Fires going down and I'm just kind of scanning this tree line.
This thing's maybe sixty to eighty yards away. It's standing in place.
I got the impressions looking back at me, waiting for me to turn away. We did like standoff where like I'm looking at it, I'm like, I am not handling this like I should. I'm having like a panic attack at the time. It was the most terrified I've ever been in my life. I think it was a couple of minutes. I didn't even want to take my eye off it because I felt like if I took my THRMB down it was going to like run toward me or just something completely irrational, you know, when you're scared
like that. The thing was is it's navigating and pitch black, and that was very intimidating to me. And then we can hear it going crunch crunch crunch walking adjacent to Camp one. I could not believe that these things actually exist, that they're actually out there, and that I actually saw one.
It was just mind blowing.
This is Bigfoot cross Roads. My name's Matt and I'd like to welcome to the podcast, mister Jonathan Easley Man. This is long overdue. We were kind of talking about that. Nice to have you on, man.
Yeah, no, no, no. When I first got into this subject, there were like a small handful of like podcasts that I started listening to, and I think yours and Jeff Kelly's what was that Squatcher's Lunge podcast was around, Yeah, and there were a couple other ones, but I mean, everything's fallen to the wayside, and you know, after all these years, you know, yours is one of the ones that's left standing. And you know, I'm glad for that
because it's such a good podcast. You've had so many great guests over the years, and I've learned a lot from it.
So I'm looking I'm glad to be on it myself now.
Yeah. I appreciate all the kind words, and I like to talk to people, especially like you, who are passionate about the subject and out there doing a lot of the work to try and learn some of the answers. What got you started in Bigfoot to begin with?
Oh, Man, Well, I mean as a kid, I've always been a little odd in the sense that, you know, I was always reading like these monster books as a kid, and you know, being like nine years old and you.
Know, into X Files. That was my favorite show growing up.
But you know, you grow up and all that stuff kind of fades away and it became just a show.
And you still have these like interests.
You know, you don't presume you have a life to live, right, but then you know, you start figuring out that maybe some of these things aren't as a aren't as.
Crazy as you like.
For example, I started doing a lot of hiking and backpacking and that kind of got my interest in Bigfoot back again. So there was a time in Sequoia I had thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. I don't tell people, oh I had a sighting, but I felt like I had a sighting. It happened so fast out of the corner of my eye, looked
like something walking. And that kind of got me thinking again, like, oh my gosh, this thinking be real, and I just went down the you know, you go down the Bigfoot wormhole online trying to figure out like, oh, do other people see it in this area? Do other people hear things?
And have people recorded things? You start figuring all this stuff out, and you just kind of start weeding out what you think is real as opposed to what you think is fake, and you know, you end up with this little tiny set of data that like I was, for example, going to Sequoia whenever I could, based on the reports that I saw from there, and.
You know, I heard a few strange things there.
I followed a lot of I went to the place of a lot of where these reports happened, you know, things that I picked up off the bf RO. I had spoken to law enforcement ranger that had some really get some pretty good looking footprints, but he could not he didn't have it in him to share him with me. I tried to get him to send me the pictures. But you know, so started off from just you know, common interest to slowly realizing, oh my gosh, you know what,
there's something to this. They're scientists and primatologists and very intelligent people pursuing this, and I just got sucked into it, just like everybody else. And now here I am spending thousands of dollars going on these trips, lots some money on like camera equipment because you know, for my for my YouTube channel, Western Bigfoot Exploration.
Let's back up to us to the part where you saw something out of the corner whenever it comes to bigfoot researchers, integrity is everything, and if you are even remotely embellishing things or putting things out there as factual that can possibly be argued against, it's curtains for your career. Nobody wants to have anything to do with it.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of encounters that take place where the people are fairly certain that it was a bigfoot. They believe it was a bigfoot, but they can't put it out there's a bigfoot sighting because they can't prove it and they can't verify that that's exactly what it was.
Correct.
No, you're right about that.
So this sounds like one of those incidents. So let's just get rid of the researcher category right now and just say, like, okay, it was a bigfoot. So what happened?
Okay, So I was in a place called Redwood Canyon and Sequoia Nationally it's actually right where Sequoia in King's Canyon National Park border each other. And there's a place you drive a couple of miles down a road and it's called Redwood Canyon, and it's the largest Sequoia grove in the world, at least I believe in North America, and it's kind of really cool. It's like when you walk through this grove, it's like, honey, I shrunk the hikers because the boulders are the sizes of houses. There's
a mixture of redwoods and sequoias. So you're walking and after a while it messes with you. You lose perspective of how big or small things are. And I've never experienced that in my life. Like you're walking and you're just
kind of like disoriented. These trees are huge anyway. So I'm walking and as I just came across around a bend going down on my right side, there's a creek, very small creek, and as I turned the corner, it looked like down in the creek, this is about maybe one hundred feet below me, it looked like if something took two steps and cleared a branch with its arm, and by the time I looked, I saw the movement of the branch and that was pretty much it.
I told my friends, They said, dude, that was weird. I go with somes down there.
And it happened so fast in such a you know, and just a split second that your mind is still catching up to what happened yeah, And I was.
Like, that looked really weird. It looked like a guy.
And I remember my first thought was like I remember, I think it was Backdraft or some some firefighting movie where they was sometimes occasionally like firefighters wore black suits, you know, they were like a yeah.
And so it hit me as is there a guy?
Is there guy from the fire department?
Like down there clearing order?
Are they doing like a control burn or something like that.
That's what I thought, like within three seconds, like it looked really weird.
And as it walked off, you know, it disappeared into some bushes very quickly. I mean I saw this corner of the eye split second.
Told the friend we walked down.
There, and the branch that was moving that was in question that I said, kind of looked like an arm coming up to move it out of the way. It was pretty tall, it was about in my head height. Now I started going, well, it happened so fast. It could have been something else. What if I saw something wrong? What if it was just the upper half that I saw? And you know, this question just kept swirling around in my mind. So, like I said, it happened really fast.
It's not something that I talked to a lot of people about because I myself have questions about what I saw. It happened so quickly. Of course, a few years later, twenty fifteen, you know, I did get to see I did see them through a thermal imager up in the Sierras Northern Sierras and Plumus National Forest, and any doubts that I had about the existence of bigfoot or answer that day, but as far as that first little glimpse of a siding, that kind of got me just going
down this wormhole and till this day. I mean, I think I saw what I saw, but not absolutely certain.
Is this an area that historically has other bigfoot sightings?
No? Absolutely, And one of the things is I've gone I had gone back there, and I went back there a handful of times, and one of the times I did hear what I thought was a vocalization. It was very quickly, but it was something that responded to two whoops I did, and it it just sounded too strange and the fact that it like almost mimicked what I did was very odd. Aside from that, yeah, this area was I guess what a befo we're talking about?
With a researcher terms, and the using the researcher words.
It'd be a hot spot because there's a number of BFRORO reports further up the mountain there, and there's almost this string that I kind of put together. I'm a guy that like sits down and likes to look at reports and look at maps, and I like to look at to see if there's any correlations within these sidings. For example, you know, maybe there's a creek that runs
all along this place with the string of sidings. And what I kind of found is that this there's this kind of canyon from a place called Hume Lake that goes all the way up to kind of like a Zalea campground, and then it goes into breaks into redwood canyons. So there is this kind of corridor that you can piece together on a map. Now, within that area, there's at least five or six reports that I've that I've heard of, some.
Of them being VFROO.
A couple of them were people that I spoke to, including I mentioned a little earlier a law enforcement ranger.
There was a there's a Christian camp called Heartland Christian Camp, and I was talking to a law enforcement ranger up the top of this Redwood canyon, and I started just talking about Bigfoot, and he's kind of sitting there in his truck, smiling, you know, nodding, and you know, I'm just I always when I talked about when I talk about bigfoot to like law enforcement or rangers, I try to come off as like, this really sane, middle of the line person, you know, because if you go to
one extreme, you're like, you know, you can see them crazy very quickly to somebody.
So I always try to ease into it.
And I kind of see him leaning back in the seat listening to me, and I'm just asking, you know, you ever see anything strange? And he pulls out his phone and he goes, let me see if I can find these, and he scrolls back, scrolls back, and he pulls up these pictures of a trackway and he says, apparently everybody woke up at this Christian camp and some people noticed some footprints.
And they were going, oh, look, it's big foot footprints.
And somehow the kids told the adults, and the adults were kind of like, you know, perplexed by it. Going home, who walked through here? This is kind of funny isn't it. The prints are kind of big, aren't they. And I guess when a law enforcement ranger passed by, they're like, you know, you want to see something strange that we think is a little bit weird. And they took him up here and he took pictures of it, and they all kind of stood around scratching their heads.
And that was the end of that story. But he's showing me these pictures and I'm like, dude, can you can you you think you can get these to me?
Like I won't see your name, I won't. He's like, man, I just can't have any involvement in this, And like before we go like government conspiracy or anything like that. I honestly think that this guy just did not, like legitimately want to get involved in anything weird. And you know stories of you know, someone in his profession telling this, you know can get back to him to give me a trace back to him. I just think he didn't want anything to do with it.
But that was a weird story.
It's also another weird story from a couple of volunteer rangers that came by to check on my campsite at night. I was here there with a couple of friends just camping, not doing a whole bigfoot thing. But when they came by, I always kind of like I said, ease my way into, you know, making sure the subject kind of meanders toward. The bigfoot thing.
Just happened to come up. What do you know, all the time.
All the time, and because and I do it, because sometimes, you know, you do this twenty times, you might get one person that goes, well, yeah, I got a story for you. They'll take you something real interesting. And these two girls, volunteer girls, were telling me about how a ranger a few months earlier, and this is right around a place called Jenny Lake's Jenny Lake. I guess she was walking up there and she saw something get up on two feet and very fat, very quickly ran up
the side of the mountain. And she got back and was like, you know, guys, you know, I don't know what I just saw. And I guess she made some sort of report about it. And she was out there servying wildlife. And when she made this report, I guess one of her superiors had told her this is a
story coming from the volunteers. By the way, one of the superiors had told her, you know, what unless you're wearing you know, I'm sorry, while you're wearing your uniform and you have that NPS badge on, We're only going to talk about National Park Service stuff, you know, bears and all the educational things that are in our curriculum,
you know, not side stories about anything strange. So he wasn't like denying that she saw something or anything, just saying, hey, look, you know, as an employee of the for Service, you got to keep it straight, which is something that a friend of mine, Robert Leiterman, has also experienced in his career, where you know, it's not this big shadow government trying to come down and suppress Bigfoot. It was just a superior going, hey, buddy, you got to keep it in line.
You know, that's not what we teach, so, you know, And that was right around this same particular area.
When did you first jump into the idea of like, hey, I'm going to go out there and specifically investigate bigfoot with like a group of people they're commonly known as Bigfoot audience. What was your first experience like with that.
Oh, you got to be cool and use the term expedition in caids what they all call them.
Your first official expedition where you're going to actually become a Bigfoot researcher.
No, you're right.
So twenty fifteen, it was spring and I had been, you know, just chatting online like we all do, and there were all these Facebook pages where people post their blurry pictures and paradolia and stuff like that. Every once in a while you'd get a great post where you'd
get somebody, you know, tossing an invite out. And one of the people that I came across was a guy named Jeff Kelly, you probably remember him, and so he had the Squatcher's Lounge podcast and I started kind of chit chatting with them, and over the course of time we talked a lot, and he was like, you know, we're all meeting up in the Sierras, and you know, this is around the area of the whole justin SMA. Supposed to kill site, as I supposed. People are real back and forth about it, you know.
Anyway, it was an incident that happened up there.
A couple of years later, you know, Barcatino, a guy films a couple on a thermal imager and this was very very interesting to me, and I had picked apart the story online, like trying to just find any holes in the stories and details. And you know, I finally got an invite to go up there and you know, camp with these guys. So I took it and I went up there. And mind you, at this point, I had been backpacking and hiking for years.
I knew the sounds of the outdoors.
I had never been really like confused by anything I've ever heard in the outdoors. I can recognize all animal sounds, and I heard strange things up there and saw what look like a trackway going through camp one day when we came back, and it was that final night where you know, I was holding a therm.
I had never held a thermal imager, and you know, I happened to just see one of.
These things at like two thirty in the morning. My intention was to go up there and maybe I'll get to like hear something strange, right, And it was one of the most active weekends I've had since I've been doing this. So after that, I was just completely glued. Somebody's got to tell this story, and there's there's other stories, and so that's when I decided, you know what, I should make a YouTube channel. I've always wanted to make kind of cinematic documentaries, but I was just glued. Man.
After that, It's like, these things are out there.
They're absolutely out there. They leave trackways, they make sounds, and if you're good enough, you can record them. So it was after that that I just like, yeah, just full on the side, like this is what I'm gonna do. I limited my backpacking and my regular you know camping, you know, I choose to go to places like the Freeman Site to see what happened there.
I wanted to investigate some of the biggest.
Stories in Bigfoot, you know, because yeah, it's just a really cool subject.
And yeah, that was after twenty fifteen.
That was it.
That's just crazy to think about your first official foray into this thing. You're going to one of the most famous locations there is in the history of bigfoot, and at that time it was at its like peak excitement, you know, because everybody was talking about it. You know, it was kind of kept a little secret. You know, you had to be part of the in crowd to know where it was even at, and then you go there and experience stuff that must have been mind blowing.
Yeah, it was also it was also like almost like a I don't want to say a letdown, but something like that, because it's like you go out there in your first time hanging out with these people in this awesome location, and that happens, and it has it.
Has not happened since.
Yeah, yude, I thought i'd have like three or four sightings under my belt. I thought this happened a lot more. Yeah, and no, it's like most most, like ninety percent of the time, you're not hearing or seeing anything, you know.
So I guess I could say, like I wish that I can.
Go back in time equipped like I am today with today's mentality.
Yeah, you know, and maybe I would have been able to document it.
And you know, of course, twenty fifteen it was very hard to get like a thermal imaguer with record capability that wasn't you know, two.
Thousand, five hundred dollars or something like that.
Right nowhere, nearly accessible as they are today to the common consumer.
Exactly.
Yeah, So what did you see? What was it?
Like? Well, it was we had been up there for three days and I heard some very strange noises, Like I said that I around my camp, I'm on my tent, at night.
The first night.
Second night, I heard like this big old power knock, and it was the third night. The campfire had just slowly, slowly died out, like I was the last person up. The last person had just said good night. He had justin right next to the fire in his cot. He sleeps with no tents, right there in his cot, in his sleeping bag. Fire's going down, and I'm just kind of scanning this tree line. And you know, with a thermal imager, you see something, and to the untrained eye,
everything can look like something else. I mean, it's just you're looking at heat signatures through the trees. Some of them look like people, some of them look like an animal, and you got to take a moment to sit there and really distinguish what you're looking at. So I was panning and I said, oh, my gosh, that looks almost like a guy standing up there. And I swear I
almost started panning again. And then I noticed like a little almost like a shoulder shrug, and this thing's maybe, I want to say, i'd have to go back to the site because it's been a long time, but my guess is sixty sixty to.
Eighty yards away and.
You know, over the course of like a minute, I start noticing that moving its shoulders and it's moving tips a little bit. It's doing this thing with its legs a little bit, but it's standing in place, and.
I get the impression it was looking back at me.
Now, at the distance it was, I couldn't see any like facial features or any really features at all. It was just this bright white, solid figure and its feet were like in some ferns, so it was walking across and the ferns were white hot on the ground. It's standing in place, and it's kind of I got the impressions looking back at me, waiting for me to turn away. That's what I That's what I thought at the time.
We did lists like standoff where like I'm looking at it, I'm like, I am not handling this like I should. I'm having like a panic attack. At the time, it was, it was the most terrified I've ever been in my life. I think I walked up a few steps, remember saying justin, justin, get up it up.
He's a very deep sleeper.
I ended up kicking him in the ribs, like like if there was a time to kick someone in their ribs, in their sleep. This was it. So I did it, and he hits up, what's going on? I go, dude, and I'm not making sense, like it's standing there, it's standing there. I'm shivering. And it went on for about it was a couple of minutes. I thought it was like thirty seconds. But what I had done was I had hit I had a GoPro on me, and I hit record, so I actually have this encounter mostly recorded
on audio. And at one point I tried to line up the GoPro with the with the thermal imager, and I just couldnt get it right because you can't you can't see what you're seeing through the go pro. I took an attempt at that, but it was just so I didn't even want to take my eye off.
It because I felt like if I took.
My THERMB down it was going to like run toward me or just something completely irrational, you know, when you're scared like that. So you know, I tried to give it to justin the therm. He goes, don't just don't take your eye off it, watch it, watch it, don't take you don't take your eye off it. Eventually, like what I think is that it just got tired of me looking. It could tell I'm looking in this direction. It can't tell that I'm holding the therm that can
see it, you know. And it's the thing was is it's navigating and pitch black, and that was was very intimidating to me. This thing is pitch black. I wouldn't walk up there myself. And it was a couple of minutes and it finally turned to its right and it just walked off, you know, this kind of steep part of the of the hill there, and then we can hear it going crunch crunch crunch walking adjacent to camp.
So it was this is one of the craziest moments in my entire life, hands down, if not the craziest. And it's like everything in that moment was like I just could not believe one. I could not believe that these things actually exist, that they're actually out there, and that I actually saw one, and it was just mind blowing. And I didn't I couldn't sleep right, I kept waking
up every like couple minutes in my chair. I actually went to my I actually went to my car, you know, and like, if you camp with me now, I'm perfectly fine navigating at night. You know, I use my therm at night. I'm always on my feet walking, and back then that wasn't me. Back then, you know, I was very new to the so I didn't handle this sighting maybe as well as I should.
I didn't go back up there and try to see how tall it was.
I didn't do any of that. We woke up in the morning and I didn't even know how to break the news to people. You're the last guy up at the at the campfire. Of course he saw bigfoot, right. I remember Jeff Kelly getting up and he walked over and I didn't have to say anything. He just looked at me and he was what happened to you? And I don't know what I looked like, but probably looked like I saw a bigfoot. So yeah, that was just an amazing experience that I want to say.
I think about that.
God, I think about it almost every day, Almost every single day. I think about it and just like try to relive it, and I try not to forget the little bit that I remember of it.
But crazy, crazy stuff.
Did you make a video on the car ride home? No?
I didn't know. I didn't I know someone that did have an experience there and made a video in the car ride home where he was actually in tears, and that was a carl lince a Lot here. You're thinking of carl A lince a Lot.
That's right, that's right, because like, yeah, I remember that guy making that video just like crying in his car right on the way home. Poor guy.
Dude.
I didn't understand that video until I saw one. And I didn't cry. On my word, I didn't cry on the way home for mine, Okay, but.
I'm not I'm not accusing you of anything, okay.
But at the time, dude, it was like I mean you, yeah, I remember, Like this is like embarrassing to talk about, but you know, I'm just saying that's what happened. Like I remember having to like not pee myself, like oh my god, Like I've never felt that before, you know. Yeah, it was just a terrifying experience. It's life changing experience. And I totally get why that guy, carl A linz
La drove home like he did. Last I heard he had like some YouTube channel where he made like family videos or something like that.
Doesn't want to have anything to do with the subject.
Yeah, no more, no more of that for him. I'm telling you like this, either, I've met people that have been very, very deterred.
I've met people that say they won't go in the woods again.
I've met people that are total opposite like me, where I'm like, I got to find something more of this thing, not just for myself, but you know, to show others.
I guess he's one.
I don't know if I guess he's one of the the ones that didn't go back.
It's just crazy though, because like, aint that whole story about the Sierras for people listening not aware of what we're talking about. There is a guy that claimed that he shot one and killed it. It was a very big deal at the time.
He shot two of them supposedly. Yeah, there is a there's a video that came out. It's on the small Town Monsters channel. Did you catch.
Eli Watson just covered it?
Oh wow?
And it's a rough watch.
It's very it's very hard to watch, even for myself. Who's you know, seeing him tell the story there you know more than two or three times. Whether you believe it or not, it's to me, it's the stuff that happened afterward that is most important, because his story is just a story, there's no way to debunk it or
corroborate it. But you know, when Bart Katino shows up there and records four figures walking around into the trees, and then you talk to like Todd Hale, who was there as well that night, and he's talking about him and Rosy Heem, the guy that did this Dead Bigfoot documentary. They're they're talking about, you know, they're seeing these things in the trees. Bart's on the other side recording them.
Then there's the Carla Lienslot guy having a sighting there. Myself, this was five miles from this site as a crow flies where I saw one, and I know other people that have had sightings right at that site too, And there are some people that don't even know about these
stories that have had experiences there. So you know there, you know, how do you just make that up so that it's like you have this really like hot spot and you have this story about some that this guy's telling, well, you know, I mean, it's like it's hard not to believe his story when everything else has happened there from people who do trust.
That's kind of what I was getting at. I mean, people were aware obviously of the Sierras. You know, of course there's potential for bigfoot there, but he came out with historian he wasn't a bigfoot or anything. The bigfoot community actually found him, and I don't want to, you know, go down the route of making this a show about him or anything. But regardless of if you believe him
or not, the fact remains. Because of that story, there was countless expeditions and investigations into the area where you have an entire array of people in experience in terms of bigfoot. Going from Bart Katino, like you said, who is like this veteran researcher with just like I don't know, I consider anything. Bart says, you can absolutely count on being honest and exactly what happened.
Take everything he says to the bank.
Yeah, and he was already a veteran before this ever happened. And then you got you, who are You're just like going out for the first time really on an expedition. You've got skeptics going there to debunk everything that have had sightings and encounters. I know multiple people personally that went there and had experiences. So how do you explain that even if this guy was lying, how did he find out about this location. How did he know to take everybody there?
I told him, you can completely remove his story. Go ahead this if you go by all the other stories. This area is still really hot. You know, it's a very active area, very interesting place. I plan to go back there this summer and do some sort of a documentary.
I don't I don't know what I tackled there.
There's like I said, there's a lot to There's a lot of kind of moving pieces and different people that have had sightings up there. And you know, I do plan hopefully to interview a couple. But yeah, interesting place. Very interesting place is on the Plumus National Forest. If we didn't cover that, I'll just say it's in the area of Gold Lake near Sierra Butts, and a beautiful place.
If you don't see anything, if you don't have anything happening, happen, you know, you still went on this epic camping trip in some beautiful country.
I mean, you've been to some amazing places you know that you feature, especially on your YouTube channel, Like you said, You've been to like historic sites. You've been to Bluff Creek, You've been to the Paris and Film Site, You've been to the Freeman Side. You've investigated, what's your favorite location though out of everything?
Oh man, it's gonna be Bluff Creek. And I'll tell you why. It's because one, it's like a Bigfoot it's like an outdoor museum. If you know your history, you drive into there first of all, Like from like Willow Creek is a small, little tiny town that's only a couple of blocks long. You drive two hours from there to get up into the mountains and the history in those mountains. There's all these different locations where you know, some of the biggest names in Bigfoot.
History have conducted their research.
It's also where the Patterson Gland film was shot, of course, but it's also where the term Bigfoot was coined. And this is all within people that I don't know if people realize it's it's way back there.
It's way back. It's very isolated.
You'll drive the roads there and you'll be there for a week and you won't see another car other than the people that are in your party on any of these roads. There are places like, for example, Loos Camp. When the whole yet anything was going on in the Himalayas, there was a guy named Tom Slick an oil tycoon.
He funded this expedition over here.
To look for this the abominable Snowman of California, because people were reporting all this stuff and finding tracks.
So he funded a bunch of these researchers to go to a place.
He landed on, Loose Camp. They all stayed at Lous Camp and trailers, and they'd wake up in the morning and just go try to find Bigfoot evidence. They pulled hundreds of not thousands, of casts, found all kinds of trackways. They were not successful one finding Bigfoot, obviously, but right in that area, I mean this is you can draw a circle in this area you had Louse Camp.
Just outside of that you had.
The Jerry crew site, which is where you know, uh, I guess a quick explanation to Jerry Crewed. You know he was a cats skill driver that they were when they were doing going into Virgin Timber up there in nineteen fifty eight.
You know, he found these tracks on the ground.
And wanted to prove, you know, it's what everyone's seeing up here, what everyone's experiencing up in his crew. So he cast a footprint who was interviewed by the Eureka Times, and it was a slow news day. So they ran that story nationwide on the AP News and it said, how this bigfoot keeps coming around their logging site and you know, messing with their equipment and leaving giant footprints. Well that happened right there, you know, right outside of
Laos Camp. So that's like two historic spots. Five miles up the road you can get down to the Patterson Gimlin film site. You have a place called Layered Meadow down the way where Roger Patterson in nineteen sixty four cast a footprint as well. So it's like you have all of these things that went on in the nineteen fifties, right, but even today in those same areas, you still have things going on. And you know, you have people like
Jerry Crew talking about big footprints. You have Bobo talking about seeing one at Laws Camp as well.
I've heard I recorded a yell once. I still don't know.
I'm still not completely certain what it was. It's on my channel, but something like this yell. We think it came about eighty yards behind me maybe. So there's still things going on there, and there's been a lot of things that have gone on when in my time up there, include finding this mysterious hair. Boy, I'm starting to realize, like there's there's been a lot of key things that have happened in Bluff Creek, and I'm trying to sum them up really quick, and I think I'm going all over the place.
Well, I mean there's like, you know, like you're talking about, dude, seventy years of history of bigfoot stuff in this.
Area, yeah and ongoing.
Yeah, you know, that kind of brings up an interesting point. A lot of people talk about, oh, well, Bigfoot obviously migrate, but then you have areas like this where like, okay, well there they've been in this area for seventy plus years at least on a regular basis, correct.
Yeah, Yeah, And it's.
It's it's just a weird thing to be able to say that you had something completely bizarre happened. Like I mean, this is like while a guy named Jamie Wayne and Dustin Severs of the Bluff Creek Project, we're talking to myself a couple of the guys, and Ken Gerhard was there and he had he was up there with a couple buddies, and I looked over as Jamie's talking, We're standing exactly where Jerry Crew cast that footprint. This guy.
I turn over to my side and I go, hey, my name's Jonathan, and he goes hey, and I gosh, it forgot his name, but anyway, he shakes my hand. And as we're seeing we hear these two huge, like big knocks down in the creek. Okay, and we go, oh, that was weird. You hear that, yeah, And we kind of peeked over. Well simultaneously, one of our one of my buddies dogs who this dog has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail.
This dog isn't scared anything.
This dog's been around bears, mount lions, everything, and he's never gotten scared like this. For some reason, this dog tucked into the bush off the side of the road. And as we all walked back to camp, you know, Ron's going, where's bandit? I go, I saw him up the road in the bushes. So he borrows my belt and he's literally dragging his dog back to camp and his dog is just frozen solid, absolutely terrified. Now this
is right in the vicinity that we heard those two knocks. Now, the rest of the group walked on back to camp and as I catch up to another guy, he's shining his flashlight in the trees and what was that? What happened? He goes, Dude, something huge just ran through here, maybe an elk And I go on an elk, I go, it's elk here. But I mean, we haven't seen an elk up here in a long time, and I haven't seen any tracks. That's weird. And this is I mean
two three minutes from that initial one. And as we get back to camp, Alex Pettakov he's already at Lous Camp and there's this yell that he records, this whoop coming from just up the side of the mountain. Okay, And so it was like this chain reaction almost as if something moved from down creek, cross the road all the way up to Laos Camp and then.
Did this yell and multiple people experience this.
Yeah, and this is also the same spot where if you ever watched, like Bobo tell his we Else Camp sighting, which it's on a few podcasts, he talks about how it ran up this kind of path.
Okay, that yell came like right up that path.
Wow.
So it's like me as his years and years after his sighting. So but yet these same locations are still you know, having strange things happen there. So that's that's just amazing when you can send it a historic site and still have stuff happen.
Whenever you're looking at an area, like a new area, let's say you're looking for a new location and go and investigate. I get asked this question all the time, so I want to get your take on it. What sorts of things do you look for to decide to go to somewhere and actually look for Bigfoot.
Well, I'd have to have like some sort of report, because I just feel like these things live out there in such low numbers that if you just you know, jump in the middle of the forest somewhere, I don't think you have very good chances.
But if you go off of.
A report or two, like a good report, that's a good starting point. When you open up the map after looking at that report, you know, I always try to find like, like why would something live here?
Why?
Well something Sometimes I'll notice, like an isolated canyon. There'll be this long, isolated canyon, and I think to myself, maybe that's something that's somewhere where they live. In the winter, you know, there's no cars back there, there's nothing, the snow, the snow won't be too bad, you know, I'll kind of piece that together with where the report was.
I mean, I'm just looking for like some.
Sort of isolated canyon. That's that's what I mainly look for. I also think that, you know, I try to talk to hunters. I've talked to a couple of hunters about like deer migrations and when things move through.
Find example of that in the Sierras.
There's a couple of people up there in this and that plumous National forest place that think that the activity only happens during the deer migration, so they keep close close tabs on the deer migration.
And I've kind of started thinking that way.
You know, maybe maybe you're looking at deer and elk where they're where they are, and herds, you know, you might have sasquatch around there. But uh, in the end, it's just like a crap shoot. It's so it's so difficult, you know, there's no there's no certainty, there's no really rubric that I really use or anything like that.
Just go off for reports and what the land looks like.
Let's talk about your I believe your most recent video about Mount Rainier. Yeah, mount Rainier crazy place, man, Yeah.
No, it really is.
And you know, that area has a really good combination of a couple of things. Has really good researchers. You got guys like Shane Corston you've had on your show. You got Jonathan Sarah Brown, you have you know, the Barcatine that we talked to gooes up there. He had an incident up there in the Cascades. So you have a lot of good researchers, and you have a lot of activity, and you also have a lot of kind of accessible roads that take you into these remote areas.
So you know, a place like like Bumping Lake for example, we went up there.
I won't say the location, the specific location.
It's kind of a you know, inner circle type of thing where people think that they're having ongoing activity. So we don't like to.
Blurt blurt it all around blurted all around the internet.
But you know, up there there's been some of the strangest sounds I've ever heard recorded. And when I went up there, I experienced some weird things. I had some very strange things on my audio recorder, like what I think ads at one point, like a rock being thrown at a tree, you hear a crack, thump, thump, a few maybe suspect vocalizations or big breaths that you know,
myself and the other camper didn't take. But it was weird because in the morning we found ourselves chasing around this like rock clacking sound, and that's on the video. And I was fortunate enough to record a lot of those clacks, and it was like, I've heard a lot of like I said, I've heard a lot of noises. I've heard a lot of woodpeckers hitting different you know, densities of wood. This was like outright two rocks just clacking together, super loud, and it wasn't just my opinion,
it was another gentleman's. After that, we found out that there was a BFRO expedition up there a month prior and they were also reporting these rock clacks. They were also kind of chasing these sounds around. So it's just a weird correlation. But you know, that Bumping Lake area, it's a very real big hot spot. I do show some audio that was recorded from there. Rainier itself is just like covered in reports that that whole like Packward
area is just covered in reports. So it's like I feel like you can live there and just you know, it's it's like a it's like a big footing mecca in a sense.
There's just reports all over the place and there's good research. So you see that.
You'll see that in my Rainier documentary talk to some good people.
Whenever you guys were hearing the rock clacking, there's also like some very loud movement going on. That's that's the best way I could describe it. I mean, you could hear it on the video itself. So like obviously microphones just unless you're spending a lot of money and in a studio, they're not going to pick up things the way that the human ear picks them up and processes them.
No, absolutely.
And the thing was like we really did feel at one point we were chasing something around because you back in that thick that thick, thick area, you can't take two steps without having to go over log or into wet mud or just everything's in your way.
So it was really slow moving. So we're trying to like sneak around.
But what happens is we hear these rock placks, right, and I felt like we'd move toward it and we'd hear this it was two times and I got it once. On there you hear this huge crashing, you know, like something very large. You hear the guy I was camping with go, maybe an elk just crashing through there, and it moved locations, and then the rock clacks came.
From where you know, where that sound had gone.
So it's like, you got to be kidding me, Like, so then we walk over there and it takes us a while to get that way, and then we hear the crashing move again. Yeah, so this just you know, crash, bang bang bang, and then it was gone. But there was a point where guy was with had a thermal imaguer and he said, you know, there's a there's a heat signature in the bushes is if there was something there,
and it's slowly I'm watching it literally dissipate. So we went over there and we found this kind of ambiguous impression, you know, spoiler. I looked for the viewers like, it's not the greatest footprint cast, it's not even it's not even good.
Really, but it is an impression and it does look like a foot.
And the way that smashed down is the way that something with if it was a bigfoot it's the it's the way that it would have stepped now wheres it looks like a foot that just went into the mud. So it was just this weird game of like literal hide and seek for a little bit.
It was during the day, so the heat signature wasn't like a rock or a log or something retaining heat it. I assume you didn't show any thermal or anything. But from the description and the fact that it was the daytime, I would assume that it was like a spot where something warm had been like sitting for a minute or two and then like walked off, and that's why the heat signature was dissipating.
Correct, Yeah, that was what we thought.
And it was early in the morning, so everything's going from cold and slowly warming up. And it's so shaded in there that there's really no rocks or trees that just hold the heat. Everything is just cold and wet, and so for a heat signature to pop up and then slowly dissipate, like if something it looked like if something was there. So yeah, very just a really weird, weird place and I was just I was just super happy that I got those clacks and the crashing and all that stuff on camera.
Were there any areas that had like a lot of rocks.
Yeah, to the it's to the south of camp.
There's just this big rock wall, so there's plenty of rocks, plenty of rocks, but it was never rocks tumbling.
Down or anything like that. And it was rhythmic. It was like clack clack clack, clack, clack clack.
Claque, and then stops and then it was like one big clack and then a couple more in a minute, and then you'd have to wait for five to ten minutes and then it would start again. You know. Yeah, it's one of those things. It just leaves you. You know, half of you's like, Wow, that was amazing, and the other half is like, what the hell was that?
Like, like I.
Wanted to see it. I honestly felt like something was just gonna walk out of the bushes at some point.
I mean, it was one of those situations, you know, like bigfoot in investigators know this situation on too Well where you're hearing all this commotion and it's huge and it's right there, but you can't see anything, and it's like you're saying, something's gonna come walking out any second, or you're gonna see it go between the trees, but you never do exactly.
And it's really hard to tell these stories because you know, it's like your integrity is on the line. You want to tell your story with integrity, but it's like it's hard to tell a story about you chasing around some sound, you know, and if you don't tell it right, you can seem real silly. So it's kind of another reason that I'm like happy that I was able to document it and put it into this video and you can see it for yourself.
I really enjoyed the video, by the way, and that's not just because you're sitting here, you know, or doing an episode together. It really was a good video, and I really like the fact that you actually documented the whole process of you like, casting the track and showing the track and like, you know, you're right, it's not the wonderful, most greatest track impression in the world. But
it definitely looks like a foot. It definitely looks like toes, and it makes sense how you know, the toes spread around that stick and everything, but the area itself, I mean, you were back in there, man, and like you were saying, it's thick, just like a bunch of old deadfall and just ankle breakers. Man, I don't like whatever was moving around back there was large, even if you separate it from the rock clacks, which to me sounded like you're
saying rock clacks. They weren't a woodpecker. I've never heard of woodpecker like that. It sounded like distinct rock clacks. But the movement itself, where you know, things are cracking and breaking as something large moves through the area. So that pretty much limits you to like elk and bear, and I don't see either one of those choosing to travel through that area like that, like they would find a smoother route, especially in elk. There's no way an elk was walking through that stuff.
Yeah, no, no, no, it would have to be you know, jumping and doing all kinds of stuff, like every single step. I don't think it's even like traversible for them. And so that BFRO expedition a month earlier they found a footprint, like right, not too far, not too far from where we did.
They cast a footprint.
I think there's looked a little bit better maybe, but not great still. But it's just so it's just like, I mean, you you have this experience where you're chasing around rock clacking, and you know, you have to be as a as a we use the term researcher, you have to be, you know, a skeptic to yourself like are you really hearing this? You know what could it be?
Could it be this? This or this? And to to come back home and I watched it was it was Jonathan and Sarah Brown's video and Saleish Sasquatch where they documented that expedition and then watching their video and I'm like, and these guys are like, yeah, so you know we were recorded these these rock clacks. You know, they're on there that we heard that they recorded them, and I'm like, rock clacks And they're literally at the same camp I was.
This is also the same camp where those long vocalizations that Tristan Yulton recorded at night. Yeah, so I mean it's also the same camp where Bart Patino had a sighting. Yeah, you know, so it's you know, it's one of those things again, just like we talked about earlier, you know, lots of things happening in a very particular location, and you know, like.
I'm going back at least a couple of times this summer for sure.
And you've got Tristan's audio on the video on this particular Tristan is somebody that will eventually be on this podcast, so excellent. Yeah, a little foreshadowing there. But what's the craziest, weirdest, strangest thing you've experienced while bigfooting?
Whoo okay, other than my sighting, we'll exclude that because they already talked about that.
We'll say, oh boy, there's a couple that.
The you know, I'll talk about one that didn't get recorded.
And it was last year and I was up there with Alex Pettakov.
We were filming for this his documentary called Return to Bluff Creek, and I was also filming.
But we were out there then. We had two groups of people. We had one This.
Is at a place called Layered Meadow by the way, which has a lot of history to it, and we've also had a few current things happen there, so that's why we were there.
We had one group way up the road. We had another group, my group down the road, and we were there for.
A couple hours, didn't hear anything, and all of a sudden, we start hearing this yelling come off the mountain and it sounded like a dude in a roller coaster going oh. And it would go for like a twenty second spurt, and it was so distant that our recorders did not pick it up. I mean we tried for hours and hours and hours, all of us to try to get our see if we can extract it out of our recorders.
We said it to people and just like nobody could get anything.
But it's just this yelling that would go on for twenty for like for like two, you know, two minutes at a time, and then stop, and then twenty minutes later it start up again and both groups hurt it. So it's like, you know, that's just another thing that adds on. But it was just such a crazy experience. Usually when you hear something, it happens very quickly and
then it's over, like in the snap of Fee. Yeah, this went on for so long where you got to like listen and assess it, and it did it again, and then it did it again, and we try to walk over to maybe where we could record it better. The group met up and then we heard it again all together. Wow, And it's like, you know, if you ever knew like reassurance that these things are there in that location. That was it to me.
But I mean, we.
Found hair there, We've heard other vocalizations there earlier. But you know, to hear something for twenty seconds yell on end like that and to do up and down and you know with its vocals, this is pretty crazy. It's a shame that no one was able to get it. Maybe a parabolic mic would have gotten it.
But yeah, that was just a that was just super super super weird.
What's your favorite Bigfoot story that you've been told or one of your favorites, because I know it's hard to be put on the spot like that and pick like a favorite and go through the rolodex, But like in the rolodex, what's one of the stories that kind of like stands out to you that you just really like.
Oh, I'd be super cliche, but I'm gonna say that the PG film story. Because the thing that a lot of people don't understand is how deep you can go with that story. There are so many people in the background that corroborate that story.
And you can it's like you can never have finish.
Learning about it, Like there's always some other person that knew Patterson that went to the side that you know, you just keep finding more and more about it, and you know, it's hands down my favorite story.
You know, it's just it's it starts.
It starts from uh, you know, Patterson just having this interest, and I kind of relate a lot to him in the sense that Patterson didn't go in his own backyard looking for Bigfoot. He went all the way to Bluff Creek. You know, I've lived in Boise, Idoh, I drive all the way to Bluff Creek. I'm there for a limited amount of time and have a very small window to maybe record or experience something. And Patterson did too. He
went down there for a month. But you can just keep going down this infinite wormhole of information of people, you know, red flags and debunking those red flags, and it goes on and on and in the end, it's like this super humanizing story where like, you know, we don't stop and think how this dude was just a regular guy, you know, kind of swinging for the swinging for the fence, you know, renting a camera that was too expensive for him, you know, staying out there longer
than he should, almost ruin his relationship with his best friend, and It's just an awesome story. And you know, I just I see Daniel Paris as a book coming out about it. I can't wait to read that. But yeah, as far as it goes, I mean, can't go wrong with Patterson Gimlin.
I think one of the most interesting things about it is the Parison film is like something that is a doorway for so many people into the Bigfoot subject, and it's gone beyond the Bigfoot world entirely. Everybody's seen the film. Everybody knows about the film. You can ask Joe Blow off the street, who doesn't give a rat's ask about Bigfoot. You know about the Parison film. Oh you mean that
old video of the thing. Yeah, exactly that. But what they don't understand is it wasn't just a situation where they were just randomly at that location and just happened to catch Bigfoot while they're trying to film a documentary about Bigfoot. There was so much history, like you were saying, in that area. There was a reason that area was chosen.
They were there for a reason. There was already absolutely tracks and activity and sightings and everything else for years and years prior to the film ever being made.
No exactly and then you know, like today, if you Matt would go to go to Bluff Creek, I would totally pass on you know, locations and things that have happened so you can follow up. You know, that's exactly what had happened. Back then. You had Jerry Crew, who you know, he was a yeah, he was a construction worker, but after all this happened, he really followed the subject and he had made a map of where footprints have been found and where he thinks that you can find footprints.
Well, Jerry Crew gave.
This map to Al Hodgson, who ran a general store there, and when Patterson and Gimblin came down, He's like, hey, I got a map for you.
Why don't you guys check this out?
And he gave him Jerry Crew's map and Jerry Crew So, I mean, Jerry Crew is a small hand in the Patterson Gimblin film too. And I just want to say something real quick. In my Bigfoot of Humboldt video, I interview Carl Krue, his nephew, and he had all kinds of neat stories. I mean, he grew up talking to his uncle Jerry, and he had these passed on things passed on like newspaper clippings, magazines, and he just had all this information on everything that happened, and you know,
it's really unfortunate Carl just passed away. So I'm just gonna say rest in peace with a great guy. But yeah, he was a big He was very instrumental and you know, muscle helping me understand what happened back then. So yeah, it's like they didn't stumble across it. No, the stumbled across it. It was the years of people researching.
So what are some projects you've got lined up for the future, Any new documentaries you're working on or anything.
Well, I'm going to make my outings this summer to back to going back to Washington. I'm going to Bluff Creek this summer, supposed to link up with a lot of really cool people, including your future guests here, Tristian Yelton.
So going to do that.
I also want to present a little bit more of the science behind Bigfoot because if me myself, I work in the medical field, so you know, everything's very science based to me. I work in the field of anatomy, so you know it's like there are certain things that I look at and I.
Go oh, that's really important that needs to be told.
And there are people like you know, David Zigan, who as a forensics guy, people should listen to that. There's you know, I have an interview with doctor Meldrum. I'm gonna use some footage from that. But what I plan on doing is just telling story of you know, the science that's behind Bigfoot. I do want to make that video. That's something you can look forward to seeing on my channel this year and we'll see. I don't know, will this Will this be the year that I one walks out of the bushes?
For me? Is this broad daylight?
You never know?
I mean back whenever you had your first sting, you probably thought it was going to be a rap in the next year or so, didn't you.
Oh?
Man, yeah, I totally did. I totally did you know. I've spent like five grand on just camera equipment, you know, trying to make sure I get you know, whatever I record in perfect four K and yeah, man, this has not happened yet.
Well, shout out your YouTube channel. Man, it's a Western Bigfoot Exploration.
Western Bigfoot Exploration on YouTube. You guys can add me on Facebook too. Jonathan Easley, I don't touch that as much.
But yeah, I got like a good handful of video on YouTube. Hopefully you like them.
They're very cinematic videos that kind of tell the story, so it's something I try to make them to be something everyone can watch, not just believers, not just skeptics. Kind of middle of the line, easy watching stuff.
So hope you guys dig it.
Yeah, man, thanks for coming on. Man, I've enjoyed the conversation. I know you got to get on to things that you got scheduled, but you're gonna have to come back on some other time. Man, talk some more Bigfoot with me.
Oh absolutely, Man, I'll talk Bigfoot all day.
You know that.
If you've had your own encounter with Bigfoot or something else you can't explain, you'd like to share your story on the podcast, email me at Bigfoot Crossroads at gmail dot com. Check out the website Bigfootcrossroads dot com. You can find links to social media, past episodes, merchandise, everything you need all in one place. And until next time, remember there's something in the woods.