Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “On the rivers in the east I had a couple brief glimpses of squatches. My neighbor built a historical replica boat that I used to crew on. We ran mainly the James River in Virginia but also a trip down the Greenbriar and Potomac Rivers.

This was during the late 80’s. On more than one occasion I saw dark figures turning into the vegetation and vanishing beside of the river bank. One time I remember seeing a hairy arm extending as the what I thought was a person made a step made while remaining in a crouched position. The creature turned like an ape, or a person who has back problems and doesn’t stand up straight, thinking back now I remember the solid black and the length of the forearm.

Back then I wasn’t thinking about Bigfoot being anything in the East Coast area. I thought these were people at the time, but as time has gone by and I have learned more about Sasquatch I understand what I saw were something other than Homo Sapiens. Fishermen without licenses who fade from boaters.

One day near where the James passes between tall hills with a steep bank on the north side we had a large rock thrown into the water near us. When it hit the bottom of the river it shook the ground enough to feel it. I heard the splash and felt the vibration of the river bottom.

Something large climbed that north bank, up the steep and heavily wooded cliff, it made the earth shake, sounded very heavy, heavy rocks crashed against each other, trees or tree limbs broke. The boat kept moving, just a little faster than the current with a couple of us propelling it with large poles. We thought it was some local people acting up.

In that same area although not on the same day I glimpsed what I thought was a man sitting right at the edge of the water. He was crouched down in the vegetation in the shadows. I assumed he was fishing, there was no fishing gear in sight. He looked like an Austral Asian Hunter Gatherer. To me I guessed he was living there in secret, fishing beside the river and camping rough.

I glanced over at him and he saw me as the boat flowed past. I think his skin was grey like the bark of the willow bush he was in. In the dappled sunlight I did not even see his body well, guessing his hair was either grey or white or clear, he was surrounded by twigs to the point that he nearly blended in. I saw his eyes were unusually large and seemed to be solid brown all the way across. His nose was wider than normal. He looked a lot like the artist’s interpretation of the Minnesota Iceman. His wide mouth grinned a little bit and that was the last I saw of him as the boat was moving at a fairly good clip, fast current in that area, as the river narrows there to pass between the hills. He was very much part of the natural environment of the place, he belonged there in his home next to the swift current and I was just passing through.

Back in the late 70’s my friend and I tried to make stone tools, banging rocks together. The ranger came and made us stop. The Shenandoah Nat’l Parkway campground was very full that weekend, the outer loops were put to use.

That night in the predawn hours I heard tree knocking that went on for a long time. Found out later that there was a place called “Devil’s Woodyard” on that mountain because of the mysterious sound of wood being chopped. Once known as “Lost Mountain” the named had changed to “Loft Mountain” due to the similarity of “F’s” and “S’s” back in the 1700’s when the first whites settled there. The next high point on the ridge was named “Devil’s Knob”.

Back around 1983 my drinking buddies and I took a keg of beer up beside a snowfield/glacier just west of Denver Colorado in the front range. In the late morning-early afternoon my roommate said “Hey look it’s Bigfoot!”. Up on the top of the ridgeline were several dark shapes. They were pretty far away and above us in elevation. Looking through binoculars I got a good look for a few seconds at the big one which was lowest down. He was all black except for the red around his neck. I know now that the red around his neck was a deer. He was crouched and remained so as he moved with ease across the steep slope. The group was in sight for 10 minutes or so, moving around so easily in that icy snow.

I thought they were not Bigfoot but some really very skilled mountaineers. They were the really cool people in their matching solid black suits. There was fast movement at times in the group. Looked like there was some tumbling going on or some ski – jumping. We thought they were on skis or snowshoes. I told my roommate that they couldn’t be Bigfoots because they only lived in the Pacific Northwest. So there I am looking at a family group of Sasquatches and still denying what I am seeing. I believe now they were driving game along the edge of the rocks that pushed up through the snow like teeth on part of the ridge. They moved from the left to the right in general but had been pushing the game back towards the biggest squatch who was lower down the ridge on the left where the rocks came to an end he was there to catch whatever was pushed by the others. He had a larger than normal smile, it came back too far towards his ear, like smiling all the way around onto his cheeks.

The picture from the cover of “Us and Them” is almost a perfect match for the figure I saw standing in the snow, except the smile seemed wider. The big one was turned towards the north, quarter ways facing me about 100 feet below the ridge top, the lowest of the group. They moved off to the north and over the saddle out of sight. It looked like a mate and two juveniles were with him.

It looked like the winter Olympics up there for a few minutes. I think I saw deer antlers hanging loosely around the big guys neck, as if the deer’s neck was broken. It was a long ways off. I knew I had seen the real mountaineers and set out to drink more beer and buried the memory

Going way back to my high school days I smelled the rank smell and saw what was probably a squatch nest on the Appalachian Trail near Roanoke Va. We went on week long backpacking trips for several years in a row there. This was probably 1978. Making a sharp bend in the trail was a spring, with some cattails and dark black soil. A nesting area about 5 feet in diameter was located right next to the spring. The smell was rank enough to notice but not overwhelming. Also came across a place where large trees were pushed down trapping smaller saplings in an archway pattern that left a large area within the archway of the trapped trees.

On Virginia’s highest peak on the AT some what we thought were trail cairns confused us as to which path to follow to stay on the AT. I never had heard of squatches making rock stacks back then, didn’t think they lived any place but the Pacific Northwest.

The area on Mount Rodgers was alpine meadow environment, no large trees in that spot to put the trail hash marks on. The trail confused us as there were stacks of rocks directing us to go onto a small side trail that didn’t make sense. Had to backtrack a bit to the previous trail cairn and ignore the turn to the right and then got back to some more clearly defined trail in the woods with has marks once more.”