Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “My encounter takes place during July 2012 on the Mogollon Rim. I have been out “bigfooting” in this area on many occasions over the years, both alone and with friends.

I had been sent to fill in at one of my company’s stores in a nearby town on a Friday, and figured I would bring my camping gear with me and go bigfooting on the Mogollon Rim after work. The particular area I ended up going to is covered by pine and fir forest for many miles in all directions. After work that night, I turned off of a side road onto an even more primitive road, where I parked in an open area and began to get my sleeping bag and sleeping pad set up in the bed of my truck. This was about 1:30 in the morning, and there were not any other campers in the area.

The first big monsoon rain had happened in this area earlier in the day, and it was it a moonless, starry night, with some residual clouds floating overhead. The forest was absolutely quiet, which was somewhat unusual, in retrospect. Not even a cricket was chirping. I recall that it was so quiet that I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. A few minutes after I parked my truck, I heard a loud snap a few hundred feet off to my right, somewhere in the tree line.

It sounded like a decent sized branch breaking. It caught my attention, but I figured it was probably just an elk, as there are thousands of elk on the Mogollon Rim. A few minutes later I heard another crack of a branch breaking in the tree line, this time to my left. Becoming intrigued at this point, I stopped getting my gear ready, turned off the light in the bed of my truck, and began to listen. After several minutes of silence, I picked up a couple of small rocks at my feet and clapped them together to try and elicit a response. No response was heard. I tried it a second time. Within a few seconds, I heard the distinctive sound of two rocks clapping together from the trees to my right. I couldn’t believe it, and began to get excited. It sounded like something was responding to me!

I clapped my rocks together a third time, but got no response. All went quiet again. A couple of minutes later, the stillness of the night was abruptly shattered by a very loud crash in the bushes maybe 30 feet in front of me. It sounded like a bowling ball had come flying out of the air and smashed into the bushes. This scared the hell out of me, so I opened the door of my truck, jumped in and then locked the door.

As far as I could tell, a rock had just been thrown at me. After the fear had subsided, I recounted what had just happened as a voice recording into my iPod. I decided that it might be best to camp down the road a ways rather than risk camping where I had parked. I slept in the bed of my truck that night, and had no further activity. I hiked around the area the next day, and noted a set of big tracks in the thick pine needles at one point. I am 6 foot 4 inches, and whatever had made them had a longer stride than me. I left the area that afternoon, and stopped at the spot where I had my experience the night before. I was looking for a natural or non-bigfoot explanation of what might have caused that loud crash in the bushes.

There was a large piece of bark hanging down from a tree, which I lifted up, and then let it fall again. That wasn’t the noise I had heard. I began searching the ground for any loose rocks. All of the rocks in the bush area were firmly in the soil, and none had been disturbed following the rain the day before. I finally found one loose rock, the size of my fist, laying on the ground. While there is no way to know for sure, I was convinced that this had been the rock that was thrown at me. I took it home as a souvenir. I think that the creature that threw it just wanted to scare me away, and that is why it threw the rock in my direction, but not right at me. Unless it had terrible aim…”