5 people went into five different forests and coastlines across America.
These are not stories of brief shadows, were strange noises in the dark.
These were clear sightings, leaving no room for doubt.
And each of these people walked away with a new understanding.
But we don't know and understand everything that's out there.
And that just because we go into the wilderness to be alone, it doesn't mean we're really alone.
[Music]
Tongus National Forest Alaska, June of 2021.
I run a small commercial fishing operation out of Petersburg, Alaska.
In June of 2021 I was working a stretch of coastline on the western side of Couprian
off Island, anchored in a small bay overnight before moving to the next set of pots in the
morning.
It was the second week of June.
At that latitude in June there's no real darkness.
The light dims at around 11.30 and comes back up around 2 in the morning.
Right twilight, that's what we have all night long.
I have worked those waters for 22 years, I'm used to that light.
I came up on deck around one in the morning to check my anchor.
The bay I was in was small, maybe 400 yards across at the mouth, surrounded on three sides
by dense Sitka spruce and western hemlock that comes right down to the high tide line.
The shore was about 150 yards off my port side.
When I came up on deck I was looking at the shoreline absolutely, not really focused,
just checking conditions.
And then I focused.
There was something walking along the tide line.
It was walking on two legs, standing straight up.
I could see it clearly in the gray twilight against the lighter color of the wet rocks.
It was walking slowly along the shore from south to north in the intertidal zone.
And it was bending down occasionally to pick something up.
Turning rocks, I realized.
The exactly the same way a person turns rocks looking for something underneath them.
I went to my pilot house and got my marine binoculars.
They are good optics, 7x50, made for low light marine use.
By the time I got back on deck and got the glasses up.
The figure was still there, still working the tide line.
What I saw through those binoculars, I will describe as best as I can.
It was very tall.
I estimate it was eight feet, possibly more.
I base that on comparison to the spruce that was behind it.
The body was covered in shaggy, dark gray hair.
It's a color I've never really hardly seen described in other accounts that I've read
on since.
This wasn't brown or black, but a strange, wet looking dark gray.
The hair was longer over most of the body, and it hung in heavy clumps that swayed as it
moved.
The arms were extremely long.
When it bent at the waist to turn over a rock, its hands reached the ground without it
needing to crouch, and it wasn't bent in half to reach the ground.
The shoulders were enormous, they were sloped, very round, and rolled forward.
The head sat low between them with a visible crust along the top of the skull.
It was foraging.
There was no other word for it.
It would walk a few steps, stop, turn over a rock, examine what was underneath, and either
eat what it found or move on.
I watched it work the tide line for approximately twelve minutes.
It found and consumed several items I could not identify at that distance, possibly small
crabs or shellfish.
At a certain point it straightened up and looked out across the water.
It was facing in my direction.
Whether it saw the boat I cannot say was certainty.
I had no lights on, and the boat was dark against the spruce on the opposite shore, but I had
the distinct sense that it was aware of something.
It stood at the tide line and looked across the bay for close to a minute, seemingly searching
for something.
Then it turned and walked into the spruce timber and was gone.
I lowered the binoculars and stood on the deck for a long time afterward.
I've worked that coastline for more than two decades.
In that time I've seen all kinds of animals, brown bears, black bears, and every kind of marine
animal you can think of.
I've also seen humans on that shore too, although a few and far in between.
If I didn't know what something was at first glance, it was easily cleared up with my binoculars.
I guess it was cleared up for me that day too.
I just had a hard time swallowing it at the time.
I saw it.
I knew what it was.
But seeing a big foot?
It was a hard swallow I had just seen that.
I had just seen a sask watch, but I have no doubts, not even today.
For the record, I have not anchored in that bay since.
See Bola National Forest, New Mexico, October 2020.
For a few years I was a wildland firefighter.
In October of 2020 my crew was working a prescribed burn in the See Bola National Forest in
Central New Mexico.
We were spread out along a control line on the eastern edge of the burn, monitoring spot
fires.
I was on the line by myself, walking a section of about a quarter mile.
Then I saw movement in the unburned timber to the east of the line.
About 60 feet inside the timber, standing motionless behind a large ponderosa pine and watching
the fire line, was a large figure that looked to be walking on two legs.
The smoke from the burn was drifting through the timber and the visibility was much reduced.
But I still had a clear view of it from the chest up, partially screened by the pine.
The hair on it was a copper reread.
I don't mean orange or brown or cinnamon.
This was a distinct color of red that I have never seen on any animal there in the southwest.
The shoulders were broad, the neck was thick, mostly absent.
The face was flat, dark-skinned, and the eyes were watching the fire.
Very carefully.
It did not appear to have noticed me yet.
Its attention was on the burn, not on the line.
I stood completely still.
It continued to watch the fire for perhaps 30 seconds may be a minute.
Then it suddenly turned its head and looked directly at me.
We held eye contact for what I estimate was 10 to 15 seconds.
Its expression did not change.
I detected no aggression and there was no startled response when it saw me.
It simply noticed me and looked.
Then it took three slow steps backward without turning.
And then it disappeared behind the larger trees of the timber.
It just went from being there to not being there.
I keyed my radio and reported large mammal sighting to my crew boss without being specific.
I held my position on the line until the burn was contained.
I did not investigate the timber.
I told my crew boss the full account at the engine that evening.
He told me he had heard similar accounts from other firefighters in that district and
a few others over the years.
Then he advised that I should keep the story to myself if I valued my career advancement.
Well, I kept it to myself for several years.
I'm no longer a firefighter there.
I can put it on record now.
Manusdene National Forest, Michigan, August 2019.
My wife and I have been kayaking together for 15 years.
In August of 2019, we were on day three of a four day kayak camping trip on the Pine River
in the Manusdene National Forest in Lower Michigan.
The Pine is a designated wild and scenic river, narrow, fast in places, with limited road
access and long stretches of river bank that are wild on both sides.
We had paddled about 12 miles that day and pulled off in mid-afternoon at one of the rustic
river side sites.
The site sat at the inside of a long bend with a small clearing for tents and a dense
wall of cedar and hemlock behind it.
The far bank of the river rose steeply into mature hardwoods.
We had camp set up by four.
By six we were sitting on our camp chairs at the river's edge with coffee, watching the
water.
The river at this point was about forty feet wide.
My wife saw it first.
She put her hand on my arm and pointed across the river without saying anything.
I followed where her eyes went.
It was standing at the water's edge directly across from us.
It had come down the slope without either of us hearing it.
It was literally forty feet from where we sat.
At that range in the clear afternoon light we had a very good, unobstructed look at it.
It was tall but not extremely so.
I put it in the six-foot range of height.
But it also was not as massively built through the chest and shoulders as most descriptions
you usually hear.
This build seemed to me to be more athletic, more lean.
The shoulders were broad but proportionate to the body.
The waist was very visible and much more narrow than the chest.
The legs were long and well muscled.
The arms were longer than human arms but not in an exaggerated way.
The overall impression of this creature was that it was powerfully built but balanced,
almost graceful rather than hooking.
The hair was a medium brown and it was lighter on the shoulders the chest and the abdomen
and darker on the back and on the limbs.
The hair looked to be relatively short, clean and lying flat against the body.
The face was very visible, it was dark-skinned.
The features sat flat and there was a high forehead and the eyes were spread apart on
the face.
There was no sagittal crest that I could see.
The features seemed to be more human in their proportion.
The expression was alert, focused, interested.
There was nothing threatening or aggressive.
If I had to pick a word, it would be curious.
I want to say plainly that both my wife and I had the same impression independently, that
what we were looking at was a young specimen and adolescent, not fully grown.
Their proportions, the leanness, the cautious but yet unguarded way that it watched us.
All of it said juvenile to us.
It was kind of the way a very young child will watch something and it doesn't know if it's
safer not to approach it.
It stood there at the water line for what we estimate was close to two minutes.
We did not move during that time and neither did it.
When we suddenly heard a sound from somewhere uphill, it was a single, low, echoing thump.
It was very hollow sounding, like wood on wood.
The figure turned its head sharply uphill in response.
It listened for a half second, then it turned, took several long strides up the bank and
into the timber and was gone.
That sound from uphill did not come again.
We sat in our camp chairs with our coffee for a very long time.
It was a couple minutes before we spoke.
Finally, my wife, her shock wearing off, finally asked if I had seen what she had just seen,
and I told her yes I did.
We then compared what we had each observed.
We agreed on every detail.
We briefly talked about packing up and paddling out to a road access in the dark, but we decided
against it.
The river is dangerous in the dark.
We hadn't felt threatened, and as we discussed it, we both came to the same conclusion.
What we had seen was a young Sasquatch, and young animals like that have parents.
And whatever made the sound from uphill, calling the young one back, it was certainly larger.
Calling in a panic in the middle of the night felt foolish.
So we banked our fire and stayed up most of the night, talking quietly and listening.
Nothing else came.
In the morning we broke camp and paddled the rest of the route to our takeout without incident.
When I now think about what we saw, I now think of it with words that most people probably
would never use about a Sasquatch.
Words like beautiful, young, healthy, watchful, and curious.
Now it might be stretching it a bit, but I also think of this word a lot, "innocent."
We both believe it was young enough that it hadn't yet learned that it should stay hidden
from humans.
And perhaps it hadn't even learned about humans until we came along.
I do hope now that it has learned and that it never shows itself to another human.
Sequoia National Forest, California, July 2020.
I was so backpacking in the Sequoia National Forest off trail in the southern Sierra Nevada.
It was late July, hot and dry, low water.
I was working through a steep granite drainage looking for a route to a lake I had not been
to before.
I came around a large granite outcrop and suddenly stopped.
About 40 feet directly below me on a flat granite shelf next to a small remaining pool of snow
melt, an enormous figure was crouched at the edge of that water pool, drinking.
It had not seen me yet.
It was crouched low, squatting on its haunches with its hands resting on the granite, and
it was bringing its face down to the water to drink directly.
Three times it lowered its mouth to the pool, drank, then looked at its head before lowering
it again.
The motion was practiced and unhurried.
This was a known water source for this animal, I was sure.
The size was the first thing that registered.
When crouched, this creature was massive.
The shoulders, when hunched forward over the pool, were nearly as wide as the granite
shelf it was on, which I later returned to, and measured at just under four feet across.
The back was broad and heavily muscled.
The arms folded down onto the rock were thick through the upper arm and forearm, in a way
I've only ever seen in large bears.
The hair was a uniform sandy brown, much lighter than I expected.
It was almost the color of dry pine duff.
The hair was short on the body, no more than an inch or two, which made the underlying
musculature very visible.
When it had finished drinking, it stood up.
I do have trouble giving an accurate estimate on the height of this creature, because I
didn't have anything to use as a measured reference.
But I will say it was big, huge.
I will tell you that it stood from that full crouch to fully erect in one fluid motion.
It didn't use its hands to push up off the shelf.
And when it stood, it was significantly taller than anything I have a frame of reference
for.
I will throw out a number finally, eight feet, possibly more, but I really am not positive
on that number.
As for the weight, again, I can only guess, four, maybe 500 pounds?
It was solid muscle.
I have no idea what something on two legs like that would weigh.
Again, I can't swear on my bank account of that number, but I do work with a guy that's
about 260 pounds on any day.
He's heavily muscled.
He lifts weights.
He's just over six feet tall.
Side by side, I am certain the creature I saw would easily dwarf him.
The creature then turned up hill away from me.
It walked up the granite drainage in a long ground-eating stride.
Within twenty seconds it was gone over the rise.
I sat there a little stunned behind that outcrop for a long time, thinking about what I had just
seen.
I got up and I went back the way I had come.
I did not go to the lake.
Sumter National Forest, South Carolina, March 2023.
I am a forester.
I have worked in the southeastern timber industry for nineteen years.
In March of 2023, I was conducting a private timber cruise on a tractive land bordering
the Sumter National Forest in the upcountry of South Carolina.
I was alone in the woods, which is normal for cruising.
That's all measuring trees, marking plot centers, and recording data.
That's all solitary work.
It was mid-morning, clear day, mid-60s.
I was working a section of mixed pine and hardwood on a gentle slope, taking measurements at
a plot center that I had flagged that morning.
I was kneeling at the base of a chestnut oak, recording data on my tablet, when I had
the sudden and certain feeling of being watched.
I looked up slowly.
Sitting in the timber, approximately thirty feet from me, downhill into my left, was a
large bipedal figure.
It was watching me as I worked.
This build was different from other descriptions I had read.
The figure was extremely lean.
Tall, yes, easily, seven feet plus.
But it was narrow through the rest of the body.
It wasn't hardy and robust in the way a young one might be.
This one looked gaunt on the unhealthy side, sickly, hungry.
The hair was a dark brown, sparse in places, particularly on the chest in the upper legs,
where I could see grayish skin underneath.
The face was visible.
Cheekbones were high and prominent, hollowed out.
The eyes were deep set under a heavy brow.
A lot of wrinkled skin around it.
My immediate impression was that I was looking at a very old one, or a very sick one, or
both.
The figure did not move.
It stood in the trees and watched me.
There was no aggression in this posture.
It was also not out of curiosity.
This look was different.
I'm reaching for the right words here.
I'll go with coldly observant.
It was deciding if it would have to deal with me or not.
Something along those lines, very detached.
We held this position for somewhere between 30 seconds in a full minute.
Honestly, I was a bit too shocked to move for a bit.
But then I managed to get my bare spray unclipped, and I started backing away.
When I moved, it turned very slow.
Gave me a last look.
Then walked downhill through the timbers.
Its movement was slow and careful.
I saw the way it was moving, and I thought again, it must be older and or sick.
It went out of sight through the timber, and I did not see it again.
I stayed at that plot center for another few minutes.
I finished my data entry, and walked back to my truck.
I did not finish the cruise that day.
I came back the following week with a colleague to complete it, but I did not mention the encounter.
Of course, I've thought about it many times since.
I think about it almost every time I go into the forest.
The Sasquatch I saw that day, and I am certain that is what I saw.
I know it had been alive for a very long time.
It must have been through a lot of things, and it had survived.
And there was something about the look it gave me that made me think.
Some of those things that have been through might have been run-ins with humans.
I do not go out now with fear, but I do have more respect than I did before.
Not just for the forest.
But for the things that I don't even know live there.
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