Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

I’m a retired Northern California peace officer from Placer County, Ca. I live in the Auburn area, which is about 65 driving miles west of Lake Tahoe.

This past August I took my 18 year old stepson and his buddy on a pre-deer season scouting trip up into the Sierras approx 20 miles north of the small mountain town of Foresthill. Elevation of where we were at is about 6000 ft.

We arrived later in the afternoon in an area I’d come across a year earlier and wanted to hunt. The area is on an old logging road, and starts as a marshy area that turns into a small creek that runs through a draw that ultimately empties down into a huge canyon. It’s a pretty remote, rugged area.

We parked at the south edge of the marsh, at the base of a hill (the marsh has a large hill or ridge line on either side of it). Not more than a few moments after we got out of the car my son thought he heard some movement in the brush on the side of the hill above us. So we started walking up the hill and about 50 yards up we all smelled a nasty odor that was kind of a cross between urine and skunk. We walked up the hill a few more yards and looked around and didn’t see anything. At that point I told the boys to be quiet because I thought I heard somebody talking. For a few seconds I heard what sounded like extremely faint voices coming from on top of the hill, but totally unintelligible. It was like a whisper of gibberish. It was only a few seconds then no more. I told the boys that we should go back down the hill and walk down the old logging road along the marsh and scout around down along the stream in the draw further down.

We walked a couple hundred yards and saw no wildlife in the area; it was really still and quiet. As we walked on we noticed the nasty odor was pretty much gone.

We scouted around a little and saw nothing. So I let the boys shoot a few rounds each from my revolver at an old dead tree along the draw overlooking the creek.

We then decided to walk back to the car because we had maybe one hour of light left and wanted to get going. We’d only walked a few yards when we heard what sounded like a large animal running though the brush in the draw below our location. We all looked but couldn’t see any animals or any movement. The sound only lasted a few seconds and sounded like it was pretty close by. But we saw nothing. At that point we were getting nervous.

We again started walking toward the car and after about a hundred yards my son, who was in the lead and about 20 yards away stopped and when we got up to him told us he just heard what sounded like a small tree falling on the other side of the marsh, which would be about 200 yards to where he pointed. We didn’t see anything moving.

We kept walking to the car and about a hundred yards before we reached it we suddenly heard engines. We stopped and looked and suddenly two military Blackhawks (with long refueling tubes on their noses) slowly flew over the marsh area traveling toward the south. They were low, flying about two hundred feet above the tree tops. We saw them for only a few seconds before they flew out of view. We didn’t see or hear them again. We made it to the car and drove home. We’d seen or heard no people or automobiles in the area while we were out walking the area.

We discussed everything that had happened while we were driving home. We were all left feeling bewildered by what we’d experienced. We were a little weirded out by the helicopters coming out of nowhere right after the strange noises at the creek and marsh area.

We still don’t know exactly what was out there causing the sounds, but the more I think about it and discuss it the more uneasy I’m left feeling.

I’ve spent all my life in and around the Sierra Nevada mountains (born and raised in Auburn / Placer Co.) and I’ve never had anything quite like this happen to me. And the majority of my law enforcement career was spent not far from the location in question. I’ve spent a lot of time working by myself out in the country and never been bothered by it.

A few weeks after this incident a good friend of mine who I hunt with, he and I were talking with a forest ranger acquaintance of ours. I had casually commented that he must see some strange things being out in the high mountains like he is. (In retrospect I think I was fishing a little bit.) I tried to keep my composure when he told us that one night (he didn’t say when and I didn’t want to press him or be to obvious about my interest) he was driving on the road that accesses the area where I had the above experience and saw a large, dark colored hairy thing run upright on two legs across the road in front of his car and disappear in the darkness in the woods. He said no further and all we said was something like “no kidding?”. He said he didn’t know what it was but he knew it wasn’t a bear. He was dead serious. He had no knowledge of my experience or that I’d become interested in learning more about Bigfoot. Later on I asked my friend if he thought the ranger was serious. He said he sounded serious to him. I was pretty amazed that the ranger told us what he’d seen.