in a hoodie, you know, no neck, pointed head, jet black. I just jet black and couldn't make out any features. The thing was just too too black and too dark. I just couldn't quite see it, and it's about twilight eash, so not there's no sun on the front of it. The sun's behind it, you know, just like just like the last year. And but we figure we probably have about an hour before it's completely black.

10:49 And we brought flashlights and lights this time for her helmet and for my bike and everything. So we're looking at it and it's just kind of standing there. It's in a slightly different place than the one we saw previous. It's about it's about fifty yards towards Mount Hood from where it was the year before, and it's standing behind a tree, which later I went back and the tree came up to its chest. Later I went back and the trees like like easy six foot tall. So anyways, I went back a couple of days later and looked for tracks. But so anyways, we continued decided, hey, should we continue up the trail. Probably shouldn't have, but did anyways, So so we continued up the trail and we did the three river crossing, and you know, it's just dead quiet.

11:43 I mean, no squirrels, no birds, and there's a ton of birds in there, just nothing across the trail. And I'm thinking, well, it's gonna get noisy on this side because you know the things over there and now just just just as quiet on that side as it was the other. So we start going up the trail. We're hearing noises paralleling us through the trees. You can hear them kind of over once we'll hear a tree branch break or something, and it's moving at the speed we're moving. And you know, deer run from us. They don't the deer, an elk don't run towards the horse. They run away from it. A bear. We've come across female bears with cubs and they run from the horse to you know, unless you're like stomping a cub, they're gonna leave it.

12:32 They just get away from the horse. So we're thinking, okay, well it's probably probably not a bear. Probably not you know, elk run, deer run, So there's really nothing that would be crashing along beside us on both sides of the trail as we go up. So we get up, We get up to the top, and on the way up, the horse the horse keeps looking off to its left, and so we know we know something's on the left. We get up to the top and there's some really strange uh structures up on top a bunch of logs interlaced just kind of weird, like like if the wind blew them they I don't know, it'd be tough for the wind to make these things, but you know, could have, I guess. So we decide, we decided we're gonna we're gonna turn around, because eventually we came to a log that was crossing the path and I had to lift my bike over it. It was it was about two feet around, roots are pushed up, probably wind blown, but it's crossing the path and we're way up there. We're like six miles up. So so there's two landings on the way up this ridge where it goes from you know, forty five to fairly flat, and then it goes back to forty five. So you really don't have places to stop that you're not on a hill going up up, you know, this seven mile ridge. So we get up to the top and there's a log across. We just say, well,

14:02 let's let's turn around, you know, yeah, with that thing down there, let's let's It started to get a little darker, and we really don't want to be caught in the dark with that thing out there, and uh, you know with the forest guy hanging out out there, and let's go down and see if he's still there where he's at. And so we turn around and we're we head down the hill and uh, and my brakes are just getting hot as hell. Man. I I had two smaller brakes and they're like glowing red, and I got a water bottle. I put it on and it's like steam just runs off and it's in the video. You can see one of my videos. It shows this run and while I'm sitting there cooling it off. One time, so I get off the bike and I pour water on it. And then you know, the horse is no problem, just gonna saw on the hill. But I'm alone about a thousand feet above her. And she stopped at the first landing on the way down, and you know, it's kind of open there because it's an old cat trail, but you know, logging trail. So so I'm I'm pouring water on on my brakes and in the video you can see rocks flying by my head and they're these little pea sized rocks and they're and they're they're they're flying by my head.

15:13 But I'm I'm focused on, get these breaks cold so I can use them again. You know, I still had you know, six more miles a trail that was like a half mile and they're glowing red, and I'm just like, I'm so screwed. I didn't bring enough water to keep my brakes cold, which now I carry a lot more water when I you know, if I go up hills like that. But anyways, so I go down and get to this landing and I'm talking with her, and there's rocks being thrown at us while we're while we're in talking real quick, the horse munched on a little bit of grass and we turn and we and we go off down the hill. So we get we get down to the bottom, and it's it's just dead quiet the whole ride. Get down to the bottom and uh and cross the three rivers and get back to this meadow and it's still standing there, or or it went back to standing there. You know, I don't know if it what it did while we were gone, but but it's it's a little bit further towards Mount Hood. It's like another twenty or thirty yards towards Mount Hood, standing behind some different trees, and you know, same looked like the same one, you know, nine ten foot tall, you know, four or five feet in the shoulders just you know, all I could see was from the chest up. But big round shoulders, arms, you know, definitely a giant And and I have it on video and I'm pointing at it, you know. And and the crazy thing about GoPros is that they're not really made to for any kind of distance filming. And that thing's filming in like four K

16:44 or whatever, it doesn't matter. Digital so blocky, and you know, it looks like a blob squatch and I'm thinking, oh, man, I got I got you know, Patterson Gimlin footage. Nah, I got a black blobby squatchy thing, you know, up in the corner. And I'm like, man, I risked my life for the Yeah, I'm like, yeah, I don't know how smart this this hobby is. So so anyways, what happens later is where it gets kind of scary. So so we get back to camp and now it's it's you know, it's a little bit before dark, it's not quite pitch black, and and we get back to camp and across the road a little ways up, there's uh, some some people in there that when we got there, they had a couple of horses. They had to crawl up.

17:30 They had a couple of horses in it. But when we got back from our ride, there's like six or eight cars there and they're just cranking music, i mean, just blasting it. And it's so loud that we instead of having our table right by our camper, we moved it down the hill away from the camper, just just to get the camper more between us and and kind of block out the sound because they were just cranking their stereo, you know, which which is fine. We're out in the woods. It's you know, nine o'clock at you know, nine thirty, ten o'clock at night. I'm all right. As long as it doesn't go past midnight, I'm okay with it. But so anyways, we move our our our all of our cooking gear and everything down below, and there's a there's an old fire pit there, so we got that going and we're set up our table and we're cooking and stuff. So we're sitting there. You know, of course we can't listen to our music because you can't hear it.

18:26 It's too there's just so loud. But start to notice some screaming and it's it's it's so our campers here, their parties over here were the screamings in the woods down by this creek, downhill from us and off to one side. So and I'd say, it's like, I don't know, a couple hundred yards is what it sounds like. It's away from us, but I can hear it, and it doesn't stop. It just keeps going, and it's going for I don't know. It had gone for about ten minutes, and we're sitting there eating our dinner and listening. You know, do you hear that? Yeah, yeah, I hear that. And what it sounds like is a deaf mute screaming like trying to speak, you know, but it sounds like a deaf mute. And I'll imitate the noise. I won't do it justice because it was, you know, really loud, and I won't be able to quite hit the you know, it had a little bit of base to it, which I can't do. But it sounded like this. It was going of, you know, like get off my lawn, shut down your music, you know whatever. But couldn't understand a single word, but it was doing that over and over.

19:44 It just NonStop. Well, it's pitch black, and I can tell it's starting to come up to the road that's that we're parked next to. It's coming up up by the road, but about about one hundred yards down, and so I decide, I'm I'm I'm gonna walk out to it. It's so dark that, you know, camera doesn't work or anything, but I'm decided I'm just going to walk out to it and and and see what this is. See if it's a bear, see if it's a you know, a wolf. It's something big, and it's coming towards towards camp. And so I have a flashlight with me that I just bought, and it's it's like, you know, a thousand candles. I'm leaving it off though, and I got my forty five with holow points. In case it is a bear and it tries to attack me, I could shoot a couple into the ground. It usually, you know, if you pop one off in the ground, they'll run typically. So I'm walking towards this thing. My girlfriends, are you sure, I'm yeah, I just want to check it out. So I walk and I'm walking towards it, and I'm used to seeing bears and cougars and stuff. We have them on our property.

20:55 I run them off all the time. So anyways, I go walking towards this thing, and it's pitch black. Well, it's walking towards me. I can hear it still yelling. It doesn't stop. It's just going and going and going, and it's walking towards me, and I'm going towards it. Well, finally I get I get about one hundred yards down the road, and it's off to the right, and where our campguns off to the right where we're set up, keeps walking towards me, and I could hear it in the brush now, I can hear it break of branches and stuff. And I'm far enough away from the music that that this thing's definitely a lot louder than the music is. And and I'm down there, and I'm thinking, okay, well, I'm gonna have a gotcha moment here in a second.

21:37 And and and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and wait till I know it's cleared. These small trees that are about I don't know, they're about one hundred feet back off the road. I'm gonna I'm gonna wait till I think it's clear to the trees that I'm gonna put the flashlight on it real quick, you know, and just kind of kind of see what it is, see what this thing is once overall, because it's coming down me, it's coming towards me. And so I'm waiting and I'm waiting and I'm waiting, and oh man, same seem like forever is probably like just a minute or two. And I'm like, you know, I think it. Should I do it? Now? Should I do it? Now? You know, it's probably cleared those trees, because it's really close and I could hear it stomping and breaking branches and crep and and I'm thinking, oh, it's got to be out in front of those trees eighty second, any second.

22:27 And then I waited a few more seconds past when I thought it would be out, and then I turned the light on it. And I turned the light on and nothing, there's nothing. I don't see a thing. It's still back in the trees a little bit, but it's so big and so loud. It just and it stopped screaming right right when I did that. So I'm thinking, okay, and you know, I got my flashlight up, and you know, I got my forty five in my pocket, my hands on my butt, you know, in case something tries to charge me, and nothing, just just nothing. So I decide after a minute or two, it just stayed quiet. And after a minute or two, I decide, well, I'm I'm gonna walk back to my camp site. So I turn and I just leave the light on. I mean, I'm you know, whatever it is knows i'm there, and the light might scare off a bear or whatever cougar. So so I'm walking back towards camp and it starts up again, just yelling again, and I'm like, oh crap. And it's off to my left because I'm I'm I'm heading back to camp, which is you know, facing camp. My gets on my left and my camp's on the left, and and it's parallel on me as I walk. As I'm walking, and there's just really thick trees in there, and and the trees come right up to the road, which I'm thinking, great, now, the trees are right next to me. So and these aren't small trees that are next to the road. They're they're a hundred foot tall if they're afoot. But a

23:58 lot of old growth in their two So some trees are way bigger than that. But but now now it has the opportunity if it wants to, it could rush me, and I'm I wouldn't know it. It was right on me. So I'm sitting there, I'm thinking, you know, this was probably a dumb idea. I probably shouldn't have done that. You know. All the way back, I'm just thinking, I shouldn't have done that. That was bad. I was I don't know what I was thinking. And I'm walking back and and the whole time it's parallel me that, you know, a hundred yards all the way back to camp, and it's probably one hundred feet in I would say maybe, which means it's probably two hundred feet in because I'm you know, I had bad estimates with with it. And it's still it's still yelling, you know, ye you know some language. I don't know what it was, but and I could tell it with sentences, and I could tell it was different words it was using. It wasn't saying the same thing over and over and over. It was.

24:55 It was yelling a whole bunch of different things at me. So I walked back down the road to camp and we're part just off to the side of the road, and and and and our horses are their corrals, probably seventy five feet away from the truck downhill. It's a nice flat spot where we had them. And I have I have motion sensor cameras set up. Now. I got traps set up around the corral after, you know, seeing all these different bigfoot shows, and I see that those can keep the bigfoot away the IR cameras, so I put those up just to keep the horses safe if they do come in. If they're dumb enough to come in and get caught on an IR, so be it.

25:41 But at least at least I'm trying to keep the horses safe. So so anyways, I get back to camp and you can hear it parallel me. You can hear now it's just down from camp. It's down on the other side of the horses. And my girlfriend's going, great, you brought it back to camp. I said, well, it was hungry, and you know, by so anyways, we're like, well, you know, boy, good late, maybe maybe suld go inside. Yeah, got this thing riled up enough. And but we're sitting there while we're thinking about what do we do next it started moving again. So it was down past our horses and it started walking down. So at this campground, it's got water. Some people would call them creeks, but they're way too big for a creek. So anyways, so it's walking down around. I can hear it moving off a little bit into the creek area, and it's breaking limbs and yelling and d D and the neighbors music is so loud. They don't even know this is all going on, but I hear it. And finally, finally the music's louder than it's yelling is and you could hear it walked around the end of the camp and it was coming back up the other side, and then the music's so loud I can't hear it anymore. So so anyways, that was That was twenty twenty at that campground. Nothing, nothing else really happened, just you know, just that just my night walk where I was a little bit, a little bit terrified. I'm trying to get past the the the anxiety of being around him so that I can get I just you know, I'm just trying to get

27:13 some film of him is my goal, you know, And trying to get past the anxiety, and I thought, well, you know, keep trying so anyway, because the anxiety is still there. So let's go to twenty twenty one. So in twenty twenty one, a lot of a lot of cool things started to happen. I had. I started meeting friends in the bigfoot world, got to know Joe Beelert quite a bit better, got to know Tom Powell a little bit. And they have a friend named John. I'm not going to say his last name. He doesn't doesn't really care to be known. But John's amazing. John's if anybody's a bigfooter, it's John. He goes up up above Malala, like almost every weekend during the summer's he's up there a lot. He's the one that heard. He's the one that had one walk up the trail between him and Joe b Lart and Joe was sleeping, and the thing talk to him as it went by, you know, using full sentences, said that he said, the most beautiful woman's voice he's ever heard. Couldn't understand the word, but it was talking to him as it went by, and he talked back, and they would each pause and let the other one talk as it was moving. It was it's pretty pretty cool thing really in the scheme of things. Anyways, that's John. So anyways, those three invited him up in twenty twenty one and after the screaming and yelling, they wanted to come up and see, well, where's all this action, you know, what's going on? You know. So I was like, well, it's where we take the ponies pretty much anywhere we

28:44 go before we get to to scook him Ridge again though in twenty twenty one, I wanted to touch on on stub Stewart. So stub Stewart is this horse park. It's a it's actually a park with cabins and big bicycle Mecca. There's a trail that goes from Banks to Vernonia. It's called the Bank's Vernonia Trail and it's a concrete trail that the Forest Service is paved in that's kind of next to the road in some places. It follows old railroad tracks and things and parallels them, but it goes, you know, I don't know, twenty thirty miles track of and on that track there's a park that was donated.

29:26 The land was donated and they put a forest park in there and it has a really cool store and everything, and then like twenty or thirty cabins you can rent. And then it has a parking for campers, probably two hundred place, one to two hundred places that all these bicyclists come in and they'll spend you know, hot summer nights there and camp out and ride their bikes all around. Well above that is a horse camp and it's called stub Stuart Horse Camp. We've been going there for years. I had gone in there, and I don't know if I mentioned it in the last last episode, but I rode my hardy end there one day when my girl was riding her horse with her friend and I parked.

30:12 I parked by some restrooms just down below. The road ends up at the horse camp. It basically ends up there and you have and there's a giant parking lot. You can turn around and go back. Well above the parking lot is the horse campground and it has parking for like I don't know, twenty horses. Really nice place, has electricity, water, it's pretty improved, beautiful, beautiful campground. But anyways, I rode in there and it's about it was about noon or so on a Saturday, and I want to say probably in June of twenty one, and I rode in there on my v rod and got off my bike and walked over to where my girlfriend and her friend were pulling their horses out of our trailer, and we brought our campers so we all had lunch together.

30:56 And anyways, they're they're getting saddled up and ready to go out down this trail and start their ride because there's tons of horse trails through there. Really good place to practice horses if you don't mind seeing bicyclists everywhere, because they're all over mountain bike and and stuff. But I was. I walked back to my bike and my helmet was on my bike, so I'm not wearing my helmet. I just have my leather jacket on. And anyways, I walk over to the restroom which is on the opposite side away from our camper, and it's the restroom is probably, i don't know, one hundred feet away from my bike. It's a it's a big, big parking lots. Anyway, so I'm walking back to my bike and a rock bounces and hits my shoe and it wasn't a big rock, just a little little rock, and I'm thinking, well, then another one comes and lands just below my feet. And I'm walking along. I'm walking along the slope where it's a big ridge that drops down, drops down about one hundred feet and then then it's old growth trees in there, just thick thick, thick, thick forest and oak trees here and there. And uh, anyways, another rock comes, and then another rock, and for like five minutes, rocks are coming, and I'm just standing there, going, what where's this coming from?

32:21 Looking down the ridge, and I see the rocks come up through this oak tree and then uphill and then land like five feet directly below me. And so I started to move over a little bit, and they throw them right right next to my feet, just a little bit over. I just don't see a human being able to do that. So so I picked up a rock and I tried to throw it back. And I could barely reach the base of those trees that are one hundred feet down. The hell, I could barely hit the base of those let alone, you know, hit the top of the tree that the thing's throwing a rock up through to get to me. You know, that's another you know, hundred feet plus up. So so anyways, they were throwing rocks at me for about ten minutes, and then finally I was just like, ah, well, you know, I'm not walking down there. I don't want to get hit by a rock. And and my girlfriend they finally got all saddled up and they're heading down the trail next to where that area is, headed down into that and I told her be careful, something's throwing rocks down there, and she's like, we'll be fine. So I mean, bravest girl I ever met. So anyway, she off, she goes. They never had any incidents, and that was pretty much the end of that. But one more thing happened at Stub Stewart like like two months later, and I want to touch on this then I'll go back to Scuokam Bridge.

33:39 So we're having activity at all these horse camps. I mean, these things are you swing a cat man? These things are all over the forest through here. So so anyways, we go back to Stub a couple months later and I ask, I asked the ranger that I know that at the time we were friends. My girl road with the guy's wife that runs he's the head a ranger for that four step Steward at the time. Now he's moved on to another area. But so I knew him pretty well and some of his rangers, you know, I talk with them now. And then well, one came through camp and uh, and we're there for the weekend practicing riding, and I asked him, Hey, any bigfoot activity up here, and I was just, you know, I expect him to say no, because they almost always do. And he goes, yeah, he goes. Last weekend a guy spotted one. There's about ten foot tall. He said. It was right at the bank's Vernonia trail where it branches off to go down down this lollipop loop. And that's what they call this loop.

34:41 The it's a horse trail that goes down and it circles around and then it comes back in on itself and up the hill, shaped like a lollipop. It's about a four mile ride down there. We go down it all the time. So I was like, cool, did he describe it? He goes, yeah, just black jet black, ten foot tall. Just after twilight is just getting dark, and it was standing up on top of where the road split. There's a kind of a ridge between him. I was standing on top of the ridge watching him go by. He said he peed himself and then turned around and came back and ran went straight to the ranger's office to report it, and he said, yeah, the guy was soiled, so he saw something or something. So anyways, a kind of a sideline. But the next day we rode the Lollipop.

35:32 And to get to the Lollipop you drop down quite a bit down these ridges. It's about a probably a mile of trail that's like zagging through. We call it the Black Force because it's so dark in there. And then you drop down some other trails and it comes out on the banks for Nonia Trail. So we dropped down to the trail and then we're we dropped down to where Lollipop is go off off that Lollipop has has a little bit of incline four ways, and it's just a steep drop and you better have excellent brakes and you better have a strong bike to even go that trail. Most mountain bikers won't do it. It's just too steep and it's just not fun getting that much exercise, so and they'll walk their bikes up. It's just too steep.

36:19 So we go out there, and you know, horse can do it, no problem. So we go out there, and I'm out in front of two horses, and I'm out a couple hundred feet, and then I stretch the distance further and further because my bike actually has just a ton of power and I got big batteries and it just goes. So I'm about a thousand feet out in front of them, and I hear something in the tree is parallel on me, and it was it had to be within fifty feet of me. But the brush is so thick in there you can't see ten feet in and it's just all these alders and aspens and just really leafy small trees and something's just crashing through them. And every time I stop, it stops, and then I go, and then it goes. And then I stop and it stops, and then I go and then it goes. It's like, okay, I know that, I know this, I know what this is.

37:07 And finally the horses come up on me because I just stopped and I'm drinking water, and finally the horses come up on me, and uh, no more noise. That was the end of that. That it just stopped right there. I just wanted to bring those two up because it's it's not that I'm just going to one spot and seeing stuff. We're having stuff happen everywhere. Like I said, swinging a cat, I mean, they're they're everywhere. So let's go back to twenty twenty one at skukumb Ridge. That's up by Mount Hood. There's around Mount Hood. There's multiple horse parks, you know, on the east side, west side. They're all over the place. There's there's some both sides of the highway, you know, up up up past up past Timberline Lodge, and there's a couple out both sides of the road and stuff. So I mean, they're they're all over and it doesn't matter which one you go to.

37:57 I'm pretty sure the same things are going to happen to you if you go out there or if you're paying attention anyways. So I guess i'll touch on that real quick before I move on to the siding. But something that I noticed and I've noticed some other people have that once you have a sighting, it kind of makes you hyper aware of what's going on around you. You're paying more attention. You're not. It's not the same world that it used to be. I'm like hyper alert anything that goes on. I'm listening for you know, tree branches breaking. I'm watching the horses ears. I mean, I'm I don't want to call it paranoid, but I'm I'm listening. Man, I hear things, you know, And I don't want to make anything up. And you know, I'm not trying to fabricate anything. I'm just I'm just like, Okay, what's this?

38:45 What's that? And I notice, you know, footprints or or you know that are odd, or or tree branches that are all twisted up or or you know, stuck through trees. You know, just weird, weird stuff. I just I kind of keep an eye out for stack rocks all that. So, so anyways, that brings us to twenty twenty one. We're back at scook and Ridge. I brought Joe b Lar, I brought to Tom Palell. I want to show him, hey man, there's stuff up here. And so we decide I built a second e bike. I built a small one. I call it Mini Me because it's quite a bit smaller than my big four four inch tire fat tire bike.

39:26 And and I let Tom ride it. And so we went out and back really really not a whole lot of activity. Had had some fun doing it though. So then we go back up the same trail and this time no birds and I'm with the horse. No birds, no, And before we're riding the bikes, birds, chipmunks, stuff everywhere. We go back out to the meadow and just whisper quiet, nothing there, just quiet. You drop down from the meadow and there's a ton of skunk cabbage and these little ponds right before you hit the first river and just super quiet in there. And usually there's a ton of birds in there, so so nothing. And started hearing stuff parallel us in the trees. And and so we're going up the hill. We cross the rivers, there's three of them, we cross them, we get we're going up this hill we call it the backside of scook them and headed up the ridge and again hear a movement above us and below us, but not really not seeing anything, just just hearing it. And one thing that we notice is up on the trail, and I have this on video, is that there's these stumps that are about I don't know.

40:51 Some of them are three feet around that are cut off at at at about two feet tall. Some of them are cut off. One of them's cut off at like seven or eight foot tall, and you can see it was a chainsaw, you know, cut it. But for the first and this is about about a thousand feet maybe two thousand feet up off the trail seven miles to the peak. But it's the first couple thousand feet as you come off the flats where the rivers are at and you start going up this hill the trail, and so these stumps are on the right hand side of the trail, so they're on the cliff side, the drop off side, and like if you took one step, you'd go down one hundred feet before you even slowed down.

41:33 It's steep in there, and these stumps are kind of holding the trail together. Their root system probably helps hold that hill side together so the trail stays in place. So I'm guessing that's probably why they left the stumps there, you know, when they made the trail. So anyways, as we're going up, we notice, we know, there's tree libs about about four or five inches around, and they're shoved right into these stumps, right dead center of them pretty much. And I walked over and I tried to pry it out. I couldn't even move it. I mean, it was stuck in so hard, you know, so it didn't fall in a windstorm. Because I have that on my property all the time. We get big winds through and branches fall. I you know, there's kind of slop you can pull them right out. These you couldn't pull out. I mean they're freaking in there. Whatever hydraul like those in there was, I had to be massive, and I don't know the four service would take the time, you know to do that.

42:25 But that's where these things were. But what was odd is it wasn't just one. There were like four stumps in a row. As you go, you know, thousand feet up this trail, every one hundred feet one hundred and fifty feet there's another stump and there's another branch shoved in it. And then one of the stumps was like like seven eight foot tall, and I have it on video and I have it on I have photos. It's about eight foot tall, and there's one shoved into the top of that too at eight feet tall, and the branch is like another ten feet tall that shoved into it. And the branches that are in it are looked fairly fresh at the time, they were still wet. They weren't you know, weren't brittled where I could just break them. So anyways, we go up the trail and we're a little creeped out because we see that, you know, something's up here. So we we get up and uh, I think at this point we did some calls at the top of these ridges, and uh, I'm calling across these canyons about about four mile five miles up from the bottom, so we're we're at a pretty high elevation. It's about a it's about a six thousand foot difference between the floor of where a campground is in the top of this this ridge. It's it's really steep ridge too, so the trail just zigzag there's you know. Anyways, so we're pretty high up at and I can see across to this other canyon, you know, across the canyon to this other ridge that's about is tall and it's in between us and rhododendron and uh and mount hoods. You can

43:58 see it. You know, we're right there. And anyways, I do some calls across the canyon, and people, you know, they make fun of of, you know, finding bigfoot calls and stuff, you know, where they do whoops or they do you know whatever. And and uh, we we we kind of made fun of it for a while. But her and I, while we go up a trail, we do this call. It's a crow call. We go cook cockaw, you know, in some funny movie back when. But I've moving forward. I now do a crow call. And and so the horse knows I'm ahead of it. So if it comes around a turn, it's not startled because something's there. It heard me, so it knows I'm ahead of it. So I'm doing the croke calls all the way up this ridge. And and we get up to this opening you can see across the canyon, and I do some I do a couple of whoops, and uh, we're laughing about it and stuff, and and you know, just having fun.

44:52 And and I'm wearing a bright green shirt and she's wearing a you know, fluorescent yellow shirt. And I mean, we're we're we're not sneaking up on nothing. We're not even trying me why, you know, it doesn't make any sense. So so anyways, we're having fun. She turns around, she goes down the trail. She gets about five minutes down the trail from me, and I'm I'm still making calls up there, and then across the canyon, I hear what sounds like a like a bunch of trees pushed over at once. I mean just but it was crashing through the trees, is what it was. And it was crashing down the slope, you know. So it did about a from where it started. I'd say it did about a five thousand foot drops straight down the fricking hill. I just came straight bee line right towards my calls, and I'm up on this other ridge. So it comes down, its ridge down, and it's starting to come up towards me, and I'm like, oh crap, okay, I'm getting out of here.

45:49 So so I'm riding down the hill and putting, you know, my brake fires out and and and we get down. We get down to the bottom, and uh, and everybody's there on the way down. Of course, we could hear him paralleling through the trees again. They walk It's like they walk us out. So we get to the river and all that stops, and and uh, and so we go, you know, we keep going back to camp, and it's we get in there right about dark, and uh, everybody's sitting around. They got a campfire going. Everybody's eating, and you know, there's tents set up all around the campfire, and and uh uh, Joe Beelert when he camps, he that guy knows how to camp. I mean, he brings in multiple camp stoves, and he's got this big countertop thing, and the food is just amazing, and there's lots, I mean, there's too much of it. You know, they're just giving it out to everybody. And just everybody's somewhere all eating and having a good time and and telling stories and stuff.

46:51 And I had put out two microphones I have here. I got a couple of these d R O seven's, so I put these out for the night and they're all charged up and all ready to go. About half hour in batteries die for whatever reason, brand new batteries. They just died out. So they were kind of useless that night, which I wish they would have stayed on because of what happened next. So so anyways, everybody eats, we call it a night. Tom Powell's actually an accomplished singer and guitarist, and he's playing just kind of real mellow acoustic music. And finally we all decide to go to bed. So everybody, everybody takes off. So you know, we told him everything that happened on the hillside, and you know our past experiences and all that. So about two am, I wake up from a dead sleep because I'm hearing pots and pans rattling around, like banging together, like somebody's digging through getting more food. At two am, and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to open the door and say busted, you know, late night snacker. So so I opened the door and there's nobody there. There's nothing.

48:11 I'm well, you know, I mean, I took a few seconds to you know, to put my sweats on, but you know, I didn't have any lights on or anything, as I was pitched black. But you could hear me moving around probably in the camper if I opened the door, and nothing. And our back door where kemper's maybe thirty feet forty feet away from those tables, and there's a lot of pots and pans on them, and dishes out and all kinds of things. Just nothing. And the strangest thing because in the morning and something else happened right after that. But in the morning, I woke up before anybody did, and I walked out there and the pots and pans had not moved. They were exactly where they were when we went to bed, and nothing was disturbed. Nothing, you know, like a bear didn't come through and knock something over to eat it. You know, nothing was disturbed, which was the strangest thing I heard. Ron Moorehead said that that happened to him at his camp. They would it sound like they knocked everything over. But they went back the next day and everything's perfect. But so always that happened to us. But here's here's the scary part of that night. At three am, about an hour after I heard the pots and pans, my girlfriend had invited a friend up just because she wanted a friend, you know there so you have all these bigfooting guys, and you know, a couple of them have wives, but she wanted a friend up, so she brought her friend up with her. And she was in a tent on the other side of the campfire from us, probably about sixty fifty sixty feet away from our camp, or facing towards

49:43 the camp. Her dowar face towards the campfire, but the back of it kind of went towards this hillside that goes down down towards the creeks where I'd heard the you know, two years before. So I'm I'm you know, I tell her before she goes to sleep, you know, just scream if you need something. So, uh, at three in the morning, she says she was laying there asleep and then woke up to something pushing in on the tent and smelling her hair. And she said that that that it was really deep, deep deep a breast that it was taking like just trying to get a good whiff of her shampoo or something. And she said it was just barely touching her head, pushing the the tent into her head and and and smelling her hair. And it did it. She said it did it for like a minute or so, and she realized, you know, as she wakes, she's waking up, She's like, oh crap, you know what if it's a bear, And she screamed, and she screamed at the top of her lungs. She said, uh for about a minute and it it stopped doing it, and it she heard it run off, and she said when it ran off, it made a racket running through the trees and it was gone. The crazy thing is we're sixty feet away and there's other campers, and nobody heard her scream. I cannot explain it. I'm sixty feet

51:18 away and my windows are open on my camper because it's summer, and I did not wake up to somebody screaming. And she said she's never felt so alone in her life, and that you know, she didn't know what to do. She just laid awake the rest of the night, scared half to death. And yeah, she won't sleep in a tent out there anymore. She came two years later, she came camping with us again and slept in her car, and I put one of our game cameras, two of them actually facing both ways around her car, just just to keep her safe, because these things don't like game cams, they just don't. I'm good luck getting them on a game pan. We'll use it to your advantage. If you don't want them somewhere, just put them up, you know.

52:03 And that's what I did. I put them on trees around her. So she felt safer and and nothing happened to her that night. But again, so so now we know, okay, they're coming into camp, and so when we go there, we we kind of camp a little bit different than before you know, we're trying to be aware of them in the camp grounds instead of having my microphones you know, one hundred yards out or fifty yards out with some bait around it, you know, food or whatever. I keep them all the way back at camp now, and I'm not sure if they're if it kind of disguises them because you know, there's so much electronics and other things around camp. Anyways, but the batteries haven't gone dead since I started keeping them closer to camp, using exact same batteries.

52:52 But so anyways, that was That was twenty twenty one, and twenty twenty two we go back to scuok them Ridge, so brought more research. We do it twilight ride up on Friday, which we usually do, and uh, of course got paralleled again going up. We didn't go as far as we normally do because it was getting dark a little quicker. We had a campfire till midnight that first night. Joe b Lart, myself and this the new guy were there. Uh, Tom didn't make it this trip, but we're sitting there and we're we're eating ribs and and anyways, stayed up untill till about midnight and Joe Joe. Joe has balls the size of church bells. I've never met a braver human being in my life. So he knows about everything that's happened, and he's had tons of stuff happened to him, and he is just fearless man. He's fearless. If anybody's ever going to get torn apart by one of these things, it's going to be Joe. So uh, because he just goes where nobody else will go. Uh. So we set up our camp. We're just down the road from from where we were before. Somebody else was in that spot.

54:04 So we set up camp down the road a little ways and uh, it's facing right towards Skukum Ridge. You can see it right from camp. The rivers are between us down this hill. We set up. We have a corral it's about one hundred feet down from camp and picnic table between, you know, just off of our camper. And it's before we got our big horse trailer, so we still had our camper then, and we're all we're all set up, great food, great company, everything's going fine. So we go up the hill, come back. Nothing. No, no real incidents happened. Didn't really see anything, heard heard a lot heard them crashed it through the trees and stuff, but didn't really see anything. The sticks were still jammed in the logs. I have that on video. They're still in those stumps going up the hill, and you know, lots of there. I guess there are a few new tree structures kind of further up the hill. But it was getting dark, so we came back a little quicker than we normally do. We didn't go up you know, five or six miles. I think we only went up like four. So we do here once in a while.

55:11 In almost every year, we hear at least one whoop when we hit the first of the three rivers coming back towards the camp because we have to cross all three, so I have to wade and water you know sometimes you know, almost up to my chest. But anyways, so we get back to camp, have the campfire. It's and and Joe went to bed about eleven o'clock. And the reason why I say Joe's got you know, big waves, is because he said, is caught on the far side of the horse corral, down the hill and on the other side of a bunch of trees, Like I can't even see Joe. He's so far away from the camp site. Well that's where Joe wanted to camp. And Joe brought night vision with them, and he's he brought microphones with him, and so when he went to sleep in a sleeping bag on the cot, he put the night vision. He had some bags or whatever under his cot, so I put it in that. And I'm just bringing this up because what happens later. So the other guy that Joe brought is is sitting with me at the at the table.

56:21 We're sitting in chairs and you know, having cold beverages and eating ribs and things. And about about eleven thirty, my Aussie, which you heard bark earlier, she all of a sudden acts real irritated. And I have her on a run line that goes away from the camper down the hill off to the side, kind of parallel on the road, and she's acting like I've never seen her act before. She's growling. And this dog never growls. I've never seen it growl. It hasn't growled since, just never happened. Well, she's growling. She's staring right at a pile of rocks that is just just kind of over this rise and kind of up on the other side of this dry gulch.

57:04 And and so the guy that's with me has he has night vision. It's a heat vision type, not ir anyways, he pulls up the heat vision. He's looking over and he says, all you can see is a rock pile there because the sun was on it all day. And I apologize for coughing into the mic there, but so he he looks over and all he sees is this rock pile and he can't really make anything else out. It's really not very good clarity on that model anyways. But but you could definitely because the dog's like fifty feet away, you could definitely see the dog crystal clear. So I ask him if can I look through it. He's like sure, So he has it to me and I'm looking at my dog. Well, my dog's jet black, so you know, he kind of need night vision even to see her because it's pretty dark in there. But then I shine it down to where the horse crawl is because the camper's here, horse corals down here, and then Joe's way down in the trees down here. Well, you can't see Joe to me, but I could see the horses, and the horses have their ears up and they're looking at the exact same rock pile. And my dog now is is going more crazy. She won't walk all the way to the end of that that that run though, because it's it's stops almost at the rock pile.

58:17 She's about halfway down it. And and I'm thinking, well, it could be a bear, could be a cougar, could be you know this, that and the other thing. You know uh, And I said, let's shine some light on it, and he's going, no, no, don't shine light on it. I'm going to keep looking through the night vision and see if see if we can pick something up. And he's recording, and I said, well, I got to go get my dog. You know, I'm I've only had the dog at that point for like three years, and so I gotta I gotta get my dog and bring it back because I'm not going to let her get whatever that is there. I'm not going to let it get a hold of her. So I I walked down the hill, I grabbed the dog. I bring it back, and the dog won't stop facing that way. I won't stop growling.

59:05 I can't get her to calm down. She's just too upset, which she's since then, never done it before that, never done it just that time. And so anyways, he's just I just can't see anything. I just can't see anything. And then after a bit I look at he lets me look again. I look at it, and the horses aren't aren't looking at that rock pile anymore. They're off eating and stuff. So they're relaxed. So I mean, whatever the threat was is gone. So that happened at about eleven thirty at night, maybe midnight. So then we both go to bed. Well, he's sleeping in a hammock fairly close to the camp or which I can't sleep in a hammock, but you know, it cripples me. But he's sleeping, and I'm just thinking, wow, you kind of look like a little taco there. If something's hungry, that's fun. You know, I'm going to go get in my metal walled vehicle.

59:55 Now go to sleep. So you have a good night, sir. And so I go to bed, and I got all the windows open. Well, we have this top vent that when it's open, acts like a parabolic dish. I can hear. I can hear that side anything on that side of the the campra it just echoes it in so so, about two in the morning, I wake up to what I think is two men talking. There were only two, and I listened to it for I want to say, about five minutes. I was trying to figure out what the heck, you know, who's who's up at? You know, two am talking? But here's what's strange. The voices were so deep, like James Earl Jones, deeper than that, deeper than that, you know, there were and they were talking in full sentences. I couldn't understand the language. I could hear it clear as a bell. And they weren't yelling, they were they were just talking. I'd say, they're probably within It sounded like they're within a hundred feet of my camper, and they were. They were talking about and the other one would go. But you could tell it was two different voices because they were hitting different octaves when they spoke. One was way deeper than the other.

1:01:20 But it definitely sounded like two men, you know, two males anyways, I don't know. Maybe their females have deep voices. I don't know. So so I finally got brave enough to throw my sweats on and take my flashlight and pop the rear door open and didn't see anything, didn't hear anything. But you know, I'm bumbling around getting sweats on and you know, so they had a few seconds of hearing me move around, shine the flashlight. Nothing there. So here's where it gets creepy. Three o'clock in the morning. Three o'clock in the morning, a lot of action happens all at once, and and what happens is, uh, let me start with Hammock Guy. That's that's all. Calm now, Hammick Guy. So, Hammick Guy wakes up to hearing deep voices at three. Now I heard him at two and they were on the other side of him, that he was in between them and me. But apparently he didn't hear that. But he did hear him at three am.

1:02:24 And I checked my phone clock to see what time it was. Is around two o'clock, but at three o'clock. This is this is and this is Hammick Guy's story because he told me what happened the next morning. So he said he heard deep voices and movement that wasn't far from him, he said it was it sounded like within like you know, fifty feet of him and uh or closer, but he could hear footsteps and voices, and they're they're talking really quiet, really quiet around him. And they started from one side of him, and they moved past him and started to go down to where my horses were down the hill, and they're going right at my horses. He could hear him moving that way, and so he grabs his therm, which is he hops out of his hammock. He's got his boots on, his pants on, he's ready to go. He grabs his therm, which is below his hammock and pulls it up and he says that they had already moved past. You know, it's about it's at least one hundred feet down to the corrals, and they'd already moved past that. And he could hear him moving down the hill, but they were on the hill has all these little rolling slopes and then a bunch of trees. Anyways, they'd already gone out of where the night vision could pick him up. So he ran after him. So he's running down the hill and he says, it doesn't sound like they're running. It sounds like they're stepping, like taking steps. Boom boom, boom boom, And it's two

1:03:56 of them and he can hear a few branch breaking here and there, and he said, he's running at top speed and can't catch him. And so they move right past our corral before he can get his THRMB up, and we're heading straight towards Joe. So Joe's down in this little meadow, you know, down the slope over this knoll from where the horses are at, surrounded by trees. But it's like this little clearing, it's maybe seventy five feet around of grass excuse me. And there's a bunch of small trees and bigger trees right in there that kind of ring it. And then if you keep going down that hill another one hundred yards, you'll hit a creek and then on the other side of that is Skukum Ridge and you'll go up through the thickest forest you've ever seen in your life. So anyways, so this thing drops down right by Joe. They're I mean, he's saying he can hear them moving right by where Joe's at.

1:04:57 So he gets over the little rise. Well, they had moved off from where Joe was at and headed down around these trees back to where there's this main logging road that goes down to the creek and you could hear them moving down that trail, but they're just through the trees where his night visions not picking them up, but he can hear them, and so he's chasing after him. He looks over sees Joe. Joe's laying on his back, face up, not moving. Thought he was asleep. So so anyways, he moves down, He gets through the trees, gets down onto that logan road where they'd already gone down the logging road, which you know, one hundred yards, and we're back in the trees on this side of the creek, crashing through the trees. So he runs down to where they're crashed through the trees and they were already going they'd already crossed the creek and we're headed up the other hillside and they're moving at a steady rate. He said, it didn't sound like they ever sped up. They were just moving quickly. And he said it sounded like you know, a f two fifty going through the trees going uphill, just crash boom, crash, crash crash, and until it just got they went over a ridge and it got quiet.

1:06:07 So he turned around, walked back up that that logan road which goes right right next to where we're camped at and uh waits up for a bit, doesn't hear anything, goes back to sleep. So so that was the end of his night. So here's where it gets spooky. So he wasn't the only one that woke up at three in the morning. Joe also woke up at three in the morning. Joe said, he woke up. It was laying on his back. He woke up and saw two silhouettes towering over the top of them like looking down at him, and you know, just massive, massive silhouettes and they were just standing there looking at him, not making any noise, just just looking at him. And he said he wanted to reach down and grab his night vision to pull it up and record this, but he couldn't move. He was frozen. He said that couldn't move his arms, couldn't couldn't lift his head. He said, all he could do is have his eyes open. And he said, you know, no glowing eyes, nothing like that, just two black silhouettes.

1:07:22 And he said that they noticed that his eyes were open, you know that he's kind of looking at him. So they turned and they moved off and they went down the hill. Now, Joe said he was frozen for about a half hour or so, and then finally he could start moving around again. And the next morning we wake up and I'm like, guys, guys, I heard voices last night, and the other guy tells you, well, I'm more than that. And then Joe's Joe's pack and he's leaving, and it was Saturday. We're supposed to be there for two days. But Joe had something real unfortunate happened back at his house. He had to get home, and I joke with him, Oh, no, you you got scared. But because Joe's fearless, it's just fun, he says. But I want to tell you this what happened last night. I woke up and there were two of them towering over the top of me, and I looked up. I couldn't move, man, he says. I tried.

1:08:17 I tried my hardest, just just even even lift my head up. I couldn't. I was just stunned. And he said, as soon as you know, after a few seconds, they noticed my eyes were open, they turned and walked off. And he said it was about three in the morning. Because he said, I laid there for about a half hour till I could move again. And and then I don't know if he checked his clock or whatever, but he has a pretty good sense of time. So I think what happened, and this is just me saying what I think is is the I heard him at two talking they're they're a little bit further away from Hammock Guy. And and then over an hour they came back in and we're probably going to come in and look real close at our camp, Hammock Guy. And because Hammock Guy stirred, they moved off. And I think when they moved off and went past the horses and dropped down the hill, they stopped Joe to take a look at him. And then when Hammick Guy came running down the hill, then they took off from where Joe was at and continued on down the hill and crossed the creek and back up the other ridge. Now that's my take on it.

1:09:22 We found no tracks. Oh, my listening devices worked until two in the morning and went dead. The batteries are supposed to last eight hours, and those bad boys and you can hear my horses stomping around and stuff on it. You know, At least I think it's the horses. But then batteries went dead again. You know, I had them too far down the hill because Joe was so far down the hill. I wanted to put him kind of down by him a little bit because I thought, well, we have bait, so anyways, and I probably shouldn't call Joe bait, but anyways, we had him downhill. But so that was twenty twenty two and we didn't find any tracks. We looked nothing. Yeah, so I still have twenty three, twenty four, and twenty five. Yeah.

1:10:04 Wow, it's so wild. I mean, I. Oh, it gets crazier. Not a lot of interviews. Do I get nervous during the person retail, Like that's some intense stuff, Gary, like extreme, and I'm sure it's you know, you probably had other things happen that are right up there with it, but I mean, my goodness, that's that's intense. Yeah. It's it's like falling off a cliff. You know, you have the fear of of I'm falling, I'm gonna hit bottom. It's that intense. It's like, you know, I'm gonna honestly, for some reason, the thought of I'm going to die, and you know they haven't they really hadn't made any attempts to kill us or anything, but they do try to scare us off. The one attempt that I would say is in twenty twenty four, and I'll tell that in another thing that I called the Odyssey too.

1:10:59 That's where they pushed it free down above the horse and the horse almost went off a cliff and and uh, we were so screwed. We're we're in a spot where it's miles to get down a hill and there's trees laying across the trail, so it's slow going man. And uh, and they set a trap for us. I think that triggered this whole thing up. And I'll get into that on a on another on at another time. But you know, I think what's important with anything that's happened to me, and I haven't really heard many other people talk about this is their speech. You know. They they talk like humans. They're not they're not apes, they're not like nothing like that.

1:11:41 And uh, and they're using complete sentences, and the sentences are different. They're not saying the same thing over and over again. They talk to each other. And you know, uh, my my mother uh Iroquois Indian descent, she always said, they're forced people, not forced monkeys, you know, and nobody really talks about that and their interactions with people. You know, and I don't want to get your your your site tagged, but you know the giant bones that are found all over America that nobody talks about, and then they go, oh, where's the bones, but you know they found over a thousand bones over eight feet tall, some of them go fifteen twenty and you know Smithsonian has them, that's where they're at. But you know, stuff like that. It's just a lot of this just comes together. One thing I found though, and for people that want to see these things, is don't wear camo. Don't you're not hunting them. That's just not going to happen. If you want to have an encounter of any kind, just just be a camper having fun where bright colors make a ton of noise, and if they're in the area, they'll hear you and they'll come in. If they're not in the area, you know, they're not going to come in. And if they're in the area, they may come in and and and keep a distance, you know, depending on what you look like, what you're doing. But if you're having fun, and laughing, and for some reason that just draws them in, and the horses draw them in, you know, just all these

1:13:12 things draw them in. And fortunately we found a place in the summer they go to all the time. But like I said, they're at stub Stewart, which is west of Portland by you know, twenty miles west of Portland. They're above Timber at Rears Horse Camp. They're up in there. They're they're at Northrup Creek, which is between Timber and Astoria. They're I mean, they're they're up at Mount Adams. Any place, any campground we go to, these things are in there. You know, they're they're nearby, and they're they're not rare and people, you know, what just astounds me is the four horsemen. Most of them never saw one, you know, and I'm like, well, geez, I swing a cat. I mean, they're everywhere, and and maybe it's because of our horses that we're seeing so many and have so much activity, but it just astounds me that people that really try to haunt them aren't finding them, you know. And one thing I'd like to put out there is is that the people that I'm going out with up up to merlthood with are kind of getting up in the years and they can't really go up some of these trails that my girlfriend and I go up. I would like to invite somebody to come in that will go up the back side of this thing, because we can't take our horse up anymore. And you'll find out in twenty twenty four why it's just too dangerous. But somebody that will go up that ridge, make a lot of noise and then come back down to camp because that brings them back in. But if somebody wants an encounter, I'll

1:14:43 put it out there. I'll take them in. I'll take them up and show them right where you need to go at twilight and make a bunch of noise. Wear bright shirts, just just pound out some you know, beat drums, whatever you want to do, and that'll bring them back down. And then other it'll bring them back down so other people can have encounters. But yeah, they're they're all over the place. I mean, they're it's not that rare. I've seen. I've seen more bigfoot than I have black bears, except for the one at the bottom of my driveway. It lives there, so I see it all the time. But right yeah, Oh my goodness, it is. It is so incredible. I can't imagine. I mean, I think you're right though. You know, it doesn't matter where you're camping around Mount Hood, you're gonna have stuff happen. The likelihood that something's gonna happen is extremely high. I mean, they're just all over the place out there.

1:15:33 Yeah, you have to be aware of it. They'll listen, listen for weird l sounds, weird stuff that's not normal sounds, and and they're in there. You know, if it goes real quiet, that's a definite sign they're in there at least a hould. So anyways, well I have, uh, I have three more years of stuff. Gary, so we got to get through it. It's it's an incredible I mean, it really is an odyssey multiple odyssees. And thank you so much for coming on again. And we will definitely set up something a time for you to come back and see where the next year's take us after twenty twenty two. But thank you so much for coming on. If you can check out Gary's videos that he's got out that he put back a few years ago, just look up a Bigfoot research project on YouTube.

1:16:32 I'll have the link more soon, perfect, perfect link. There'll be a lot more up there. Awesome, that's great. But thank you again, Gary so much for coming on my pleasure. Look forward to getting the rest of this off my chest. All right. 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 from 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 gonna 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. 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

1:18:06 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. It's just trust 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.

1:18:49 Can get a little 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 forestry 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've 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 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 while 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,

1:20:21 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. 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 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?

1:21:53 And see you in the woods.