Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare. Hey, Brian,
Speaker 1: I've been going back and forth with myself about whether
Speaker 1: or not to write this for probably two years. I
Speaker 1: found your show during the pandemic, like a lot of
Speaker 1: people probably did, and I've been a loyal listener ever since.
Speaker 1: I've heard you share encounters from law enforcement officers, park rangers,
Speaker 1: military folks, and every time I hear one of those stories,
Speaker 1: I feel this not tighten in my gut because I
Speaker 1: know exactly what those people went through. I know what
Speaker 1: it's like to see something that isn't supposed to exist
Speaker 1: and then have to figure out how to keep living
Speaker 1: your life with that knowledge sitting in the back of
Speaker 1: your head like a splinter you can't pull out. I
Speaker 1: guess what finally pushed me to sit down and write
Speaker 1: this was your episode last month where that retired forest
Speaker 1: ranger talked about what he saw in the Sierras back
Speaker 1: in the nineties, when he described the way those eyes
Speaker 1: looked in the dark, that yellowish white glow that didn't
Speaker 1: reflect light so much as it seemed to produce its own.
Speaker 1: I actually had to pull my truck over to the
Speaker 1: side of the road because my hands were shaking. Not
Speaker 1: out of fear, not anymore, but because for the first
Speaker 1: time in over thirty five years, I heard somebody describe
Speaker 1: exactly what I saw exactly, and I knew right then
Speaker 1: that I couldn't keep this to myself any longer. My
Speaker 1: name is Kyle. That's not my real name, and i'd
Speaker 1: appreciate it if you'd use that one instead when you
Speaker 1: share this, if you decide to share it at all.
Speaker 1: I'm seventy one years old, now retired, living in a
Speaker 1: small town in northern Idaho. I've got no reason to
Speaker 1: make any of this up. I've got no book to sell,
Speaker 1: no YouTube channel, nothing like that. What I've got is
Speaker 1: a story that I've carried with me since nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: and a small group of men who carried it with me,
Speaker 1: most of whom I've lost touch with over the years.
Speaker 1: A couple of them have passed on. But every single
Speaker 1: one of us saw what we saw, and not a
Speaker 1: single one of us ever talked about it publicly until now.
Speaker 1: I suppose I need to get give you some background
Speaker 1: so this all makes sense. Back in eighty seven, I
Speaker 1: was thirty two years old and in the best shape
Speaker 1: of my life. I'd been working with the United States
Speaker 1: Forest Service for about nine years by that point, and
Speaker 1: I'd worked my way onto a hell Attack crew based
Speaker 1: out of the Mendocino National Forest in northern California. For
Speaker 1: people who don't know what hell attack is, it's basically
Speaker 1: a helicopter delivered firefighting crew. We were the guys who
Speaker 1: got dropped into remote, rugged terrain that engine crews and
Speaker 1: ground teams couldn't reach or couldn't reach fast enough. We'd
Speaker 1: go in by helicopter, usually in teams of anywhere from
Speaker 1: seven to twelve, depending on the operation, and we'd do
Speaker 1: initial attack on wildfires, cut fire lines, clear brush, whatever
Speaker 1: needed to be done to slow a fire down or
Speaker 1: stop it before it could blow up into something catastrophic.
Speaker 1: It was hard, dangerous work, and I loved every minute
Speaker 1: of it. There's a brotherhood that forms on those crews.
Speaker 1: It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't lived it.
Speaker 1: You're literally try trusting these guys with your life. Every
Speaker 1: single day. You eat together, sleep on the ground together,
Speaker 1: hike through terrain that would break most people, and you
Speaker 1: do it all while a wall of fire is bearing
Speaker 1: down on you. It bonds you in a way that
Speaker 1: nothing else really can. And I need you to understand
Speaker 1: that bond, Brian, because it's part of the reason none
Speaker 1: of us ever talked. We made a pact out there
Speaker 1: in those mountains, and every man honored it. Now, the
Speaker 1: summer of eighty seven was a bad one. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're all bad in California fire country, but that year
Speaker 1: was something else. The drought conditions were severe, the fuels
Speaker 1: were bone dry, and by late August everything was just
Speaker 1: waiting for a spark. And on August thirtieth, it got
Speaker 1: a whole lot of sparks. Multiple fires broke out across
Speaker 1: the state, and within hours we were looking at a
Speaker 1: situation that was overwhelming the resources of every agency involved.
Speaker 1: The fires tore through tens of thousands of acres across
Speaker 1: several counties. The smoke was so thick in some areas
Speaker 1: that people hundreds of miles away were dealing with respiratory problems.
Speaker 1: It was chaos, organized chaos, but chaos. Nonetheless. Our crew
Speaker 1: got the call early on the morning of August thirty first.
Speaker 1: I remember it clearly because I'd actually had the previous
Speaker 1: day off, which was rare, and i'd driven down to
Speaker 1: Yukaia to pick up apart from my truck, I was
Speaker 1: sitting in a diner eating breakfast when my pager went off.
Speaker 1: I don't even think I finished my coffee. I just
Speaker 1: threw some cash on the table and ran for the door.
Speaker 1: By the time I got back to base, the rest
Speaker 1: of the crew was already there gearing up. Our crew
Speaker 1: boss was a guy I'll call Tom, and Tom was
Speaker 1: one of those guys who'd been doing this so long
Speaker 1: that fire was just part of his DNA. Nothing rattled Tom.
Speaker 1: He was maybe forty five at the time, lean and
Speaker 1: hard as a railroad spike, with this calm, steady voice
Speaker 1: that never changed whether he was ordering breakfast or calling
Speaker 1: in an airstrike on a fire that was about to
Speaker 1: overrun our position. Tom had at all, or so we thought.
Speaker 1: There were nine of us on the crew that day, Tom, myself,
Speaker 1: and seven other guys, ranging in age from about twenty
Speaker 1: three to maybe forty. I won't use their real names either,
Speaker 1: but for the sake of telling the story, I'll call
Speaker 1: them Danny, Rich, Marcos, Pete, Bobby, Hank, and Walt. Every
Speaker 1: one of them was experienced. Every one of them was solid.
Speaker 1: These weren't green horns or weekend warriors. These were seasoned
Speaker 1: wild land firefighters who'd spent years in some of the
Speaker 1: nastiest fire conditions California could throw at them. Tom briefed
Speaker 1: us in the ready room. The situation was bad and
Speaker 1: getting worse. Multiple fire complexes were burning across the northern
Speaker 1: part of the state, and resources were stretched so thin
Speaker 1: that crews were being sent into areas with minimal support.
Speaker 1: Our assignment was to helicopter into a remote drainage in
Speaker 1: the Mendocino National Forest ahead of one of the advancing
Speaker 1: firefronts and cut a fire break along a ridgeline that
Speaker 1: the overhead team believed could serve as a natural containment boundary.
Speaker 1: The idea was that if we could get a solid
Speaker 1: line cut along that ridge, combined with the natural rock
Speaker 1: features on the far side, we might be able to
Speaker 1: keep the fire from jumping into the next drainage, which
Speaker 1: would have put it on a direct path towards several
Speaker 1: small communities. The area we were going into was about
Speaker 1: as remote as it gets in that part of the state.
Speaker 1: No roads, no trails to speak of, heavy timber, steep terrain,
Speaker 1: the kind of country where you could walk for days
Speaker 1: and never see another human being. The helicopter would drop
Speaker 1: us in, we'd cut our line, and then we'd be
Speaker 1: extracted once the work was done or the fire situation changed.
Speaker 1: We were told to plan for a minimum of three
Speaker 1: days on the ground. We packed accordingly, heavy packs, extra
Speaker 1: food and water, all our line cutting tools, emergency shelters,
Speaker 1: the works. We loaded into the helicopter around zero eight
Speaker 1: hundred and lifted off into a sky that was already
Speaker 1: starting to turn that sick brownish orange color. That you
Speaker 1: get when big fires are pumping smoke into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: The pilot, a Vietnam Vet named Jack who'd been flying
Speaker 1: fire missions for years, was quiet on the way in,
Speaker 1: which wasn't unusual for Jack, but I remember thinking he
Speaker 1: seemed more focused than normal. The fire was moving fast
Speaker 1: and the winds were unpredictable. There was talk of the
Speaker 1: fire generating its own weather patterns, which is something that
Speaker 1: happens with the really big ones, and that made flying
Speaker 1: conditions dicey at best. The flight in took about forty minutes.
Speaker 1: I was sitting in the back, wedged between Danny and Marcos,
Speaker 1: with my pack between my knees and the vibration of
Speaker 1: the rotors coming up through the middle floor and into
Speaker 1: my bones. Nobody talked much on helicopter flights. The noise
Speaker 1: made it impossible without headsets, and only Tom and the
Speaker 1: pilot were on the intercom, so you just sat there
Speaker 1: with your thoughts and watched the world go by through
Speaker 1: the small windows. And what a world it was. Northern
Speaker 1: California back country in late summer is one of the
Speaker 1: most beautiful landscapes on Earth, and I mean that sincerely,
Speaker 1: even though I've seen a lot of country in my years,
Speaker 1: rolling ridges covered in thick stands of Douglas fir and
Speaker 1: Ponderosa pine, broken by meadows of golden brown grass, and
Speaker 1: the occasional silver thread of a creek winding through a canyon,
Speaker 1: granite outcrops poking up through the timber like the bones
Speaker 1: of the earth, showing through red tailed hawks riding the
Speaker 1: thermals below us, looking like toys. From our altitude, it
Speaker 1: was gorgeous, and it was all about to burn. Off
Speaker 1: to the southeast, maybe thirty miles away. The fire was
Speaker 1: making its presence known. An enormous wall of gray and
Speaker 1: white smoke boiled up from the ridges like a thunderhead
Speaker 1: mushrooming out at the top where it hit the upper
Speaker 1: atmosphere and spreading into a dirty brown blanket that was
Speaker 1: already starting to filter the sunlight. Beneath the smoke, you
Speaker 1: could see occasional flashes of deep orange where the fire
Speaker 1: was crowning through the tree tops, running from tree to
Speaker 1: tree like a living thing. And at the base of
Speaker 1: the column, this seething, roiling mass of darker smoke that
Speaker 1: was the main body of the fire, consuming everything in
Speaker 1: its path with an appetite that was absolutely indifferent to
Speaker 1: anything we might.
Speaker 2: Do about it.
Speaker 1: Fire does what fire wants. I've learned that lesson more
Speaker 1: times than I can count, and it's a lesson that
Speaker 1: never gets less humbling. I remember Danny tapping my arm
Speaker 1: and pointing out his window at the smoke column, and
Speaker 1: I looked at his face and saw something there that
Speaker 1: I recognized. Not fear exactly. Danny wasn't afraid of fire.
Speaker 1: None of us were, not in the way civilians understand fear.
Speaker 1: But there was a respect in his eyes, a seriousness
Speaker 1: that told me he understood what we were heading into.
Speaker 1: This wasn't going to be a quick in and out.
Speaker 1: This was going to be a grind, a multi day
Speaker 1: slog and brutal conditions with a monster on our doorstep,
Speaker 1: and every man on that helicopter knew it. Jack put
Speaker 1: us down in a small clearing on the ridge, a
Speaker 1: natural meadow maybe one hundred yards across, surrounded by thick
Speaker 1: stands of Douglas fir and Ponderosa pine. As soon as
Speaker 1: we offloaded our gear and the helicopter pulled up and
Speaker 1: banked away, the silence hit us. That's always the strangest
Speaker 1: part of a hell attack. Insertion. You go from the
Speaker 1: deafening roar of the rotors to this sudden, almost overwhelming quiet,
Speaker 1: and your ears ring for a minute while your brain adjusts.
Speaker 1: But even after the ringing stopped, this silence was different.
Speaker 1: It was deeper than it should have been. There were
Speaker 1: no birds, no insects, buzzing, nothing, just the faint whisper
Speaker 1: of wind through the trees, and far off to the south,
Speaker 1: this low, almost subliminal rumble that was the fire. Tom
Speaker 1: noticed it too. I saw him look around the meadow,
Speaker 1: scanning the tree line with that sharp, evaluating gaze he had,
Speaker 1: and then he looked at me, and I could see
Speaker 1: it on his face. Something wasn't right, not wrong exactly
Speaker 1: just off. The air felt heavy, and not just from
Speaker 1: the smoke. There was a pressure to it, like the
Speaker 1: whole forest was holding its breath. But we had a
Speaker 1: job to do and we were burning daylight. Tom got
Speaker 1: us organized, assigned tasks, and we moved out toward the
Speaker 1: ridge line to start surveying our cut. The terrain was
Speaker 1: steep and the undergrowth was thick, and we were all
Speaker 1: packing heavy, so it was slow going. We worked our
Speaker 1: way along the ridge for maybe half a mile flagging
Speaker 1: the route for our fire break. When Danny, who was
Speaker 1: on point, stopped dead in his tracks and held up
Speaker 1: a fist, we all froze. When your point man stops
Speaker 1: on a fire line, you stop. Period. Could be a
Speaker 1: hazard tree, a spot fire, a rattlesnake, anything. Danny was
Speaker 1: standing at the edge of a small clearing where a
Speaker 1: seasonal creek bed cut across our route, and he was
Speaker 1: staring at the ground When I came up beside him,
Speaker 1: I looked down and felt something cold moved through my stomach.
Speaker 1: There were footprints in the dirt along the creek bed,
Speaker 1: large footprints, human shaped, but not human, not even close
Speaker 1: to human in terms of size. The prints were clearly
Speaker 1: defined five toes, a wide ball, a rounded heel, and
Speaker 1: they were easily sixteen maybe seventeen inches long. The stride
Speaker 1: between them was enormous, way beyond what any person could
Speaker 1: produce at a walk, and they were fresh. The edges
Speaker 1: were crisp and sharp. The detail in the toes was
Speaker 1: clear enough that you could see the individual pressure ridges.
Speaker 1: Whatever had made these tracks had come through here recently,
Speaker 1: hours maybe less, and there were multiple sets of tracks,
Speaker 1: at least three distinct sizes. The largest ones were the
Speaker 1: ones Danny and I were staring at, But there were
Speaker 1: also medium sized prints that were maybe twelve or thirteen inches,
Speaker 1: and then smaller ones, maybe eight or nine inches, that
Speaker 1: almost looked like a child's footprint, except for the proportions.
Speaker 1: The smaller ones were wider relative to their length than
Speaker 1: a human child's foot would be, and the toe'splay was different,
Speaker 1: more spread out, more like a hand's fingers than a
Speaker 1: foot's toes. One thing that struck me immediately, and I
Speaker 1: think Danny noticed it too, was the depth of the impressions.
Speaker 1: The large prints were sunk a good two inches into
Speaker 1: the dirt that was fairly firm. My size eleven boot
Speaker 1: with my one hundred and ninety pounds plus a sixty
Speaker 1: pound pack on my back, barely left a quarter inch
Speaker 1: impression in the same soil. You could do the math.
Speaker 1: Whatever made that track was carrying hundreds of pounds on
Speaker 1: a foot that was designed for exactly this kind of terrain,
Speaker 1: bare skin on soft earth, gripping and pushing with a
Speaker 1: biomechanical efficiency that our boots could never match. Danny looked
Speaker 1: at me, and I looked at Danny, and neither one
Speaker 1: of us said a word. Danny was from a small
Speaker 1: town in the Trinity Alps, and he'd grown up hearing
Speaker 1: stories from the old timers about wild men in the mountains.
Speaker 1: He knew what we were looking at, so did I,
Speaker 1: but neither of us was ready to say it out loud.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Tom came up and looked at the tracks,
Speaker 1: and I watched his face go through several expressions in
Speaker 1: rapid succession. Confusion, then calculation, then something I'd never seen
Speaker 1: on Tom's face before, which was uncertainty. Tom knelt down
Speaker 1: and put his hand next to one of the large prints,
Speaker 1: and his hand looked like a child's hand next to it.
Speaker 1: Tom stood up, brushed off his knee and said something
Speaker 1: I'll never forget. He said, and I'm quoting him as
Speaker 1: best I can remember. I don't know what made these
Speaker 1: and right now I don't care. We've got a fire
Speaker 1: line to cut in about forty eight hours.
Speaker 2: To cut it.
Speaker 1: Whatever this is, it lives here and we don't, so
Speaker 1: let's give it space and do our jobs. And that
Speaker 1: was that. Tom was pragmatic to his core. He acknowledged
Speaker 1: there's what was in front of us without letting it
Speaker 1: derail the mission. It was exactly the right call, and
Speaker 1: it was exactly the kind of leadership that made us
Speaker 1: all trust him. But as we moved on from that
Speaker 1: creek bed, every single one of us was quieter than before.
Speaker 1: Every single one of us was looking into the timber
Speaker 1: a little harder, listening a little more carefully, and I
Speaker 1: think every single one of us knew in some deep,
Speaker 1: primal part of our brains that we weren't alone in
Speaker 1: those mountains. We worked through the morning and into the
Speaker 1: afternoon cutting line. For those who don't know, cutting a
Speaker 1: fire line is exactly what it sounds like. You're clearing
Speaker 1: a strip of ground down to mineral soil, removing all vegetation,
Speaker 1: all duff all organic material, creating a gap in the
Speaker 1: fuel that the fire hopefully can't jump across. It's back
Speaker 1: breaking work done with hand tools Pulaski's and maclouds and
Speaker 1: shovels and chainsaws, and on steep terrain with heavy smoke
Speaker 1: in the air. It's about as physically demanding as anything
Speaker 1: a human body can do. We were soaked through with
Speaker 1: sweat within the first hour, and the smoke was getting
Speaker 1: thicker as the day wore on. You could taste it,
Speaker 1: that bitter, acrid flavor that gets into everything, your clothes,
Speaker 1: your skin, your lungs. Around fourteen hundred, we took a
Speaker 1: break to eat and hydrate. We'd set up in a
Speaker 1: small natural opening on the ridge, a little bench of
Speaker 1: flat ground with good visibility in three directions. The mood
Speaker 1: was subdued. The tracks had gotten under everyone's skin, even
Speaker 1: the guys who hadn't seen them firsthand. Because word travels
Speaker 1: fast on a small crew, Danny had told Rich, Rich
Speaker 1: had told Marcos, and within an hour everybody knew. It
Speaker 1: was during that break that we found the tree structures.
Speaker 1: Bobby and Hank had walked a little ways down the
Speaker 1: slope to relieve themselves, and Bobby came back up with
Speaker 1: this look on his face, like he'd just seen a ghost.
Speaker 1: He told us to come look at something, and when
Speaker 1: we followed him down, we found a cluster of young
Speaker 1: trees that had been broken and twisted in ways that
Speaker 1: made absolutely no sense. I've spent my whole career in
Speaker 1: the woods. I know what wind damage looks like. I
Speaker 1: know what snow loading does to trees. I know what
Speaker 1: happens when a big tree falls and takes out smaller
Speaker 1: ones on the way down. This wasn't any of those things.
Speaker 1: These were live green trees, healthy ponderosa saplings with trunks
Speaker 1: maybe four to six inches in diameter, and they'd been
Speaker 1: snapped or twisted at heights of eight to ten feet.
Speaker 1: Some of them were bent over and woven together, almost
Speaker 1: like they'd been braided. One of them had been twisted
Speaker 1: until the wood fibers separated in a spiral, like ringing
Speaker 1: out a wet towel. And the force required to do
Speaker 1: that to a live green sapling of that diameter is enormous.
Speaker 1: I couldn't have done it. No man on our crew
Speaker 1: could have done it. I'm not sure a machine could
Speaker 1: have done it that cleanly. There were about a dozen
Speaker 1: of these broken and manipulated trees in a rough cluster,
Speaker 1: and in the center of the cluster the ground was
Speaker 1: matten down flat, like something very large and very heavy
Speaker 1: had been bedding there. The matted area was maybe seven
Speaker 1: feet long and four feet wide, roughly oval, and the
Speaker 1: grass and ground cover were pressed flat and starting to
Speaker 1: brown from the compression. There was a smell too. I
Speaker 1: need to describe this because it's important. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: dead animal smell, and it wasn't a skunk smell, although
Speaker 1: there were elements of both. It was this thick, musky,
Speaker 1: almost rancid odor that seemed to come from everywhere and
Speaker 1: nowhere at once. It filled your nose and sat in
Speaker 1: the back of your throat, and it was unlike anything
Speaker 1: any of us had ever smelled in the woods. Hank,
Speaker 1: who'd been a ranch hand before he became a firefighter
Speaker 1: and was as familiar with animal smells as anybody I've
Speaker 1: ever known, just shook his head and said he had
Speaker 1: no idea what could produce an odor like that. We
Speaker 1: found two more of these bedding sites within one hundred
Speaker 1: yards of the first one, smaller ones, but with the
Speaker 1: same characteristics, broken and twisted trees, matted ground, and that
Speaker 1: same overwhelming stench. Three bedding sites, three different sizes of
Speaker 1: footprints at the creek. The math wasn't hard, even if
Speaker 1: the conclusion was impossible. Tom gathered us up and gave
Speaker 1: us a talk. He said that whatever was living in
Speaker 1: these mountains, it had clearly been here a long time,
Speaker 1: and it was clearly not interested in bothering us, and
Speaker 1: we were going to extend it the same courtesy. He
Speaker 1: said that when we got back to base, we could
Speaker 1: talk about it, report it, do whatever we wanted, but
Speaker 1: out here on this ridge, with a fire bearing down
Speaker 1: on us, our focus had to be on the mission.
Speaker 1: And then he said something that I've thought about a
Speaker 1: thousand times since. He said, these things were here before us,
Speaker 1: and they'll be here long after we're gone. They've got
Speaker 1: bigger problems than us right now, same as we've got
Speaker 1: bigger problems than them. That fire doesn't care what any
Speaker 1: of us are. Tom was right about that, the fire
Speaker 1: didn't care, and it was getting closer. By late afternoon,
Speaker 1: the smoke column to the south had grown into a
Speaker 1: monstrous pillar that leaned over the landscape like something out
Speaker 1: of the Old Testament. We could hear the fire now,
Speaker 1: not just that low background rumble, but actual sounds of combustion,
Speaker 1: the crackling and popping of burning timber, the occasional deep
Speaker 1: whoosh of a crown fire run, and every now and
Speaker 1: then this sounded like a freight train. That was the
Speaker 1: fire creating its own wind. We had maybe thirty six
Speaker 1: to forty eight hours before the front reached our ridge,
Speaker 1: and we had a lot of line.
Speaker 2: Left to cut.
Speaker 1: We worked until dark, until we literally couldn't see what
Speaker 1: we were doing anymore, and then Tom called it and
Speaker 1: we headed back to the meadow where we'd been dropped
Speaker 1: off to make camp. We were exhausted, covered in soot
Speaker 1: and sweat, and every muscle in my body ached. But
Speaker 1: I was wired. We all were. And it wasn't just
Speaker 1: the physical exertion or the proximity of the fire. It
Speaker 1: was the knowing, that feeling of being watched that had
Speaker 1: been building all day, prickly sensation on the back of
Speaker 1: your neck that your rational mind tries to explain away,
Speaker 1: but your animal brain absolutely refuses to ignore. We set
Speaker 1: up camp in the middle of the meadow as far
Speaker 1: from the tree line as we could get, which wasn't
Speaker 1: saying much since the meadow was only about one hundred
Speaker 1: yards across. We built a fire, partly for warmth, because
Speaker 1: the nights were cool at that elevation, even in late summer,
Speaker 1: and partly, I think, because every single one of us
Speaker 1: wanted light. Nobody said that out loud, but when Bobby
Speaker 1: suggested we build the fire up bigger than we normally
Speaker 1: would not one person argued Hank and Pete went to
Speaker 1: collect extra wood, and they came back in about half
Speaker 1: the time it should have taken them, moving fast, carrying
Speaker 1: armloads of deadfall, and not talking. Hank caught my eye
Speaker 1: as he dropped his wood near the fire ring, and
Speaker 1: I could see it on his face he'd heard something
Speaker 1: out there, or seen something, or felt something. He didn't
Speaker 1: say what, and I didn't ask. We arranged our packs
Speaker 1: and sleeping bags in a rough circle around the fire,
Speaker 1: close enough that the light reached all of us, and
Speaker 1: for a while we just worked on settling in. Boots off, socks,
Speaker 1: changed blisters, tended to water, bottles refilled from our canteens,
Speaker 1: the mundane rituals of camp life, the small physical tasks
Speaker 1: that ground you in the real world when your mind
Speaker 1: is trying to drift somewhere you don't want it to go.
Speaker 1: I cleaned and sharpened my pulaski, working the file over
Speaker 1: the blade in slow, rhythmic strokes, and the sound of
Speaker 1: metal on metal was oddly comforting, real, tangible, a sound
Speaker 1: that belonged in the world I understood. The sky above
Speaker 1: us was a muddy orange canvas, the smoke layer reflecting
Speaker 1: the fire's glow back down to earth, and every now
Speaker 1: and then a fragment of ash would drift down into
Speaker 1: the meadow like gray snow. The air tasted like a
Speaker 1: campfire that had been burning for a thousand years. You
Speaker 1: could feel the grid of it between your teeth and
Speaker 1: in the corners of your eye, and when you blew
Speaker 1: your nose, the tissue came away black. We ate our
Speaker 1: MRIs and drank our water and tried to act normal.
Speaker 1: Guys talked about their families, about football, about what they
Speaker 1: were going to do when fire season was over, normal
Speaker 1: campfire talk. But there were a lot of long pauses
Speaker 1: and a lot of glances toward the tree line, and
Speaker 1: every time somebody heard a branch crack or the wind
Speaker 1: shift in the timber, every head would turn in that direction.
Speaker 1: It was probably around twenty one hundred, maybe a little
Speaker 1: later when it started. The first sound was a howl,
Speaker 1: but calling it a howl doesn't do it justice, and
Speaker 1: I've struggled for thirty five years to find the right
Speaker 1: words for it, so bear with me. It started low,
Speaker 1: almost below the threshold of hearing, more of a vibration
Speaker 1: in your chest than an actual sound. Then it rose
Speaker 1: in pitch and volume until it became this long, sustained,
Speaker 1: wavering cry that echoed off the ridges and canyons until
Speaker 1: it seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was
Speaker 1: not a coyote. It was not a wolf, and there
Speaker 1: weren't wolves in that part of California anyway. It was
Speaker 1: not a mountain lion. I've heard all of those animals
Speaker 1: many times at close range, and this was none of them.
Speaker 1: This sound had a depth and a power to it
Speaker 1: that was almost physical. You felt it in your bones,
Speaker 1: in your teeth. It resonated in your rib cage, like
Speaker 1: standing too close to a base speaker. And there was
Speaker 1: something in it, some quality, some tambore that was uncomfortably
Speaker 1: close to human, like a human voice pushed through a
Speaker 1: body three times the size of a man. The howl
Speaker 1: lasted maybe ten seconds, and when it faded, the silence
Speaker 1: that followed was absolute. Nobody at the campfire moved, nobody breathed.
Speaker 1: We just sat there, nine grown men, nine experienced outdoorsmen
Speaker 1: and firefighters who'd faced down situations that would send most
Speaker 1: people running, and we sat there, frozen like rabbits. Then
Speaker 1: it was answered from a different maybe forty five degrees
Speaker 1: around from the first one, and closer. This one was shorter, sharper,
Speaker 1: more like a bark or a scream that transitioned into
Speaker 1: a howl at the end. And then a third voice
Speaker 1: from behind us, higher pitched, almost mournful, trailing off into
Speaker 1: what I can only describe as a series of stuttering sobs,
Speaker 1: three distinct voices, three different directions. We were triangulated. Rich
Speaker 1: God bless him was the first one to speak. He said,
Speaker 1: very quietly, what in the ever loving hell was that?
Speaker 1: And nobody answered him, because nobody had an answer. Tom
Speaker 1: was on his feet, slowly, calmly, like he was just
Speaker 1: stretching his legs. He had his head lamp on, but
Speaker 1: he hadn't turned it on, and his hand was resting
Speaker 1: on the handle of his Pulaski, which he'd driven into
Speaker 1: the ground next to his pack. Tom looked at each
Speaker 1: one of us in turn, and in the firelight, I
Speaker 1: could see his jaw muscles working, and I knew he
Speaker 1: was processing, calculating, running through every possible explanation the same
Speaker 1: way I was, and coming up empty the same way
Speaker 1: I was. Then the wood knock started. If you know
Speaker 1: you know, Brian, and based on your show, I think
Speaker 1: you know it sounded exactly like someone had taken a
Speaker 1: baseball bat or maybe a log and slammed it against
Speaker 1: a tree trunk, a sharp, resonant crack that carried through
Speaker 1: the timber with startling clarity. The first one came from
Speaker 1: the east side of the meadow, then one from the west,
Speaker 1: then two in rapid succession from the south, so close
Speaker 1: together that they almost overlapped, like a conversation. Bang bang bang, pause,
Speaker 1: bang bang bang bang. There was a rhythm to it,
Speaker 1: a pattern, and I knew with absolute certainty that whatever
Speaker 1: was making those sounds was communicating. This wasn't random, This
Speaker 1: was deliberate, organized, purposeful crossed himself. I remember that because
Speaker 1: Marcos was not a particularly religious guy, but I watched
Speaker 1: him make the sign of the cross and mouth something
Speaker 1: that I'm pretty sure was a prayer. Pete had pulled
Speaker 1: his hard hat down low over his eyes, like he
Speaker 1: could block out the sounds if he couldn't see where
Speaker 1: they were coming from. Danny was standing next to me,
Speaker 1: and I could feel him vibrating, literally trembling, not from cold.
Speaker 1: The knocks went on for maybe five minutes, moving around
Speaker 1: our perimeter in a way that made it clear we
Speaker 1: were being circled, and then they stopped and something new started,
Speaker 1: a sound that still to this day makes the hair
Speaker 1: on the back of my neck stand straight up when
Speaker 1: I think about it. It was a chattering, a rapid,
Speaker 1: complex series of clicks and clacks and glottal pops that
Speaker 1: came from the timber, maybe fifty or sixty yards to
Speaker 1: our north. It sounded almost like language. I know how
Speaker 1: that sounds, and I know you've probably heard other witnesses
Speaker 1: describe something similar, but I need to emphasize this. It
Speaker 1: didn't just vaguely resemble language. It had cadence, It had rhythm,
Speaker 1: It had what sounded like sentences with pauses and inflections
Speaker 1: and emphasis. There were guttural low tones and higher pitched,
Speaker 1: rapid fire sequences and everything in between. It was like
Speaker 1: listening to someone speak a language you've never heard before,
Speaker 1: one that used sounds the human mouth might not even
Speaker 1: be capable of producing. And then a second voice answered
Speaker 1: from the southeast, same type of sounds, same complexity, but
Speaker 1: with a different vocal quality, like a different speaker. The
Speaker 1: two voices went back and forth for two or three minutes,
Speaker 1: and during that time, every single man on that crew
Speaker 1: stood absolutely still and just listened, because there was no
Speaker 1: denying what we were hearing. Whatever was out there in
Speaker 1: those trees was intelligent, not just smart the way a
Speaker 1: bear is smart or a coyote is smart, intelligent in
Speaker 1: a way that involved structured communication, coordination, and what certainly
Speaker 1: seemed like planning. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I'd like to tell
Speaker 1: you that I was brave. I'd like to tell you
Speaker 1: that I grabbed a flashlight and walked toward the sounds
Speaker 1: like some kind of hero. I didn't, none of us did.
Speaker 1: We stood by our fire and we listened, and we
Speaker 1: watched the dark tree line, and we waited. The chattering
Speaker 1: faded away, and for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, there
Speaker 1: was nothing, just the crackle of our campfire and the
Speaker 1: distant rumble of the wildfire and the sound of nine
Speaker 1: men breathing too fast. Some of the guys started to relax,
Speaker 1: started to sit back down, started to whisper to each
Speaker 1: other about what we'd heard. Bobby said, maybe it was
Speaker 1: just coyotes acting weird because of the fire. Hank said,
Speaker 1: maybe it was some kind of owl he'd never heard before.
Speaker 1: They were reaching, and they knew they were reaching, but
Speaker 1: sometimes you need to reach for a normal explanation, just
Speaker 1: to keep yourself together. That's when the first rock came in.
Speaker 1: It landed about three feet from the campfire with a
Speaker 1: heavy thud that sent up a little puff of dust
Speaker 1: and ash. It was roughly the size of a soft ball,
Speaker 1: maybe a little bigger, a chunk of granite that had
Speaker 1: no business being in the middle of a grass meadow.
Speaker 1: We all stared at it for a second, and then
Speaker 1: we all looked up at the tree line. And then
Speaker 1: a second rock sailed in from the opposite direction and
Speaker 1: landed near Pete's boots, and Pete jumped back so fast
Speaker 1: he tripped over his pack and went down hard on
Speaker 1: his backside. A third rock, a fourth. They weren't coming fast,
Speaker 1: maybe one every fifteen or twenty seconds, and they weren't
Speaker 1: aimed at us. That's the thing I want to be
Speaker 1: really clear about. They were landing near us, around us,
Speaker 1: but not hitting us. The accuracy was remarkable, actually, to
Speaker 1: throw a rock that size from fifty or sixty yards
Speaker 1: away in the dark, through trees and have it land
Speaker 1: within a few feet of a campfire without hitting any
Speaker 1: of the nine people sitting around it. That requires not
Speaker 1: just strength but precision, control intent. Over the next ten
Speaker 1: minutes or so, maybe a dozen rocks came in from
Speaker 1: various directions. Some were small, just pebbles really. Others were substantial,
Speaker 1: heavy enough that they could have done real damage if
Speaker 1: they'd hit someone, but none of them did not one
Speaker 1: and I became increasingly convinced as it was happening that
Speaker 1: the rocks weren't meant to hurt us. They were meant
Speaker 1: to get our attention, to let us know they were there,
Speaker 1: to test us, maybe to see how we'd react. Tom
Speaker 1: told us to stay calm and stay together, and not
Speaker 1: to throw anything back. That last part was directed at Rich,
Speaker 1: who had picked up one of the rocks and was
Speaker 1: rearing back to launch it into the timber. Tom put
Speaker 1: a hand on Rich's arm and said no, He said,
Speaker 1: we don't know what we're dealing with. We don't start
Speaker 1: a fight. We can't finish. Rich put the rock down.
Speaker 1: The rock throwing tapered off, and for a little while
Speaker 1: it was quiet again. The guys were huddled together, talking
Speaker 1: in low voices. Marcos was praying openly now, which nobody
Speaker 1: gave him a hard time. About Walt, who was the
Speaker 1: youngest guy on the crew at twenty three, had his
Speaker 1: sleeping bag pulled up to his chin and hadn't said
Speaker 1: a word in over an hour. I was standing at
Speaker 1: the edge of the campfire's light, looking into the darkness,
Speaker 1: and that's when I saw the eyes. They were exactly
Speaker 1: how that ranger on your show described them, Brian, exactly,
Speaker 1: a pale yellowish white, with an almost luminous quality that
Speaker 1: didn't look like reflected firelight. They were up high, way
Speaker 1: too high to be a raccoon or a fox or
Speaker 1: anything that made sense. I estimated them at about eight
Speaker 1: feet off the ground, maybe more, and they were set
Speaker 1: wide apart, whiter than a human's eyes, with a spacing
Speaker 1: that suggested a face much broader than ours. They were
Speaker 1: just there, just visible between two large ponderosa trunks, about
Speaker 1: forty yards from where I was standing, and they were
Speaker 1: looking directly at me. I've been looked at by animals before.
Speaker 1: I've locked eyes with mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes. I've had
Speaker 1: a cougar stare me down from twenty feet away, and
Speaker 1: that's an experience that'll rearrange your priorities in a hurry.
Speaker 1: But this was different. The intelligence behind those eyes was different.
Speaker 1: When a mountain lion looks at you, it's assessing you
Speaker 1: as either a threat or a meal, simple binary calculation.
Speaker 1: When these eyes looked at me, I felt like I
Speaker 1: was being studied, evaluated, like there was a mind behind
Speaker 1: them that was curious about me in a way that
Speaker 1: went beyond predator prey dynamics. There was awareness there, recognition
Speaker 1: of what I was, and a deliberate choice to let
Speaker 1: me see it. I don't know how long we stared
Speaker 1: at each other, probably only a few seconds, but it
Speaker 1: felt like minutes. I couldn't move. I don't mean I
Speaker 1: was too scared to move, Although I was scared. I
Speaker 1: mean my body physically would not respond to my brain's commands.
Speaker 1: I was locked in place by those eyes, the way
Speaker 1: a deer gets locked in headlights. And somewhere in the deepest,
Speaker 1: oldest part of my brain, a voice was screaming at
Speaker 1: me that I was in the presence of something that
Speaker 1: existed on a level I didn't have the framework to comprehend.
Speaker 1: Then I felt Danny's hand on my shoulder, and the
Speaker 1: spell broke. I turned to look at him, and when
Speaker 1: I looked back. The eyes were gone, just gone. No
Speaker 1: sound of movement, no crashing through brush. Whatever had been
Speaker 1: standing there had simply melted back into the forest without
Speaker 1: making a single sound. And that might have been the
Speaker 1: most frightening part of all. Something that size at that proximity,
Speaker 1: moving in complete silence. It defied everything I knew about
Speaker 1: large animals and how they moved through dense timber. I
Speaker 1: told Danny what I'd seen, and Danny told Tom, and
Speaker 1: Tom told everyone to stay by the fire, stay calm,
Speaker 1: and try to get some sleep. Nobody laughed at that suggestion,
Speaker 1: but nobody slept either. We sat up all night, feeding
Speaker 1: the fire, watching the tree line, jumping at every sound.
Speaker 1: The vocalizations continued intermittently throughout the night, more howls, more chattering,
Speaker 1: occasional wood knocks. At one point, around maybe zero two hundred,
Speaker 1: something very large walked through the timber on the west
Speaker 1: side of the meadow. We couldn't see it, but we
Speaker 1: could hear it. Heavy footsteps, widely spaced, crunching through the
Speaker 1: duff and pine needles, and once a deep, resonant grunt
Speaker 1: that sounded like it came from a barrel chest the
Speaker 1: size of a fifty five gallon drum. It walked the
Speaker 1: length of the meadow, and then the footsteps faded and
Speaker 1: it was quiet again. That was the longest night of
Speaker 1: my life, and I include the nights I spent sleeping
Speaker 1: in fire shelters while walls of flame passed overhead. At
Speaker 1: least with fire, you understand what's happening. You know what
Speaker 1: fire is and how it behaves and what it can do.
Speaker 1: Out there on that ridge, we were dealing with something
Speaker 1: that we had no training for, no manual for, no
Speaker 1: frame of reference for. And that kind of not knowing
Speaker 1: is a special kind of tear that sits in your
Speaker 1: chest and makes every breath feel like it's not quite
Speaker 1: deep enough. Dawn came slowly that morning, the sky lightning
Speaker 1: from black to gray to that hazy, smoke filtered orange
Speaker 1: that had become the background color of our world, and
Speaker 1: with the light came a sense of relief that was
Speaker 1: almost overwhelming. Several of the guys were openly weeping, just
Speaker 1: quiet tears running down their soot streaked faces, and nobody
Speaker 1: said a word about it, because every single one of
Speaker 1: us understood. Tom let us have a longer breakfast than usual.
Speaker 1: I think he knew we needed the time to decompose,
Speaker 1: to process, to get our heads right before we went
Speaker 1: back to work. And we did go back to work,
Speaker 1: because that's what you do. The fire hadn't stopped moving,
Speaker 1: just because we'd had a rough night, and people's homes
Speaker 1: were still in jeopardy, and we had a line to cut.
Speaker 1: So we picked up our tools and we went back
Speaker 1: to the ridge and we swung pulaski's and pulled mcclouds
Speaker 1: and felled trees and piled brush, and we did it
Speaker 1: with the quiet, grim determination of men who have decided
Speaker 1: that they are going to accomplish their mission, regardless of
Speaker 1: what else is happening around them. But the whole time
Speaker 1: I felt them watching it wasn't paranoia. I'm sure of that.
Speaker 1: I've experienced enough genuine danger in my life to know
Speaker 1: the difference between irrational fear and legitimate situational awareness. Something
Speaker 1: was up in the higher terrain above our work site,
Speaker 1: observing us. Every now and then, if you looked uphill
Speaker 1: at just the right moment, you could catch a glimpse
Speaker 1: of movement, a dark shape shifting behind a tree, a
Speaker 1: shadow that didn't match the shadows around it. Once around midday,
Speaker 1: I looked up from my work and saw a figure
Speaker 1: standing on a rocky outcrop, maybe two hundred yards above us.
Speaker 1: It was there for perhaps three seconds, back lit against
Speaker 1: the smoky sky, and even at that distance and in
Speaker 1: those conditions, I could see that it was enormous, broad shoulders,
Speaker 1: long arms ahead. It seemed to sit directly on the
Speaker 1: shoulders without much visible neck. It was watching us work,
Speaker 1: and when I nudged Danny and pointed, it stepped back
Speaker 1: behind the outcrop and was gone. Danny saw it too,
Speaker 1: so did Rich, who was working about twenty yards downhill
Speaker 1: from us. Rich didn't say anything, just nodded slowly and
Speaker 1: went back to swinging his pulaski, but his face was
Speaker 1: white under the soot. We found more tracks that day,
Speaker 1: fresh ones crossing our fire line in several places, as
Speaker 1: if the creatures had come down during the night to
Speaker 1: investigate what we'd been doing. The prints were deep and clear,
Speaker 1: and in one spot you could see where one of
Speaker 1: them had apparently knelt down and examined the cut brush
Speaker 1: we piled along the line. There were hand impressions in
Speaker 1: the soft dirt near the brush pile, hand impressions with
Speaker 1: fingers that were thick as sausages, and a palm span
Speaker 1: that was nearly twice the width of mine. I measured
Speaker 1: one of them with my hand tool, and from thumb
Speaker 1: tip to pinky tip the span was easily throw eighteen inches.
Speaker 1: But here's what got to me the most about those tracks.
Speaker 1: In one section of the line, where we'd felled a
Speaker 1: medium sized ponderosa and bucked it into rounds to clear
Speaker 1: the way, the track showed that one of the creatures
Speaker 1: had walked along the cut, stopped at each round, and
Speaker 1: apparently touched or examined them. You could see where it
Speaker 1: had placed its hand on the cut face of one
Speaker 1: of the rounds, leaving a perfect impression in the sawdust
Speaker 1: and sap. It was curious about what we'd done. It
Speaker 1: had looked at the fresh cut wood, the sawdust, the
Speaker 1: chainsaw marks, the way we'd limbed and sectioned the tree,
Speaker 1: and it had tried to understand. I've thought about that
Speaker 1: a lot over the years. What must that have looked
Speaker 1: like through its eyes? Strange small creatures with loud, screaming tools,
Speaker 1: cutting down trees and clearing the ground in a neat,
Speaker 1: straight line across the ridge. What could it have made
Speaker 1: of that. Did it understand that we were fighting the fire?
Speaker 1: Did it connect our activity with the approaching flames. I'd
Speaker 1: like to think it did, but I honestly don't know.
Speaker 1: We also found several more areas of twisted and broken
Speaker 1: trees along the ridge, and in one location we found
Speaker 1: something that I've never been able to explain satisfactorily. It
Speaker 1: was a formation made from branches and small logs, stacked
Speaker 1: and interlocked in a way that was clearly deliberate, almost
Speaker 1: like a small shelter or a blind. It was maybe
Speaker 1: four feet high and six feet long, constructed from branches
Speaker 1: that had been broken to relatively uniform lengths and placed
Speaker 1: in an overlapping pattern that shed water remarkably well. There
Speaker 1: was no way the wind had done this. There was
Speaker 1: no way any natural process had done this. Something with
Speaker 1: hands and a plan had built it. The second night
Speaker 1: was in some ways worse than the first, because we
Speaker 1: knew what was coming. We set up camp in the
Speaker 1: same meadow, built our fire up even bigger, and waded.
Speaker 1: The sun went down behind the smoke layer, without any
Speaker 1: real sunset, just a gradual din from gray to darker
Speaker 1: gray to the deep purple black of a mountain night,
Speaker 1: and the stars, which on a clear night in that
Speaker 1: country are thick enough to read by, were completely blotted
Speaker 1: out by the smoke canopy. The only light beyond our
Speaker 1: campfire was the distant orange glow of the fire to
Speaker 1: the south, painting the underside of the smoke clouds like
Speaker 1: some kind of hellish aurora. Tom had organized a watch
Speaker 1: rotation for the second night, two men awake at all times,
Speaker 1: sitting on opposite sides of the fire watching the tree line.
Speaker 1: The rest could try to sleep. Though I think everyone
Speaker 1: understood that was optimistic. Still, the structure of it helped.
Speaker 1: Having a task, a responsibility, something concrete to focus on.
Speaker 1: That's what keeps you functional when your brain is trying
Speaker 1: to come apart at the seams. The vocalization started earlier,
Speaker 1: this time, before full dark, while there was still a gray,
Speaker 1: smoky twilight filtering through the trees. The howls, the chattering,
Speaker 1: the wood knots, all of it following roughly the same
Speaker 1: pattern as the night before, but closer, noticeably closer, and
Speaker 1: there was a new element, a low, rhythmic thumping that
Speaker 1: seemed to come from the ground itself, like something very
Speaker 1: heavy was stomping its feet or pounding the earth with
Speaker 1: its fists. It was subtle, more felt than heard, a
Speaker 1: vibration that traveled through the soil and up through the
Speaker 1: soles of your boots. It went on for maybe thirty seconds, stopped,
Speaker 1: then started again from a slightly different location, three separate episodes,
Speaker 1: three different spots along the perimeter. They were showing us something,
Speaker 1: demonstrating their presence, their size, their power, not threatening exactly,
Speaker 1: but making sure we understood that they were there and
Speaker 1: that they were substantial. The rock throwing started again too,
Speaker 1: and this time it seemed almost playful. I know that's
Speaker 1: a strange word to use, and I struggled with Weather
Speaker 1: to include it, but it's the true truth. The rocks
Speaker 1: were smaller this time, pebbles mostly, and they seemed to
Speaker 1: be tossed rather than thrown. One of them landed in
Speaker 1: Hank's lap, and Hank looked down at it, and then
Speaker 1: looked up at the tree line and said, very calmly, well,
Speaker 1: that's just rude. And despite everything, despite the fear and
Speaker 1: the exhaustion and the absolute strangeness of our situation, every
Speaker 1: single one of us laughed. It was the first real
Speaker 1: laugh we'd had in over twenty four hours, and it
Speaker 1: felt like a pressure valve releasing. Maybe the creatures heard
Speaker 1: us laugh. Maybe that's what prompted what happened next, or
Speaker 1: maybe it was going to happen regardless. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But about twenty minutes after Hank's comment, the chattering started again,
Speaker 1: very close, this time just inside the tree line to
Speaker 1: the north. And then while we were all focused on
Speaker 1: the sounds, something stepped out from behind a large ponderosa
Speaker 1: on the east side of the meadow. Every single one
Speaker 1: of us saw it, all nine of us. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods big Foot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. There was no question about what we were
Speaker 1: looking at, no ambiguity, no trick of the light. It
Speaker 1: was standing in the open, maybe thirty five yards from
Speaker 1: our fire, partially illuminated by the firelight and partially silhouetted
Speaker 1: against the darker timber behind it. And it was the
Speaker 1: most terrifying and the most magnificent thing I've ever seen
Speaker 1: in my life.
Speaker 2: It was massive.
Speaker 1: I'm six foot one and I was looking up at
Speaker 1: this thing way up. My best estimate, and Tom and
Speaker 1: I talked about this extensively afterward, is that it was
Speaker 1: between eight and a half and nine feet tall, Its
Speaker 1: shoulders were easily three and a half to four feet across,
Speaker 1: and its body was covered in dark hair, not fur
Speaker 1: like an animal, but hair like a human's body, hair
Speaker 1: if it grew to three or four inches in length
Speaker 1: and covered every visible surface. The hair was darkest on
Speaker 1: the back and shoulders, and lighter, more of a reddish
Speaker 1: brown on the chest and stomach. The arms were long,
Speaker 1: proportionally much longer than a human's, hanging to about mid thigh,
Speaker 1: and the hands were enormous, easily twice the size of mine.
Speaker 1: The face is what I remember most clearly, and it's
Speaker 1: the image that visits me at night when I can't sleep.
Speaker 1: It was broad and flat, with a heavy brow ridge
Speaker 1: that cast the eyes in shadow, a wide, flat nose,
Speaker 1: and a mouth that was set in what I can
Speaker 1: only describe as a neutral expression, neither threatening nor friendly.
Speaker 1: The eyes were the same yellowish white I'd seen the
Speaker 1: night before, and in the firelight they seemed to almost
Speaker 1: glow from within. The head was slightly conical, rising to
Speaker 1: a subtle crest on top, and the whole face was
Speaker 1: framed by that dark hair, almost like a mane. It
Speaker 1: stood there and looked at us, and we stood there
Speaker 1: and looked at it, and the world shrank to just
Speaker 1: that moment, that exchange. I could hear my own heart
Speaker 1: beat in my ears, loud and fast, and I could
Speaker 1: hear the men around me breathing, and I could hear
Speaker 1: the fire crackling, And that was it. That was the
Speaker 1: entire universe, us and it, staring at each other across
Speaker 1: thirty five yards of mountain meadow, with a wildfire bearing
Speaker 1: down on all of us. Tom incredibly slowly raised one hand,
Speaker 1: palm out, not a wave, just a slow, deliberate display
Speaker 1: of his empty hand. I don't know if he planned
Speaker 1: it or if it was instinct, but the creature's eyes
Speaker 1: shifted to Tom's hand, and its head tilted slightly, and for
Speaker 1: just a moment, just a heartbeat, I thought I saw
Speaker 1: something in its expression that looked like recognition, like it
Speaker 1: understood the gesture. Then it turned smoothly, with a fluid
Speaker 1: grace that was almost impossible for something that size, and
Speaker 1: it walked back into the timber, not running, walking calm unhurried,
Speaker 1: like it had seen what it wanted to see and
Speaker 1: was satisfied. And as it disappeared into the shadows between
Speaker 1: the trees. I heard the chattering again from multiple directions,
Speaker 1: and I knew that the others had been watching too,
Speaker 1: the whole family or group or clan or whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call it. They'd been right there the whole time,
Speaker 1: just out of sight while one of them came forward
Speaker 1: to take a closer look at the strange creatures with
Speaker 1: the fire and the tools who had come into their home.
Speaker 1: Nobody spoke for a long time after.
Speaker 2: It was gone.
Speaker 1: I think we were all dealing with a kind of
Speaker 1: cognitive overload, a system error in our understanding of the
Speaker 1: world that needed time to reboot. The thing about seeing
Speaker 1: something like that, Brian, something that's not supposed to exist,
Speaker 1: is that it doesn't just challenge what you know. It
Speaker 1: challenges who you are. Your whole identity, your whole concept
Speaker 1: of reality shifts in that moment, and you can feel
Speaker 1: the ground moving under your feet even though you're standing
Speaker 1: perfectly still. What was the first one to talk? He said,
Speaker 1: And I remember this word for word, that was real.
Speaker 1: That just happened. I'm not crazy, right, that was real?
Speaker 1: And Tom said, yeah, kid, that was real. And Walt
Speaker 1: sat down on the ground and put his face in
Speaker 1: his hands, and he didn't cry. He just sat there
Speaker 1: for a while, and when he looked up again, he
Speaker 1: looked about ten years older. The rest of the second
Speaker 1: night was relatively quiet compared to the first. We heard
Speaker 1: occasional vocalizations distant now, and a few wood knocks, but
Speaker 1: nothing close. Nothing came into the meadow again. I think
Speaker 1: the big one, the one who'd shown himself, had gotten
Speaker 1: the information he wanted, and whatever he'd communicated to the
Speaker 1: others in that chattering language of theirs, had apparently concluded
Speaker 1: that we weren't a threat, or maybe they decided we
Speaker 1: were boring. I don't know, but the intensity of the
Speaker 1: previous night's activity was gone, replaced by a more distant,
Speaker 1: almost casual surveillance. I actually slept a little that second
Speaker 1: at night, not well, not deeply, but I dozed off
Speaker 1: around zero three hundred and got maybe two hours of broken,
Speaker 1: restless sleep before dawn. I dreamed about the creature's face,
Speaker 1: about those intelligent, glowing eyes, and in the dream it
Speaker 1: spoke to me, although when I woke up I couldn't
Speaker 1: remember what it said, just the feeling of being spoken
Speaker 1: to by something very old and very wise that was
Speaker 1: trying to tell me something important. Day three was our
Speaker 1: last day on the ridge. The fire line was nearly complete,
Speaker 1: and the fire itself had shifted direction slightly over night,
Speaker 1: pushed by changing winds, which gave us a little more
Speaker 1: breathing room. We worked hard through the morning, finishing the line,
Speaker 1: clearing hot spots, reinforcing weak sections. The smoke was thick
Speaker 1: and the air was brutally hot and dry, and we
Speaker 1: were running low on water and food, but we pushed
Speaker 1: through because we were almost done, and because every single
Speaker 1: one of us was ready to get off that mountain.
Speaker 1: Throughout the day, we continued to catch glimpses of the
Speaker 1: creatures on the higher ground above us. They seemed less
Speaker 1: concerned about concealment now, or maybe we'd just gotten better
Speaker 1: at spotting them. I counted at least four distinct individuals
Speaker 1: at various times. The big one, the male, was easy
Speaker 1: to identify even at distance because of his sheer size.
Speaker 1: There was a slightly smaller one that moved differently, with
Speaker 1: a smoother, more graceful gait that I took to be
Speaker 1: a female. And there were two smaller ones, juveniles who
Speaker 1: seemed bolder and more curious than the adults. Occasionally moving
Speaker 1: to exposed positions where we could see them clearly before
Speaker 1: one of the larger ones would appear, and heard them
Speaker 1: back into cover. At one point during the afternoon, I
Speaker 1: was working a section of line near the top of
Speaker 1: the ridge and I heard a sound above me and
Speaker 1: looked up. One of the juveniles was sitting on a
Speaker 1: boulder about eighty yards uphill, watching me work. It was
Speaker 1: smaller than the adults, maybe five and a half or
Speaker 1: six feet, and its hair was lighter in color, more
Speaker 1: of a tawny brown. It sat perfectly still, just watching
Speaker 1: me swing my pulaski, and its head would track the
Speaker 1: tool from the upswing to the downswing and back again,
Speaker 1: like a kid watching a tennis match. I stopped working
Speaker 1: and looked at it, and it looked at me, and
Speaker 1: I swear it tilted its head to the side, the
Speaker 1: way a dog does when it's trying to figure something out.
Speaker 1: Then a low, guttural grunt came from somewhere in the
Speaker 1: trees behind the boulder, and the juvenile scrambled off the
Speaker 1: rock and disappeared into the timber so fast it was
Speaker 1: like it had never been there. A parent calling its
Speaker 1: kid back is what it looked like a parent calling
Speaker 1: its kid back because it had wandered too close to
Speaker 1: the strangers. That was the moment, Brian, More than the
Speaker 1: footprints or the vocalizations, or the rock throwing or even
Speaker 1: the big male standing in the meadow. That was the
Speaker 1: moment that changed me forever, because that juvenile's behavior was
Speaker 1: so recognizable, so familiar, so fundamentally the same as any
Speaker 1: curious kid being told to come back where it's safe.
Speaker 1: That the last wall of denial in my mind just crumbled.
Speaker 1: These weren't monsters, they weren't aberrations. They were a family
Speaker 1: living their lives in these mountains the same way families
Speaker 1: do everywhere, dealing with the same dynamics of curious children
Speaker 1: and protective parents and the need to find food and
Speaker 1: stay safe. And right now their home was burning, and
Speaker 1: they were probably more scared than we were. We finished
Speaker 1: the line late that afternoon and Tom radioed for extraction.
Speaker 1: The helicopter was going to pick us up at first
Speaker 1: light the next morning, so we had one more night
Speaker 1: to spend on the ridge. But that last night was different.
Speaker 1: The creatures were quiet. We heard a few distant howls
Speaker 1: around dusk, mournful and long, drifting over the ridges from
Speaker 1: somewhere to the south, closer to the fire, and then nothing, silence.
Speaker 1: I wondered if they'd moved on, pushed north by the
Speaker 1: advancing flames, looking for safer ground. I hope, so, Lord,
Speaker 1: I hope so. I didn't sleep at all that last night.
Speaker 1: I sat by the fire and watched the sky to
Speaker 1: the south, where the fire was painting the underside of
Speaker 1: the smoke clouds in shades of orange and red and
Speaker 1: angry yellow. And I thought about those creatures and what
Speaker 1: their world must be like. To live your entire life
Speaker 1: in hiding in the margins, in the deepest and most
Speaker 1: remote pockets of wilderness, always watching, always aware, always keeping
Speaker 1: your distance from the one species on the planet that
Speaker 1: would either kill you or cage you if it ever
Speaker 1: confirmed your existence. And then to have your home, your refuge,
Speaker 1: your last safe place, consumed by fire. I thought about
Speaker 1: the juveniles, the little ones, and I felt a sorrow
Speaker 1: so deep it actually made my chest ache. Morning came
Speaker 1: and with it the distant thrum of the helicopter. Jack
Speaker 1: was right on time, appearing over the ridge from the
Speaker 1: north in that old bell that he ha handled like
Speaker 1: an extension of his own body. We'd already packed up
Speaker 1: camp and were standing in the meadow with our gear
Speaker 1: when the helicopter crested the ridge and began its approach.
Speaker 1: The downdraft from the rotors flattened the grass around us
Speaker 1: in expanding circles, and kicked up dust and ash that
Speaker 1: stung our eyes. We loaded gear and climbed in, nine exhausted, filthy,
Speaker 1: emotionally wrung out men who wanted nothing more than a
Speaker 1: hot shower and a cold beer and a world that
Speaker 1: made sense again. The helicopter lifted off, and the meadow
Speaker 1: fell away beneath us, that little patch of grass that
Speaker 1: had been our home and our refuge for three of
Speaker 1: the most extraordinary days of my life, shrinking to a
Speaker 1: green dot and then disappearing behind the ridge. I pressed
Speaker 1: my face against the window and watched the landscape tilt
Speaker 1: and roll as Jack banked toward the northeast, gaining altitude
Speaker 1: for the flight back to base. And that's when we
Speaker 1: saw them for the last time. They were standing on
Speaker 1: a rocky ridge about a quarter mile to the northeast,
Speaker 1: silhouetted against the smoky morning sky, all of them six.
Speaker 1: I counted them twice because I wanted to be sure.
Speaker 1: And then I counted them a third time because my
Speaker 1: brain wouldn't accept what my eyes were telling it. Six
Speaker 1: individuals standing in a loose group on the exposed rock,
Speaker 1: making no effort whatsoever to hide. In three days, these
Speaker 1: creatures had gone from cautious nighttime observers to openly standing
Speaker 1: on an exposed ridge and broad daylight watching us leave.
Speaker 1: Something had changed whatever conclusions they'd drawn about us during
Speaker 1: our time in their territory. The result was that they
Speaker 1: no longer felt the need to conceal themselves. The big
Speaker 1: male was in front, slightly apart from the others, and
Speaker 1: even at that distance, even through the smoke haze, I
Speaker 1: could see the massive breadth of his shoulders, and the
Speaker 1: way he stood upright and solid, like a monument carved
Speaker 1: from the mountain itself. There was something almost regal about
Speaker 1: his posture, a dignity and a self assurance that I've
Speaker 1: never seen in any animal before or since. He stood
Speaker 1: the way a king stands, surveying his domain. And even
Speaker 1: though that domain was burning, even though the smoke was
Speaker 1: thickening and the fire was creeping closer, he stood his
Speaker 1: ground and he watched us go. The helicopter swung toward
Speaker 1: them as it came in for the pickup, and Jack,
Speaker 1: who couldn't have missed them, said nothing on the radio,
Speaker 1: not a word. The crew chief in the helicopter said nothing.
Speaker 1: We all just looked. I glanced around the cabin, and
Speaker 1: every single man had his face pressed to whatever window
Speaker 1: was closest, eyes wide, mouths open. Marcos was crying again, openly,
Speaker 1: tears cutting clean tracks through the soot on his face.
Speaker 1: Walt had his hand pressed flat against the plexiglass, like
Speaker 1: he was trying to reach out and touch them. Danny
Speaker 1: was whispering something under his breath that I couldn't hear
Speaker 1: over the rotors, but that looked like my God, repeated
Speaker 1: over and over. The helicopter passed maybe two hundred yards
Speaker 1: from the ridge where they were standing, close enough that
Speaker 1: I could make out individual details, the big male, the female,
Speaker 1: or what I took to be the female, standing slightly
Speaker 1: behind him, with one of the smaller ones partially hidden
Speaker 1: behind her legs, just the way a human child might
Speaker 1: peek out from behind its mother when strangers are around.
Speaker 1: Two juveniles side by side, the one I'd watched on
Speaker 1: the boulder, and another of similar size, and a sixth,
Speaker 1: medium sized that I hadn't been sure about before, positioned
Speaker 1: at the edge of the group, like a sentry or
Speaker 1: an older sibling, keeping watch. Their hair ruffled in the
Speaker 1: rotor wash as we passed, and the female reached down
Speaker 1: and put what I can only describe as a hand
Speaker 1: on the head of the small one at her side,
Speaker 1: a gesture so tender and so human that it nearly
Speaker 1: broke me. Six a family standing on a ridge with
Speaker 1: their world burning behind them, watching us leave. The big
Speaker 1: male's head turned to track the helicopter as we flew over,
Speaker 1: and for one brief moment, one impossibly compressed instant of time,
Speaker 1: I felt like he looked directly at me through the
Speaker 1: plexiglass window, those eyes, even at that distance. I can't
Speaker 1: be sure, of course, I know that. I know it
Speaker 1: might have been my imagination or the angle, or the
Speaker 1: emotional state I was in. But I felt seen, I
Speaker 1: felt acknowledged, and I felt like something passed between us
Speaker 1: in that moment, some communication that went beyond language or gesture,
Speaker 1: something as simple and as profound as one living thing
Speaker 1: recognizing another. Then the helicopter banked and they slid out
Speaker 1: of view behind the ridge, and they were gone. Nobody
Speaker 1: spoke for the first twenty minutes of the flight back.
Speaker 1: The only sounds were the rotors and the wind, and
Speaker 1: the occasional crackle of the radio. I sat in my
Speaker 1: seat and stared at my hands, which were blistered and
Speaker 1: cut and black with soot, and I tried to reconcile
Speaker 1: what I'd just seen with the world I thought. I
Speaker 1: lived in the world where I had a truck and
Speaker 1: an apartment and a girlfriend who was waiting for me
Speaker 1: in Yukiyah. I had a career that made sense and
Speaker 1: a future that was predictable. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. That world
Speaker 1: felt very small, suddenly, like a room i'd been living
Speaker 1: in my whole life that I just discovered had a
Speaker 1: door I'd never noticed, and behind that door was something
Speaker 1: vast and wild and completely beyond my control. When Tom
Speaker 1: finally broke the silence, he just said, we're not going
Speaker 1: to talk about this, not to anyone, not to our families,
Speaker 1: not to our friends, not to anyone in the service.
Speaker 1: We all know what we saw. That's enough, and those
Speaker 1: things they've got enough problems without us bringing a circus
Speaker 1: into their backyard. Every man on that crew nodded, every
Speaker 1: single one. There was no argument, no debate, no one
Speaker 1: playing devil's advocate. We'd made a collective decision in that moment,
Speaker 1: born not out of fear of ridicule, although that was
Speaker 1: certainly part of it, but out of something more fundamental,
Speaker 1: out of respect. We'd been guests in their home, and
Speaker 1: they tolerated us, even engaged with us, and the least
Speaker 1: we could do was protect their privacy. Tom understood that instinctively,
Speaker 1: and so did the rest of us. And for thirty
Speaker 1: five years, every man on that crew kept his word.
Speaker 1: Jack the pilot never said a single word about what
Speaker 1: he'd seen from the cockpit. I ran into him a
Speaker 1: few years later at a fire camp in Oregon and
Speaker 1: we had coffee together, and at one point I started
Speaker 1: to bring it up, and he just held up his
Speaker 1: hand and shook his head and changed the subject. Jack
Speaker 1: took it to his grave. He died in twenty and
Speaker 1: thirteen heart attack, sitting in his recliner watching a baseball game.
Speaker 1: His daughter told me he went easy, which is more
Speaker 1: than a lot of men in our line of work
Speaker 1: can say. I need to tell you what happened after,
Speaker 1: because I think it matters. We got back to base
Speaker 1: and threw ourselves into the firefight, which went on for weeks.
Speaker 1: The fire eventually burned through the area where we'd been working,
Speaker 1: and our fire line held. I'd like to think it helped.
Speaker 1: I'd like to think that the line we cut gave
Speaker 1: those creatures and everything else living on that mountain a
Speaker 1: little extra time to get out of the way. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it did. I'll never know. Over the years,
Speaker 1: I've thought about that experience almost every day. Some days
Speaker 1: it's just a fleeting image those eyes in the firelight.
Speaker 1: Other days it's a full immersion, and I'm back on
Speaker 1: that ridge with the smoke and the fear and the wonder,
Speaker 1: and I can smell that musky odor and hear that
Speaker 1: chattering language, and feel the ground shake from footsteps that
Speaker 1: belonged to something that science says can't exist. I stayed
Speaker 1: with the Forest Service for another fifteen years. After eighty seven,
Speaker 1: I transferred out of hell Attack, eventually moved into a
Speaker 1: management position, and spent the rest of my career in
Speaker 1: fire planning and prevention. I worked all over the West, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington,
Speaker 1: and I spent a lot of time in remote backcountry.
Speaker 1: I never saw anything like what I saw on that
Speaker 1: ridge in the Mendocino Again. I found tracks a couple
Speaker 1: of times up in the Cellway Bitter Route in Idaho,
Speaker 1: and once in the Walla Was in Oregon, big prints,
Speaker 1: clear and unmistakable, pressed into the mud of a remote
Speaker 1: stream bank where nobody had any business being. Each time
Speaker 1: I'd stand there and stare at them and feel that
Speaker 1: same electric jolt of recognition, that same collision between what
Speaker 1: I knew to be true and what the rest of
Speaker 1: the world told me was impossible. But I never had
Speaker 1: another face to face encounter. Part of me is grateful
Speaker 1: for that. Part of me wishes I could see them
Speaker 1: one more time. I tried to go back once. In
Speaker 1: ninety two, I took a week of vacation and drove
Speaker 1: up into the Mendocino to the same general area where
Speaker 1: we'd worked that fire line. The forest had started to
Speaker 1: recover by then, new growth coming in green and determined
Speaker 1: among the blackened trunks of the big trees that hadn't survived.
Speaker 1: I hiked in alone, camped for three nights on a
Speaker 1: ridge that I thought might have been close to our
Speaker 1: old meadow, although five years of fire damage and regrowth
Speaker 1: had changed the landscape so much that I couldn't be sure.
Speaker 1: I didn't find tracks, I didn't hear vocalizations, I didn't
Speaker 1: feel watched. The place felt empty in a way that
Speaker 1: made my heart sink. Maybe they'd moved on, Maybe they'd
Speaker 1: gone deeper into the wilderness to places even more remote,
Speaker 1: pushed further away by the fire and the logging and
Speaker 1: the roads and all the other ways we keep shrinking
Speaker 1: their world. Or maybe they were right there, fifty yards
Speaker 1: away in the timber, watching me, the same as they'd
Speaker 1: watched us before, and they'd simply decided that one old
Speaker 1: firefighter sitting alone by a campfire wasn't interesting enough to investigate.
Speaker 1: I'd like to think it was that. I'd like to
Speaker 1: think they remembered. Tom passed away in two thousand and
Speaker 1: nine cancer. He was a smoker, which didn't help, but
Speaker 1: the doctor said years of smoke inholation from wildfire fighting
Speaker 1: probably contributed. I saw him a few months before he died.
Speaker 1: Drove down to Redding, where he was living with his daughter.
Speaker 1: We sat on his porch and drank coffee, and he
Speaker 1: was thin and tired, but his eyes were still sharp.
Speaker 1: And at some point he said, you ever think about
Speaker 1: that night on the ridge? And I said every day,
Speaker 1: and he nodded and said me too. Best thing I
Speaker 1: ever saw, worst secret I ever kept. And then we
Speaker 1: sat there for a while and didn't say anything, because
Speaker 1: what else was there to say. Danny moved to Alaska
Speaker 1: after he left the service. Last I heard, he was
Speaker 1: running a fishing charter out of Sitka. Rich died in
Speaker 1: a car accident in ninety four. Marcos went back to
Speaker 1: Mexico to take care of his mother, and I lost
Speaker 1: touch with him. Pete, Bobby, Hank, and Walt are all
Speaker 1: still alive as far as I know, scattered around the West,
Speaker 1: living their lives, carrying the same memories. I've thought about
Speaker 1: reaching out to them, especially now, but I think the
Speaker 1: pact we made still holds. They'll talk about it when
Speaker 1: they're ready, or they won't. That's their choice, and I
Speaker 1: respect it. I'm writing this to you now because I'm
Speaker 1: seventy one years old and time is getting short, and
Speaker 1: there are things that need to be said before I
Speaker 1: can't say them anymore. I don't care if people believe me.
Speaker 1: I really don't The believing or not believing. That's everybody
Speaker 1: else's problem. I was there. I saw what I saw,
Speaker 1: I heard what I heard, I felt what I felt.
Speaker 1: And what I felt, more than the fear, more than
Speaker 1: the awe, more than the strangeness of it all, was privilege.
Speaker 1: I felt like I'd been given a gift, like the
Speaker 1: universe had pulled back a curtain for just a few
Speaker 1: days and shown me something that most people will never see,
Speaker 1: something that exists just beyond the edge of our understanding, patiently, quietly,
Speaker 1: persistently existing, despite everything we've done to pave over and
Speaker 1: burn down and explain away the wild places where they live.
Speaker 1: The fires of eighty seven were devastating. They burned hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of acres and change the landscape forever. But
Speaker 1: life came back the way it always does. Trees grew,
Speaker 1: grass returned, streams cleared. And I've always believed, I've always
Speaker 1: hoped that somewhere in those mountains, in the deepest, most
Speaker 1: remote canyons and ridges, that family survived, That the big
Speaker 1: male led them to safety, that the female kept the
Speaker 1: little ones close, that those curious juveniles grew up and
Speaker 1: had families of their own. I don't know that I
Speaker 1: can't know that, but I choose to believe it because
Speaker 1: the alternative is too painful to accept. Brian, I want
Speaker 1: to thank you for what you do. I know it
Speaker 1: probably sounds strange coming from an old man you've never met,
Speaker 1: but your show has given me something I didn't know
Speaker 1: I needed, which is the knowledge that I'm not alone,
Speaker 1: that other people have seen these things, experience these things,
Speaker 1: and that there's at least one place in this world
Speaker 1: where those stories are treated with respect and taken seriously.
Speaker 1: You mentioned on your show that you hadn't experienced yourself
Speaker 1: when you were young, and that it changed your life.
Speaker 1: I understand that in a way that I wish I didn't,
Speaker 1: because once you see the truth, you can't unsee it,
Speaker 1: and the world never looks quite the same again. I
Speaker 1: hope those creatures made it through the fires. I hope
Speaker 1: they're still out there somewhere in the smoke and the
Speaker 1: timber and the deep green silence of the mountains. I
Speaker 1: hope the little ones grew up strong and cautious and curious,
Speaker 1: just like their parents. And I hope that someday, when
Speaker 1: humanity is ready, when we've grown up enough to handle it,
Speaker 1: the curtain gets pulled back all the way and everyone
Speaker 1: gets to see what a few of us have been
Speaker 1: fortunate enough to witness. Until then, I'll keep my memories.
Speaker 1: Nine men on a ridge, a wall of fire at
Speaker 1: our backs, and a family of impossible, magnificent creatures who
Speaker 1: came out of the shadows just long enough to remind
Speaker 1: us that we don't know nearly as much about this
Speaker 1: world as we think we do. Thank you for listening, Brian.
Speaker 1: Keep doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2: Kyle, don't want to
Speaker 1: Do