@punkinworks
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4 weeks ago while on a dirt bike ride I had a couple of interesting experiences.
I was riding in an area I have been roaming around for years. The trail climbs several thousand feet over 15 miles. I had climbed up to the point where the road was blocked by snow still, about 7,000′ elev., and at the top of the road system. There is nothing for a 25 mile radius.
I went out on a granite point to have lunch and parked the bike under a tree and took off my helmet. I had such a good ride up the hill I let out a good “hwoooooow”.
A few seconds I heard a “whoot” from a low rise of rock with a line of trees anout 100 yards to my west.
It was an obvious reply to my whooow, so I replied back with a whoot, and got a hoot back.
I hooted back again, this time it freaked out, “woooHOOOT!,woooHOOOT!,woooHOOOT! as it moved to the north in the tree line and deeper into the forest,but in the direction of the way I came in.
It kinda creeped me out for a bit, but I had my lunch out on the rocks until thunderstorms started to build up, so I decided to head back down and go around to the peak behind whereI was currently at.
A ways back down the road, but only about a 1/2 mile cross country from the point I was previously on, I passed through a scent trail.
It was more properly a stench,a mix of nasty wet dog, rotting meat and skunk.
The trail was so powerful that at 35mph it stung my nose and was almost eyewatering.
I stopped about 30 yards past it but couldn’t see anything,but I had dropped around another point.
I watched for a bit but got a little uneasy, and I don’t get uneasy, so I went on about my merry way.
2 weeks ago I was riding in the same area, but had taken a technical route up a granite finger ridge immediately across the canyon from where I was before.
It’s another good lunch vista so I stopped, as soon as I stepped out on the ridge three loud wood knocks came from the direction of the next big ridge to the east. Then a little bit later three sharp sounds a little further to the east and deeper into the forest, and the direction I was headed.
The first set sounded like somebody breaking some of the ample deadwood.
The other sounded like someone chopping wood, no big deal but it’s pretty remote over there and there are no campgrounds or anything.
So I went on about my ride, I did a 30 mile loop of the roads and trails in the area and there was nobody around. As I headed back I noticed a little trail I hadn’t seen before, it was freshly being used and someone on a moto had put a wheel up it in the last couple days. So I was checking it out trying to decide if was going up it that late in the day, and you could see into the forest about 40-50 feet as the sun was at my back and low in the sky. There were young trees and brush mixed with some large adult trees.
As I’m looking into a sunlit gap in the woods a large shadow moved across the gap in the woods. I was kinda taken aback, it was too tall and wide to have been a bear or deer and too stealthy to be cattle, so at first I thought it was a trickof the light.
There was nothing at my back to cast a shadow, so I waited a watched.
A couple minutes later the shadow moved back from behind the big dark tree/shadow on the right, almost as though it was peeking out.
Then it moved back into the shadows, I could tell something was there because it was making the foliage move.
Now my hackles are kinda up and I decide it’s time to leave when a second shadow moves across the the open patch, about 30 seconds later there was a low, quiet “whoot”.
I left at that point.
This spot is in the direction of the second set of wood knocks I had heard earlier in the day, and at the end of the trail that heads out there.
Here is the funny thing, the patch of woods that is between these two points has an intersting history.
When we first started riding the manzinita tunnels and black forest in there, several friends and myself could have sworn someone crossed the trail peaked out from behind a tree in this Tolkienesque forest.
It happened enough we jokingly named the trail ,”Bigfoot”, 25 years ago.The Cerutti mastadon find is not an isolated instance of evidence for archaic humans in the new world.
There is Calico hills and a long forgotten paper from the sixties detailing tools found in the Yukon dating back to 300kya.
The one piece of evidence about Cerutti that the critics ignore, is the fact that the hammer and anvil stones used are of types not native to the area. One, the pegmatite anvil, came from more that 20 miles away, and the andesite hammer stones travelled 5 miles uphill to get where they were found.
