It was October 2019 and I learned then Sasquatch is real.
Me and the other men in the group all saw it.
It stood at the top of a ridge and watched us for nearly four minutes.
Nine feet tall, dark, completely still.
And when it finally left it didn't run.
It turned and mocked, slow, deliberate strides like it wasn't afraid of a single thing
on that mountain.
There were six of us.
We had rifles, but it didn't matter.
I've been guiding hunters in the Bob Marshall Wilderness for more than twenty years, and
I'd never seen anything like what I saw that morning.
And since then I have almost never talked about it.
But every man in my party saw the exact same thing that I saw.
And I'm done pretending we didn't see a thing.
My name is Gary, and this is my Sasquatch story.
First, I have to tell you something about that country because it's important.
The Bob Marshall Wilderness in Northwest Montana is not a place you wander into casually.
It's one of the largest roadless wilderness areas in the lower 48 states.
Over a million acres are federally designated, and it's surrounded on all sides by another
twelve million acres of National Forest and Wilderness.
No roads, no cell service, no help.
And then twenty miles in any direction.
The terrain there is both savage and beautiful.
Jagged limestone reefs, miles of ancient Douglas Furs, and river drainages that are so remote,
some of them don't see half a dozen humans in a given year.
I've been guiding elk hunts into the Bob for over two decades, working out of a Wal-Tent
camp that gets set up each September in a high drainage on the western slope.
I know this country the way most people know their backyards.
I run four mules on my pack train.
They're good, seasoned animals, and they've all made that pack out route many, many times.
The mules carry the meat in the gear.
Everyone in the party, that is me, my Wrangler, and the four hunters I had that day.
We were all riding horses.
The 2019 season had been a good one.
That day I had a party at four hunters, all capable, experienced men.
There were two brothers from Missouri, a retired game warden from Idaho, and a rancher from
eastern Montana.
By day eight, three of the four elk tags were filled.
The animals were quartered, boned out, and loaded into game bags hanging in the trees.
By the morning of day ten, everything was broken down and packed up.
My Wrangler is a guy named Corey.
Now Corey's been riding with me for six seasons.
Corey had the mule string loaded and moving down the drainage by seven that morning.
It was twelve miles to the trailhead.
We do that in a day.
We're usually loading up the horse trailers by mid-afternoon.
For the first ten miles out that morning, everything went just like it should.
However, the same cannot be said for the last two miles.
Later on I came to figure out that Corey felt something was off first.
He told me it started around the ten mile mark on the trail.
This section where the drainage opens up before dropping off into a long, timbreed corridor
that runs the final two miles to the trailhead.
He said, "It wasn't a feeling of fear, exactly.
It was more like a certainty of being watched.
There was a prickling at the back of his neck, and he couldn't reason it away."
Corey was riding drag.
Last in line behind the mule string.
He told me that the feeling hit him at almost exactly the same time that Duchess, the mule
right in front of him, started throwing her head.
Ears hard forward, nostrils wide, her body posture tight.
Duchess is the steadiest mule I think I've ever put on a string.
She doesn't spook at shadows or blow up at grouse, flushing out of the brush.
Not Corey described, "Wasn't a quick spook."
This was more of an alarm and alert.
You know, mules are better than most dogs at knowing when there's something out there,
and Duchess knew.
There are grislies in that country, not a lot of them, but enough that you're smart enough
to keep your eyes moving, especially when you're packing out with meat.
So Corey's first thought was bare.
He thought Duchess had picked up a scent somewhere.
He stood up in the stirrups, scanned behind him, then forward along the mule string, then
down into the trees on both sides of the trail.
There was nothing.
He quickly looked up into the canopy above, thinking about mountain lions.
Still nothing.
Then he swept the ridge above the timber corridor.
There was nothing he could see.
He pulled his rifle out and laid it across the saddle in front of him.
Then he sent word up to the first rider after the mule string.
Told him, "Keep your eyes open.
Might be a bear."
And then told him to pass it on forward.
So then all six of us had our heads on swivels.
For context in the order that we were riding, I was at the front.
Flying me were the two Missouri brothers, then the rancher and the game warden.
Then there were the four mules in a string loaded with meat and gear, but no riders.
And Corey was the last.
He had his rifle out and watching everything behind and above us.
Less than a quarter mile after Corey passed the word up, one of the Missouri brothers pulled
his horse up beside mine and quietly said, "Hey, there's something moving up."
On that ridge.
I stopped and I looked left.
The last two miles of that trail ran through a timbered corridor with an open slope climbing
steeply to a rocky ridge line on the left side.
The crest sits roughly 400 yards above the trail.
Open ground up there, just scattered sub-Alpine fur, some rock outcroppings, and brown October
grass bent flat in the wind.
I have ridden past that ridge line every fall for over twenty years.
I know what it looks like.
I know the silhouette of almost every animal that belongs on it.
There was a figure there at the crest.
Standing upright.
Perfectly motionless.
And it was a silhouette I couldn't match to any animal that should be up there.
My first thought, that must be another hunter.
That thought lasted about two seconds, right up until I really looked at it.
Reading terrain, judging distance, estimating the size of animals against known land marks.
Well, that's my job.
I do it every day in the field.
So I use the sub-Alpine fur's nearest to the figure as my reference.
I know those trees.
I've ridden up their past them for over two decades.
In that wind-stunted zone near the ridge crust, they top out at about twelve to fifteen feet.
The figure was taller than their lowest branches.
Accounting for the distance and the uphill angle, I put it standing hide at somewhere between
seven and a half to nine feet.
And it was standing, fully, completely upright.
This wasn't the awkward, hunched posture of a bear up on its hind legs.
It was nothing like that.
And it stood straight.
And still.
And the build of it.
It was, like nothing, I have a reference point for.
Massive through the chest and shoulders.
This proportionately wide in a way that no human body ever achieves.
The arms hung too long, dropping well past where a person's hands would rest.
The head, that was large.
And it sat down directly on the shoulders with almost no neck between shoulder and head.
The whole figure was covered in a dark, shaggy hair that was moving in the wind.
This wasn't fabric, wasn't any kind of gear or a gilly suit.
It was nothing manufactured from the look of it.
It was hair, like the kind an animal has.
He was facing downslope, and it was looking right at us.
All six of us had now stopped.
All four mules had their heads up.
The whole string had gone completely still, and the only sound was the October wind moving
through the furs above the trail.
We all just watched, and nobody spoke for a long time.
Then the rancher, and I want you to understand something about this man before I tell you
what he said.
This rancher is a fourth-generation Montana rancher stock.
He's worked with cattle and hunted hard country his entire life.
You do this kind of job.
You spend ten days out in the wilderness with any man, and you will get a very good feel
for him.
And this rancher, he's not the kind that will spook or jump.
But he looked up at that ridge for a long moment, and he looked at me and he said in the
same flat voice that he used for everything.
That is not a bear.
That wasn't a question or a guess.
That was a statement from a man who has seen bears on and off his whole life, and he was
telling me quite clearly he knew he was not looking at one.
Nobody said a word back about that.
There was no argument to be had, and there was nothing to add to it.
We watched it there on the ridge for somewhere between two and four minutes.
I know I've replayed it so many times.
I can't be certain of the exact length anymore.
But it was long enough in full daylight on an open slope with nothing between us, for all
six of us men to get a clear, unobstructed look.
It did not move once the entire time we watched it.
It stood at that ridge crest, and it watched us.
It was unhurried, unbothered by us.
There didn't seem to be any aggression.
There was no alarm, no attempt to retreat into cover or hiding.
It stood there, and it simply observed us, exactly as we were observing it.
And whatever was going through its mind, fear or concern was not part of it.
Then it simply turned away from us, slow and deliberate, no panic in its movement.
It was as if it had had enough of looking at us, and it walked back over to the far side
of the ridge, then down the slope and out of sight.
Long, ground eating strides.
It was nothing like the way a person walks.
Within thirty seconds it was gone below the crest.
Not just dropped her head, the very instant it disappeared, and she blew hard through
her nose.
Then every mule on the string settled down at the same time, like some switch had been
thrown.
I'd had enough, I plucked my horse forward.
We rode the last two miles to the trailhead, without a single word being said, but all
of us were watching all around us.
I didn't open the conversation until the mules were unloaded.
The meat was in the coolers, and the trailer was hitched.
I wanted all the work done first.
And that seemed fine with everybody else.
It was like they were nervous or they were processing their own thoughts, or maybe they
didn't want to talk about it at all, because there was hardly words spoken, even as we
did the work.
Now, when I did ask, I had each man describe what he saw separately away from the others,
so they didn't influence each other's words.
And all of them described the exact same thing, the exact same thing I saw.
They were correct in the height, the build, the long arms, the dark hair, the way it stood,
the way it left.
And every single detail, we were all in agreement.
The game-morden, a man who's been over 30 years in the field professionally observing and
identifying wildlife, said he had no logical explanation for what he saw.
He said it plainly, clearly, the way he said everything.
He didn't elaborate, but he didn't need to.
The word logical really hung in the air between all of us.
We knew the word we would use, but for some reason we didn't.
One of the Missouri brothers said something sitting on the tailgate of the ranchers truck
that I haven't stopped thinking about since he said it.
He said whatever that was, it was not afraid of us, not even a little.
He had six people, four mules, six horses and rifles.
And it stood up there in the open, and it watched us like we were the strange ones, like
we were the ones that didn't belong.
I've turned over those words just about every day for the past six and a half years, and
I've never found anything wrong with what he said.
He was correct.
Now the following week after that siding, for lack of a better word, I went right back
into the bob with Cory, just the two of us.
We hiked up to that ridge line, and we walked the ground where we knew it had been standing.
There were no visible tracks, but the ground up there was disturbed in ways that neither
of us could account for.
Large areas of churned up soil.
And the branches broken off the downslope furs at a height that we couldn't reach without
a ladder.
And a depression pressed into the soft earth near the high point of the crest that Cory
measured at roughly 16 and a half inches long, and almost eight inches wide across the
widest part.
After all of that, here is what I know.
I have been going into the bob marshal for over two decades.
I have encountered every animal that lives in those mountains in every kind of light, distance,
weather, and type of condition.
What was standing up on that ridge watching us pack out?
Was not any of those.
And the other thing I keep coming back to, really, more than the size, more than the way it moved.
Is what I said to Cory on the drive home that night?
I told him I believed it had followed us along the far side of that drainage for the full
last two miles to the trailhead.
Not because I saw it again.
I didn't.
But because I could feel it.
And after two decades in wild country, I know the difference between thinking you're being
watched and knowing that you are.
I think it wanted to see where we were going.
It wanted to make sure we were leaving.
And when we pulled out of that trailhead and drove away, I think it had its answer.
And here's another thing.
I know very well that we all thought it was a Sasquatch.
But on that day, not a single one of us would say it.
I think the hunters were looking to me and Cory to say it first.
After all, we were on our turf and our territory.
We knew it best.
But we sure weren't going to say it for a lot of reasons.
But I will say again that when you spend ten days or more out in the wilderness with different
men, you learn to get the feel for them and you learn to do it very quickly.
And I do get a feel for every man.
Pretty early on.
That's how I help give them the best hunt of their life.
I'm just saying that I knew a little something of each of those men by that point.
And I could see it in their eyes.
Sasquatch.
That was a word that was hanging around in their minds.
But no one said it out loud.
I am certain beyond any doubt we had a Sasquatch watching us that day.
I watch that ridge line every time we pack through there.
I have not seen it again.
And I don't think I want to.
But every time I'm down in that timber canyon, I am reminded of many old stories about Sasquatch's,
watching prospectors and other men on horses from up on high way on ridge lines.
Now most of those stories, as you probably know, don't have great endings for those
men on horseback.
Thankfully, ours was different.
Signed Gary from Show 2 Montana.
You've been listening to The Buckeye Bigfoot Podcast.
Find more stories, hundreds more, over on our YouTube channel.
Just look for Buckeye Bigfoot.