Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I hope you are doing well. I’ve been a longtime listener and wanted to reach out to tell you about my personal sasquatch story. I’ve been a magnet for the weird my entire but this particular event took place Oct 30 and 31, 2016, when I was 32 years old.

Let me start by saying I love the outdoors and I am a competitive shooter but I am not a hunter. I grew up in a far-flung suburb of Denver called Brighton, which historically was a farm town and when I was a kid it still had a Bradbury-esque small town feel but I had a lot of friends with farm property. One of those friends is a kid I knew through middle school and high school named Aaron, and we became good buddies in college and still keep in touch from time to time. Aaron’s dad hunted for elk in the same area outside Carbondale for over 40 years, on the side of Mt. Sopris. Interestingly enough, he vehemently refused to invite Aaron to go with him and his hunting buddies until he was an adult. I don’t recall what age specifically, but he was weird about it and, in retrospect, I believe it’s because he had experiences out there himself over the years.

Anyhow, my friend Aaron, at the time of the occurrence, was an ultra marathoner, fit as a fiddle and he invited me to come along with him and his dad on their annual hunting trip, mostly just because he knew I loved to hike and at that point his dad’s hunting crew had shrunk down to just the two of them. I agreed to come along and hike through the backcountry with him and bought some safety orange.

So we made our way up to Carbondale on the 29th and planted our trucks/camper in the parking lot of the Mt. Sopris Trailhead. Aaron’s dad was really pushy about me staying in the camper with them, and despite all that I still threw up my tent on what Steve (Aaron’s dad) said they used to call “Shit hill” back in the day before there were public toilets there. Again, I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but my tent was probably ten yards from the trailer, just far enough away to not be “camping” in the parking lot. The first night passed without incident and we went to bed pretty early so we could get an early start the next day.

At about 4:30 AM on the 30th Aaron and I set out up the trailhead while Steve stayed in the lowland area for the day because of bad knees. We followed the trail for a couple miles before setting out into the backcountry to zip up and down peaks and valleys all day. It was absolutely beautiful weather, probably in the low 60’s, which I learned made for abysmal hunting but good grief was it pretty. The hiking was great. We wound up doing about 13 miles that day and around 2 in the afternoon we stumbled across what I now believe to have been a sasquatch bed.

I took a bunch of photos and would be happy to send them along, but what stood out to me at the time was the sheer size of it. It was about 7’X4′ and comprised of pine bark scrapings shaped into a bowl. There were a couple piles of scat at the edge of it full of nuts and berries. Later telling Steve about it he said it sounded like a bear bed but I made the case it was strange that NONE of the trees surrounding it had any signs of claw marks where bark had clearly been rubbed off to make the giant bed. Anyway, we spent some time poking around at it. I’ve been into bigfoot since I was a kid and at that point I’d read plenty of books and was a fan of yours and the Bigfoot Outlaw Radio show at the time. I was super curious but my buddy Aaron was (and still is) about the biggest skeptic in the world and didn’t really care to waste a lot of time on it.

So we made our way back to the trailer, both Steve and Aaron skunked by the weather. We drank beers and played cribbage late into the night, before going to our respective beds.

Here’s where things went sideways.

It was 4AM on the morning of Oct. 31. It’s worth noting here that I had almost zero cell service.

I woke up to the buzzing of my phone alarm. Again, I had no service but had kept the phone in airplane mode to save the battery and I’d set the alarm knowing we planned to set out again that morning at 4:30. As I groggily squeezed the phone I became aware of another immediate noise. There were big, heavy footsteps just outside my tent. Instantly I was awake.

My first instinct was to reach into my sleeping bag and grab the 10mm Glock I had in the bag with me. As I quietly slipped it out of the holster I listened intently and realized that the footsteps were slowly, heavily, circling my tent. My first thought was that it was a moose, because there was literally moose scat everywhere and the Rockies are rife with them. But then it struck me that I was hearing bipedal steps. Crunch, crunch, crunch in the rocky dirt. I listened to it make one full circle around my tent before I thought “could this be a man?” but there was no way because it was the first weekend of rifle season and you’d have to be an absolute lunatic to screw with somebody in those woods. However, there are lunatics out there. I will admit that, at that moment, sasquatch did not cross my mind. I thought it was a person, albeit a huge person, and just as I started to unzip and slide myself out of my bag in the dark, getting ready to exit the tent, I heard muffled speaking and the screen door of the trailer squeaked open. Then I heard my buddy Aaron say something to his dad and whatever was making the footsteps made an immediate beeline away from my tent and away downhill.

I shouted out of my tent “Aaron, did you see that?” as I threw my boots on. Neither he nor his dad had seen anything, but their alarms had also been thankfully set for 4AM and they had scared away my visitor. That was just the start.

We spent the next 20 minutes making instant oatmeal, taking Advil, and admitting we’d stayed up too late. I was still troubled about the visitor but Steve reassured me it had to have been a bear and he reiterated that I should have stayed in the trailer.

Finally, at 4:30 we headed out again in the pitch black. Aaron and I went up the hill in pitch black, hoping to get to the area they called the meadow by about 7:30, where I would turn around and hike back to head home while they stayed out on the mountain.

We only made it about a half mile before the incident took place. The terrain on the trail was rocks sloping uphill to our right and insanely dense scrub oak trees/bushes on the downhill side to our left. We each had dinky headlamps that functionally lit up about ten feet in front of us. Aaron was in front of me with his .30-06 slung and I was right behind him just hiking with the 10mm on my hip. Completely without warning there was a series of three deep whooping noises from behind us, maybe ten yards away. We both stopped. Aaron was surprised but I think he was doing everything he could to not be scared. I knew instantly what that noise was.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

“Dude,” I said. “You know of anything that makes gorilla noises out here?”

He shook his head, trying to scoff, but I knew he was unsettled and started walking again.

Like I said, I was big into Bigfoot Outlaw Radio at the time and I could hear their voices in the back of my head saying “You’d better not take a shot at one unless you’re ready to die.” And so I said that to Aaron. I saw him shake his head again as he continued up the hill and he never unslung his rifle. With that same thought in my head I made no move whatsoever for my own gun. We took probably ten more steps before there was a responding call, this time from up ahead of us, maybe another ten yards. Another three whoops. This time my blood ran cold. Because at that moment I knew that what we’d heard was exactly what we’d heard and that there were multiple of them. And they were communicating ABOUT us.

Now Aaron was scared. I could see it in his eyes when he turned to look at me. I turned and looked around, could see nothing besides some fallen branches and brush, and debated what I was going to say, when all of a sudden there was a thundering sound from the downhill slope to our left. Footsteps landed like anvils, smashing their way rapidly uphill, directly through the brush, coming right for us. We could see literally nothing but the scrub oak, probably ten feet tall, shaking violently as the footsteps smashed right toward us. Instinct took over then. Neither of us ran, and honestly there wouldn’t have been time to.

Just as it looked like the thing was about to crash out of the brush right in front of us…it stopped.

Everything stopped, and it was silent. Zero sound except Aaron and I breathing heavily. I looked down and saw that I was holding a large fallen tree branch (aspen?), like a damn caveman, pointing it toward the downhill, while six feet of dead branches pointed the opposite way behind me.

“Holy shit,” Aaron said. He was holding his rifle now but not pointing it. “what do we do?”

I looked around and could just barely see a bend in the trail ahead of us with a low boulder.

“I think we should sit on that boulder and wait for sunrise.” And that’s what we did. All I wanted to do was talk about what had happened but Aaron brushed it off as “an animal” and made it clear he did not want to discuss it further. The sun started to come up and I continued on with him for a couple miles, but I felt like we were being watched the whole time. Eventually, I told him I was ready to go and we parted ways. I told him to be careful, which he actually shrugged off. In the daylight I watched the hilltops beside me like a hawk all the way back down to the trailhead. I didn’t see Steve again that day. I just packed up my tent into my truck and hauled ass out of there. I did ask Steve about it later and he got very weird about it. I still keep in touch with a lot of Brighton friends and the kid of one of Steve’s old hunting buddies confirmed that they’d absolutely had bigfoot experiences up there over the years.

Anyhow, I feel like I’ve rambled enough now. As I mentioned earlier I’ve had a lot of weir experiences. Here’s one that’s even weirder than the bigfoot story. I’ll link a report I made to NUFORC that they have posted publicly. I reported it to MUFON also and spoke with one of their field guys.”

https://nuforc.org/sighting/?id=126744