Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “My girlfriend and I decided to backpack in with our 2 dogs for a camping trip to Boulder Lake campground in Oregon around the base of Mt. Hood.

The hike is approximately 3/4 of a mile from the parking area. The lake is fairly secluded and we had to drive down some pretty narrow dirt roads which are old forest service/logging road roads to reach the parking area. This was our first time visiting the lake and I was surprised how many other people were out at this little place. We hiked in to Boulder lake and continued to hike around the lake only to find that all of the camp sites were taken.

Lucky for us there was a smaller less traveled lake just another 3/4 of a mile in called Little Boulder Lake. We set off, found the lake which had no camp grounds and only 1 man made camp site. Another couple, just 1 guy and girl had already claimed the campsite. We kind of stumbled upon them and walked through their camp saying hi on our way through. From here on we followed the trail as it got smaller and disappeared about 100 yards or so away. Anxious to get our backpacks off and set up camp we scanned around and found a place. We had to clear an area in the woods at the side of the lake for our 2 man tent.

We still wanted to explore and let our dogs off leash, so we decided to walk around Little Boulder Lake that we were camped at. There was no trail around the lake and we just bushwacked it. The ground is pretty much covered in sphagnum moss and small plants. Most of the sun is blocked by the tall pine trees. Back at our tent and still not satisfied, we threw the leashes back on our pups and headed back on the main trail through Bolder Lake on the way to Bonney Meadows. In between Little Boulder and Boulder lake we saw a couple of people picking blue berries and huckle berries just off the main trail. I had also been picking berries as I was walking because they were delicious!

We walked through Bolder lake campground to get to the Bonney Meadows trail head and continued on. The trail wound through the woods and came out on the side of a mountain. Hikers left (up) was all rock slide and hikers right (down) was forest, berries, saplings and old growth trees. Right about when the trail came out of the denser woods onto the side of the mountain we ran into the only other people that we saw on the hike heading in the opposite direction. They were the couple which were the only other 2 people from Little Boulder Lake. We said hi as we passed and that was that.

We continued to hike on with our dogs on leash for another 5 minutes or so when I thought that I heard someone talking off to our right in the bushes and trees. I thought nothing of it at first and then thought it would be fun to quiet down and try to locate the voices. I stopped Erin and told her to be quiet and listen, the dogs did the same. We waited quietly, but the talking seemed to stop just as we got quiet. Erin didn’t hear anything to begin with, so after maybe 10-15 seconds we just continued on. As we continue on I am thinking about the voices and thinking that they were loud enough that I could hear. It was choppy like English, but didn’t seem to be words that I recognized. It gave me the same sense of hearing a foreign language with similar structure as English, my first language.

About 45 seconds later Erin stops in her tracks and looks right and tells me to shut it. At this point I look over to the right and see a reddish/brownish hairy thing, mostly behind a huge oldgrowth pine. I immediately got chills thinking that we just stumbled across a bear. I watched the figure go completely behind the big tree after maybe 2 seconds and then immediately a crashing through the blue berry bushes directly behind the huge pine. I recall it seemed like 3 huge bounds where I could see bushes moving on either side of the big tree which was blocking the view of the creature. After the 3 bounds it was silent again.

At this point I thought that I had just seen a black bear standing up on its hind quarters. It made sense that it just took off as they tend to do if they are startled and don’t feel the need to defend anything. I have seen many beers, I grew up commercial fishing in SE. Alaska, I used to see black bears almost daily at my house which is surrounded in blue berry bushes. The fur I saw that day was much more red in color and a lot longer than what I have seen up in AK. I have seen a lot of lighter colored bears and many coastal brown bears and they were not nearly as red/orange as what I saw up on the mountain.

Our dogs did not change as if they had smelled anything, they seemed oblivious to anything that may have been around us. I asked Erin why she stopped us in the first place and she said she heard a low growl or something off to the right where I saw the figure. I think I was talking as I like to do and did not hear any grunt, growl or noise until after I looked over and saw the fur which was over some smaller saplings which were an estimated 6′ or so high, which is why I thought that I had just seen a black bear standing up. I then heard as the animal left the scene in a hurry. Erin did not have her glasses and can’t see as well as me at that distance (60 yards maybe less).

At this point I’m thinking bear, but weird that the fur was so different looking and I had just heard talking just right by the sighting of the creature, so people must have been really close to the bear yet it seemed that we were the ones that spooked it. Just didn’t add up. We were on kind of high alert, fully aware that we were walking out around all sorts of good food that predators would be eating. I started to shout and make lots of noise to put us at ease and allow for any bears to hear we were coming so we didn’t startle one and get a charge (I’ve been charged before when I caught one off guard in AK, scary stuff).

We continued on to the meadow trail, but about 10 minutes or so of walking brought us back into the woods. We were on the shady side of the mountain and by that time we were losing daylight. The woods seemed pretty spooky and dark plus we were a little jumpy, so after about 5 minutes of walking in the darker woods we chickened out and turned around. I hadn’t ever felt like this down in Oregon, so I picked up some rocks off the trail and started clacking them together repeatedly for the rest of the hike back just to give some assurance we wouldn’t spook a bear. We walked back through Boulder Lake Campground and to Little boulder lake where we had our camp set up.

That evening we had a tiny fire, ate dinner and went to bed relatively early. The next incident is when I woke up in the middle of the night, pitch black out. Then right across the lake about 50 feet away I hear a loud clear as day rocks clack together, just as I had done on the hike back. I look over at Erin who is already sitting up and ask if she just heard that, she replied that she had just heard one right before the one that I heard. She had heard a total of 2 clacks and I heard 1. I think the clacking woke Erin up first and the first clack that she was awake for woke me up and I heard the last one. These were loud enough to wake us up, so we were a little spooked, the dogs were up, but quiet. We went back to sleep and that was it.

I’ve hiked, camped, canoed, and been in the out doors my whole life and never had anything like these 3 things in a row that just seemed odd.”