Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I’m from Washington State. I’ve been listening to your show for about 3 years now. It’s an amazing show and I love what you do. Anyways, let me get into my Bigfoot encounter at Mt. Rainer National Park. I have two different experiences…

My first experience was July 2019. My girlfriend (now my wife) wanted to go up to Sunrise within Mt. Rainer National Park to have a pic-nic and to go on a summer hike. We got there around 12 pm. We had lunch for about 30-45 minutes and then made our way to a trailhead. We started hiking. It was a beautiful sunny day. There wasn’t a cloud insight. It was 75 degrees. Couldn’t have asked for better weather.

While we were hiking, my wife and I didn’t see any other hikers on the trail. About a mile and a half in, my wife and I noticed that the forest went quiet. No wind, no birds chirping, just quiet… my wife and I both stated that this is weird and just kept on hiking. About 5 minutes pass and all of a sudden the hair on my neck and arm start to raise and it felt like I was being watched. I’m also getting goosebumps too. My wife was experiencing this too and we just shook it off and decided to keep walking. 5 more minutes pass and it’s still dead quiet. My wife and I stopped for a water break because we are probably 1.75 into the hike. All of a sudden while we were drinking our water we hear this very low tone growl that last for 5-10 seconds.

My wife and I just looked at each other like did we just hear that and it growled again for another 5-10 seconds. This grown didn’t sound like a bear, cougar, mountain lion or bobcat. It was a super low frequency growl that send chills down your spine. When my wife heard that, she said I think we should leave. I told her let’s just keep walking to see if it will do it again. My wife decided to keep walking with me. As we were walking, all of a sudden a rock the size of a golf ball gets thrown onto the trail in front of us.. I was like.. “hmm, it’s just just us out here… what could throw a rock the size of a baseball at us…’ there are no homeless people, no people on the trail that we’ve run into all day, what’s going on….’ I’ve always believed in Bigfoot growing up.

My moms side of the family lives along the coast of Washington near Montesano/Elma and many of them are farmers & log truck drivers. A few of them had experiences as well so I had an idea they existed, just never had an experience until this point. After the rock landed in front of my wife and I, I told my wife we should leave and just keep walking and don’t look back. We were probably close to 2 miles into this hike before we were walking back. While we were walking back, I could hear something on the ridge above me matching my walking pattern and stepping on twigs/branches. It was the most eerie feeling there was. If we slowed down at all, whatever was on that ridge slowed down too. As you said on the show before, I believe it was pacing us out to tell us to go home. It paced us out the whole way back out of the hike until we were about 50 yards from the entrance. When we got back, we just went straight to our cars and left the area and left the national park.

Second Encounter: My second encounter happened on May 2022 within Mt. Rainer National Park. My college friends from Clark Fork, ID came to visit us for a long weekend. We decided to go hiking in Mt. Rainer National Park. We went on May 28th 2022. This time around we went through the Paradise side of the park. We decided to drive all the way up to the Paradise Vistor Center first and work our way down the mountain. I remember that this was a very cloudy/overcast day with light rain, when we got to the top of Paradise, we couldn’t see the Mountain. There was sledding and tubbing but we didn’t want to do that. We were making our way down the mountain and pulling off the road to see different waterfalls, and go down these mini trails to overlook different valleys within Mt. Rainer National Park. As we continue to make our way down the mountain, we came across Steven’s Canyon Rd bridge that goes over the Nisqually River.

We decided to park our car on the side of the road and walk down to the bridge that overlooked the river. With it being May, a lot of the snow melt was melting off the mountain and coming down the river. I was trying to see if there were any animals I could see that were going to come out of the tree line or woods to get a drink of water. My buddy and I were looking down the riverbed for about 5 minutes and then all of a sudden I see this big black figure kneeling down on the river edge. We were about 300 yards away looking down the river when we saw this figure. It looked like he had his knees bent with his butt almost touching the ground . He was either drinking water or bathing himself because he would crouch, then stand up, crouch again and then stand up again. He did this for about 7 minutes. Meanwhile I pointed out to my buddy and I was like dude, do you see this right now or am I dreaming. It took him a little bit to find this figure but he found it and locked his eyes in it. I said dude, I think that’s Bigfoot and he said no it couldn’t be. Then after he looked at it longer he was like holy shit, I think that might be Bigfoot.

We didn’t want to make this a big public scene as we were on a bridge with cars going by and other people on the bridge. We just kept this to ourselves. 15 minutes pass and this figured got up again, and then started to walk south along the river. We followed him for another 2 minutes walking down the river until he went into another tree line/woods in the middle of the river and we couldn’t find him again. I remember the strides were long, the hair was black, and the legs/arms/torso were thick.

Once he was out of range, my buddy and I walked back to my car and we were speechless. We didn’t know what to say. The car ride back home was quiet. We finally started talking to each other once we got home and we were trying to make sense of what was that but we ultimately couldn’t. At first I thought it was a scientist doing stream surveys for the national park but in my head I was like , if it was a scientist, he would have been wearing a bright green/orange reflecting jacket , not a black jacket. Plus we were 300 yards away, he would have looked tiny. This creature was not tiny, it was massive. I eventually emailed Mt. Rainer National Park about this encounter. They responded back to me and stated they would forward my email to their wildness team. Ever since then, I haven’t heard back from their wildness team.

I haven’t shared this story with anyone. It has taken me a long time to get the courage to do this. I also took photos of this creature. I have attached all four. If you look closely, there might be another one north of the main one that I saw. At the time I didn’t see this but looking back on the photos, I saw this other creature. It looks like they are traveling down the river together but you can be the judge of that,

Thank you for reading my email!”