"I sat there with my knife ready" | Oakridge Wilderness Guide Remote Interview

every week? Well there is now. If you become a supporting member over at Patreon, you get a special members only episode every single week on Wednesdays, and sometimes even more episodes. Head on over to patreon dot com. Forward slash the Big for Society and now let's get on with the show. The following remote interview happens in the region around Oakridge, Oregon, at a cabin out in the woods. That being said, the audio might be a bit different than what you're used to, but enjoy as this is

the first time this individual has shared this information. There may be hot mics, mic issues and other things that you notice in the background, but don't let that stop your enjoyment of this and again, thank you to Kevin for coming on the podcast. Enjoy and we're okay with Kevin first name only. Okay, I'm going to start with it. Kevin introduced me to his property, which is pretty far up in the woods. Kevin, thank you for inviting me out to your picnic table at your property. It is

very nice out here. Your dog is running around. We've been tossing the ball too. He's pretty good at running around getting that. But do you mind. Is there anything you can share about the area that we're in, just for the listeners to get a visual of what we're looking at.

sits and all the bigger cities in Oregon. So basically in western Oregon, once you get out of the valley areas, you end up with all small world towns that might be ten, fifteen to twenty miles apart and probably averaging anywhere from a thousand people maybe to three thousand or five thousand people, So a lot of small spread out

towns dispersed in a really large forest system. And so where we're at here, this is the Blama National Forest, one of the largest national forests in the United States. I mean, there's just a huge amount of roads and different ecosystems, you know. I mean you go from one thousand feet in elevation all the way up to ten thousand, three hundred and fifty eight feet at the top of South Sister Mountains, which is the pinnacle of Blama National Force.

And that's bordered on the eastern side by the Hush National Forest over their eastern Oregon in Bend area. But anyways, really lush area, really pretty area. And I spent decades out here, me and my wife, backpacking and exploring and really just just finding places away from people. And before I had children, my oldest daughter's nine, we always went camping.

growing up in rural communities, on farms, on ranches. I spent most of my adolescents growing up in eastern Oregon outside of Pendleton on the Indian Humuntil Indian Reservation out there, and I worked for all the ranchers that were had big ranches and big farms nestled up against the slopes of the Blue Mountains out there, and just a beautiful area.

And for me, I came from Florida. I moved up here when I was eleven from southwest Florida, just south of Fort Myers, and even down there my family we lived out pretty muchut in the middle of nowhere. We were the typical southern swamp kids. I don't know most

of time, I probably was barefoot and shirtless. And when I was my boy's age now, which there are seven, me and my younger brother, we'd take the john boat out and we'd go hunt alligators and bring back little three foot four foot alligators and just spent our days exploring.

And the funny thing is, now that I've gotten more familiar with miss Bigfoot phenomenon and had experiences myself, think about how remote I lived in Florida, and my mom and dad got divorced at an early as, so there's two different hig This is how we spent our time at and my dad lived out and out in the middle of big swamps. There's no houses around us for six or seven miles. And I never experienced anything in Florida, you know. And I know people say that there's a

lot of activity on there, and I believe them. I believe them. I think that there's a lot of people that have these experiences and they just don't automatically go to Bigfoot as a first explanation, which in my case for the experiences that I had, while the most of these happened, Most of these happened, and I didn't even realize what was really behind it until years later, even decades later, on some of these and when you start thinking and putting it together and being like, ah, that

explains what happened. And it was one that finding Bigfoot show kicked off, and there's a lot of fans of that show, and we discussed my opinions on it, and I think it really mainstreamed the Bigfoot thing absolutely, you know, really brought it out there. But it was more entertainment and hooting and hollering and these microscopic noises that you hear in your TV you know, when the show's debut

and they're like, here, that's a sasquatch. It's a hard bill to sell, you know, to people that never had experiences. But what I really did get out of that show was listening to people share their encounters. And after listening to several of the very first episodes of Finding Bigfoot, me and my wife both looked at each other and we're like, we started recounting all these experiences we had, and we really like that explains exactly.

I have my camper pack right now. I have all my important stuff in there ready to go in case we have to leave. I've had to evacuate the last five years, and so it's just one of those things you prepare for. Reminds me of being in Florida prepared for hurricanes, you know. So, I mean, nature's nature is still rules out here, and a lot of these places are. Even though there's roads going everywhere in this Lamba National Forest, there's just so much uncharted land. There's two thousand plus

miles worth of road in this National forest. You could spend decades trying to drive these roads. And I'm friends with a lot of third generation loggers up here, and even these guys haven't explored all the roads out here. It's just incredible how much room there is. I ran a backpacking business where I take people out on paid

hikes and everything. And after getting really involved with backpacking myself and spending spending months outside literally every year, sleeping in the stars, finding the most remote corners of this Western Oregon Cascade Slope wilderness areas, and just spending weeks out in these quiet spots, we really got to know

the area well. And my experiences with Bigfoot really only started happening when I moved to Western Oregon, and once I made the realization of what was going on, Like I said, sometimes ten years later plus on some of these experiences, it was kind of exciting and made me a little bit apprehensive, especially now that I have children, and so all my kids but you know, I have to seven year old boys that are twins, and I have a nine year old daughter, and we camp all

the time. We go super remote. My camp trailer set up for boon dog camping. We never go to campgrounds. We go thirty forty miles out and we'll stay there for as long as we can usually when we go camping, so usually it's three days, five days or whatever. So my kids know my stories, and I told my kids all my experiences more as a cautionary tale. I don't know if I don't think these things necessarily want to

be your friends. I think they're out there. I don't think I don't think that they are prone to violence and disappear in you or murdering you with anything, especially large animals and especially intelligent large animals.

And I think the more intelligent a creature is, the more likely you are to have personalities, and the more likely you are to just come across a poor, an angry sasquatch. So anyways, my kids know about it. It's really just let them know that they're out there. We deal with cougar and bear all the time up here, and wolves and everything that's not an issue.

years of these happen. I'll give you the baseline unless you want me to throw it out there.

spook easy. I've been around play any of cougars and bears. I've been followed for a day with mountain lions, hiking up and through wilderness, and it's really just not an issue. You learn how to act around them, and you know they're there, so you never want to freak out, and you never want to freak out and run. And so with that being said, you know, so I moved to Eugene area from Pendleton when I was nineteen, and my wife went to University of Oregon and she was studying there.

I was a farm boy out in Pendleton, eastern Oregon on the Until Indian Reservation. And after living in small towns my entire life and rural communities, my wife invited me to be a roommate with her and her other classmates over in Eugene. We were friends. I went to school with my wife. Her dad was my math teacher in high school actually, you know. And so I moved

in with her at tuxa village in Eugene. And when I got to Eugene, about two hundred thousand ish population in that area there because Eugene is Springfielder right next to each other, second largest metropolitan area in Oregon. Small for some of the East Coast stuff, but when I got here, it was exciting moving into a bigger city.

And we started exploring outside of the city limits more and got in a lane county and we ended up in the mountains, and that's when I really got into backpacking over here. So in two thousand and eight, we were well on our way to pretty much backpacking. Every chance we got, we just me and my wife. We went back back wintertime, it didn't matter. We went rain storms, snowstorms. So in two thousand and eight I got invited to

go to Thanksgiving up in as story organ. My mom actually lives up in Warrington out there, which is sits more west of Astoria, I mean, a couple miles away from the beach.

My mom offered for us to pitch our tent in her yard, but we, like I said, we like to seek out those quieter places, and so me and my wife we decided to go find a little spot off of one of the main highways out there, a mile or two off and just pitched a tent for a night or two, and that's where we'd stay. So we got up to Astoria, met with a family and it was later afternoon, hung out with them for a few hours. And in November the sun sets quite a bit earlier

up here. You're starting to it into shorter days, winters coming and everything like that. And this is before cell phones and the communions. Having a phone you could just shake and get a flashlight on and stuff like that. So one thing I realized I forgot was my flashlights. And so we swung by the fred Myers in Warrington and on our way to go find a campsite, and I picked up a Coleman lantern, propane lantern, and.

a couple of days. We drove through Astoria so over'heading east now on Highway thirty, heading towards Sevenson and Rainier and all those little places that are right along the Columbia River there, and we drove twelve to fourteen miles east out of Astoria. And once you get out of as story, it turns into just logging country. A house here and there, gold amongst the forest and everything, but pretty open, with a lot of little side roads that

come off of it. So fourteen ish miles or so out of Astoria, we find a little road to the right. And I have tried to remember the name of that road, but I just I can't remember the exact name of it. And I've looked on the maps and I found the general area. I couldn't pinpoint the road, but we found this little road, and it's getting dusk, you know, the sign has got maybe an hour worth of light left in it. And we find this little road, come off

of it off of Highway thirty. Go a couple of miles up this road and find this little four by four track some of the locals must wheel their trucks on and stuff like that drops sharply off this little gravel road that we turned on too.

to a little a t junction. You come down and then there's a junction and we went straight and it ended up in these big maple trees and there was a campsite under there.

for weeks. I mean, there was a good covering of leaves over everything, and it was kind of bizarre, you know, And we looked at the situation. We thought it was odd, and we're like, who knows what the deal is? And so we just went back to that junction on that little four by four road, and then we took that other leg that came off of it.

into a brushing mass. You couldn't walk through this stuff if you wanted to, you know, while walking down this trail, there was just a big enough spot, probably not much bigger than the footprint that this picnic table takes up, cleared off the side of the road there where some of some of the bushes have gott knocked down. And we set the tent up there and it's getting fairly dark now, and I'm like, I'm gonna get that lantern set up, So I unbox it out there and get the.

disappeared at that point in time. And so at this point in time, it's it's dusk to the point to where you can still see, but it's getting dark, like you couldn't read a book, was getting that dark. And so I told my wife, I'm like, we're just gonna have to camp without the lights tonight.

her scruff on the back of her neck. I looked out at her, and she's been in the wilderness tons and round bears and cooars, and she's not a very reactive dog, and she kind of growls, and I thought it was odd and maybe that kind of put me on alert, and so I say, oh, she smells something.

And so as I get closer to these water bottles, these gallon jugs, the bushes, the brush on the other side right immediately ten feet behind where these jugs are sitting that whole shrub line just starts shaking, I mean shaking so hard that leaves are falling off of them. And Nori goes to run up there and she's growling, and I call her back right away. She made it

five feet in front her. I called her back, and I saw him sitting there looking at these jugs, and the bush is still shaking a little bit, and it stops, and I just decided I got this feeling. I'm like, I don't think we need water tonight. So I just turned around. I left the jugs and made it back to the tent. My wife asked me why didn't grab the jugs, and I'm like, I didn't want to tell her what happened, because I mean, it just was kind of an off putting feeling. I'm like, we'll just get

him in the morning, you know. I mean, we had a little water bottle with us, so we stilled some water. You know what, we'll scrab in the morning. I don't want I didn't want a home all the way down here. We get in the tent now and it's completely dark and we're setting up to go sleep. We lay down and within five minutes of laying down, we start hearing things moving through this thick brush.

animals moving around through here. And well, as we were talking about it, the noises got louder, and it got to the point to where it sounded like there were three or four truck sized things running through this brush. And they'd run directly to our tent from multiple directions, and they would stop twenty feet away, and then you just hear the brush go crazy, you know, I mean as they ran back away. And this went on for thirty to forty five minutes, and they got so close.

I mean, they were right outside our tent and me and my wife were laying there and just looking at each other.

to it. And this went on, and I mean it was pretty nerve wracking when these things would run through the bushes to us, there was no going around brush. They ran right through it like a truck. And after forty five minutes the noises died down, and a couple hours later we ended up falling asleep and I woke up in the morning, beautiful morning, and got out of

the tent and went for a little walk. And there's this big power line lane path that leads all the way up to the east side of the river and that connects up to Rainier And I know you've done some stories about Rainier up there, and it was just a really odd experience. And this is this stuff that me and my wife experience over the decades backpacking and hiking. And like I said, it wasn't until the Finding Bigfoot show came on that we really started putting together what happened.

you know. And so, like I said, we backpacked every chance we could get, and we did that pretty much till we moved out here eleven years ago. And when we moved in here, had a kid our first year in here, and now I run a business and I don't have as much time to do the backpacking that

I used to do. And two thousand and nine, I still live in Eugene and it was a weekend, so we took our dogs I too at that time, Hughey and Nori, and we decided to head to the Coast Range to just find a spot out of the way, find a little swimming hole in one of the creeks up there. And this is the area is Wolf Mountain, which is west of Benita, and the Coast Range is super rugged. They don't have the big mountains that the

Cascades have. But you're either going up or down. You're either the bottom of the valley or you're on top of it, and that's how the roads go too. We end up finding this section of land. It was actually Warehouser land, and they have a gate on it and they say private property, no tresspassing.

big trees were cut down. There was probably a one hundred acre clearcut, and the clear cut went straight up this really steep ridge, and I wanted to get to the top of this ridge to see the view. Well, this clear cut is flanked by very large trees. So when you take out these sections of these big trees, it opens a forest up.

same feeling I got when I was camped outside of Astoria. There, when I abandoned the water jugs, I just got this feeling a little uneasy that I was being watched. I hadn't heard anything yet, and I put it aside and just continued hiking up the trail while I made another fifty feet up this step slope, and you got to weave through this mess of slash and stump, so it's

hard hiking. And as I was making my way up the hill, I hear I almost sounded like a gunsholt, a dry chunk of tree, not even a branch, getting.

the sap. I continued up and stick started snapping and breaking a big tree knox whack on the side of trees, and it was all to the right of me, and like I said, you look into this force and it's so dark, but I could see there was there was almost like shadows moving back there. I could see that there was something in there, and it made me really uneasy. And at this point, I'm only fifty yards from the top of the ridge that I want to get up on to get my vantage point. I stopped there and

I got even more uneasy. And it's just one of those situations. I always followed my gut when I'm in the woods, I always have and I just felt really uneasy, and it was a turnaround now kind of a thing, and I didn't want to stand where I was standing, and so I turned around and met back up with my wife. She was a little bit lower down the hill, and I'm like, oh, just get some so rough and brushy up there, and it probably wouldn't be much of you. I'm like, let's just head back down. And my wife

had heard the commotion in the wood sield. I'm like, oh, I think there's a bear up there. Anyways, I'm like, let's just head down to the creek and enjoy ourself sore. So we went back down to the creek and spent the rest of the day, probably three hundred yards away from where I was at the top of that ridge, just enjoying herself. Nothing else happened that day, but it was the first time that I really started more paying

attention to that. Just that really off putting turnaround. Now you know, your hair is up on the back of your neck kind of deal. And I had never experienced that hunting or anything, you know, being around mountain lions and bears and stuff like that. I mean, you're always on edge when you see them, but it's not terrifying. That was the borderline terrifying. So I spent a restaurant day there, no big deal, but nothing else happened. And so the next experience I had was actually later that year.

So I was in my early twenties and Eugene has a hippie influence and I was getting to that scene, and so I was. I did small grows years prior to that, little closet grows and stuff like that, and like most people did in Oregon, pot was still highly

illegal felony for any of it. And my roommate that I was living with at the time, we decided in that year to do a grow out in the forest and I'm like, we want to pick a spot that's as remote as possible but has access to where we can get to it and still be able to hike in and not spend five hours hiking into this place, you know, because I mean you have to carry the

plants up there. We grew from clones before planting them, so the plants were already two feet tall before we put them in the ground and threw in this group. So I think we had sixty or seventy little plants and it was an industrial operation. It was just us kids messing around. Have fund I don't think we were going to make millions off of this stuff, which it

was never the case. So we find the spot, and Google Maps really was a new thing than once, so it was pretty unbelievable to be able to pull up.

weather in the fall. If you get too high, you're going to get froze out before your plants finish, you know. And so we go up there that early spring two scout spots to put our plants on. So I go up with my wife and my roommate Terry, and we go to check out this first spot, and it's about three quarters of a mile of a brushwhack off of these logging roads that you drive for twelve or fourteen miles, and they're so brushy, brushes dragging down in the side of

your vehicle while you're doing it, you know. And so we get to the spot where I marked it, and this is before GPS and everything, so we always just navigate it with map and compass, and the GPS units they had then were expensive and fairly clunky, gray screen, none of that nice overlay like not having your tablet out in the woods like it is now, you know. And so we hike into this first spot that I had marked, and three quarter mile hike in kind of

pick on our way through through this forest area. They have been logged several times over. Every time they log, they plant three trees for every tree they cut. So that process, if you repeat it over several times, you can imagine how dense the trees get after they keep on replanning three to one on the cuttings, and that stuff dense. And I'm heading for this open spot that

I saw in satellite. It was probably a half acre in between all this old or this new reprodden, which is what they call the trees that they plan after the log and we get up into the spot finally antakes I don't know, forty five minutes a bust and brush. You get up there and it's actually a perfect spot

to grow. I had a little spring that popped up in the middle, really brushy, some BlackBerry up in the middle of it that had enough room to where we would get sunlight, enough sun light to do what we

want to do. As we got into this clearing, I got that feeling again, same feeling I got when I was over in a Wolf Mountain, and the same feeling I got outside of Astoria that the really uneasy, like you're being watched and really just very uncomfortable, like you wouldn't want to You wouldn't want to spend any mountain time up there with that feeling. And so we scout

around it and we brought a lunch. We were planning eating a lunch out there, and I was talking to Terry about the spot and turs like, yeah, I like the spot.

next to a little creek. We get up there and find that there's these little terraces where the hillside slumped over the years, these little terrace spots that are pretty flat, and that's the open spots that I was seeing on the map, and there's about five or six of them. I continue down the hill, the creek kind of followed them.

I mean, it was a perfect spot. And I told my buddy, I'm like, this is a spot, and no off putting feelings or anything like that on that earlier hike we did in that day, we just no one talked about it, and all the end easiness seemed to disappear. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be the spot. So the next week I organize a couple of my buddies to help us get our supplies up there, and we got all the stuff up there, all of our plants and all of our supplies we're going to need throughout

the year. And our schedule was in the summertime. Every other week on Friday, we would leave Eugene at about eleven o'clock and we'd drive up to this area which was in the Lane County Lynn County line up there. So it took us about an hour to an hour and twenty minutes to get up drive up to the spot, and then it was another We always parked about a mile and a half away from where the spot was, even though it was only quarter mile off the road.

We don't want to park right below it on so we would park and then do about a mile and a half walk in. And so it's after midnight and the stipulation I had for doing this was one, we never took any guns with us, you know it. One I didn't want that to be part of it. And two, like I said back in the day, you got caught doing the stuff, that's just an extra felony thrown on

top of it. And so we would go up and hike into the spot and we would do our pruning and our watering and fertilizing and stuff like that, and spend a few hours up and up in the spot in the middle of the night doing it. We'd usually come out about about four o'clock or so in the

morning back to the rig. So as we're doing this through the summer, we started having some strange experiences up there, and we heard the sound of car doors slamming, just boom, and it only sounded like they were one hundred feet away. But there's just no way, there's no cars up there. We walked the roads to this spot, and the spot's at the end of Deadon Road, and there's no roads

within besides the one we came in on. There's no roads within three quarters to a mile away from there, and those roads are so brush anyways, no one's gonna be out there in the middle of the night.

the Carridor thing was the weirdest. It just sounded like a newer car, not like not like an eighty square body Chevy. I mean like a newer car where the doors closed and there's no rattle, and you get that loud as it closes, just tons of that. And my buddy Terry was joking rising, he's maybe this maybe it's haunted up here. And we always had our chuckle about it,

you know. And and so later in the year, in late September, going on October, we harvested at the as far into October as we can get it before the frost kicked us out of there. We started going every week and doing our late night prunings, and it was our last weekend that we were going up there to do our maintenance before we come back and harvest our our our little crops, which they the plants, did not

do good. They were tall, they were big plants, ten feet tall, nine feet tall, but they were so spindily growing in that clay soil.

like that. So it couldn't be spots. They use helicopters back then, they were flying helicopters all over the place, and as on stash and this the stuff the creeks to my back here and there's a slight open area, probably about to the edge of where it drops off right there, and I see out of my per field is really dark black shadow just zoomed by.

messed with your debt perception. You can't see. It drowns out some of the colors and textures of things. So anyways, i'd see this, the shadow move, and it gets my attention, And so I sat there for a couple of minutes listening, and I didn't hear anything, and so I was like, oh, maybe it's and I'll move me through there really quick so much which I mean it would have made a lot of noise if his alk, But that's the explanation

I came up with that time. So packed the stuff up and put my backpack on, clicked on my CRAPPYRII headlamp, and went down to started heading down to Terry. And about the time I started coming off that first plot to come down towards where Terry was, I started hearing brush breaking. It started about one hundred and fifty feet above me on the hillside, right where that that shadow, that dark figure had ran to. And I would start walking and it would start walking, and I mean at

first it was pacing. I was going at the same speed I was going by, I mean, in the thick brush moving so you hear yeah, I mean just just like walking through thick brush, snapping, crackling. It wasn't rushing at that point, and I would stop and it would stop. As I got closer to Terry down on the lower plot,

it started picking up. Every time it started moving, it started getting faster and faster, and so this thing started pretty much running to me and when I would stop, a couple seconds later it would stop, but every time it would get closer, and I got that feeling again. I'm like, oh, man, Harry, are middle of the night. A couple three inch three and a half inch pocket knives, you know. And I make it down Terry. I'm like, hey,

I just want to let you know. When I was up there top plot, I don't know if there's a bear or nolk. I saw something move up there and it was moving down the hill with me when I was going, and Terry hadn't heard it at that point, and he's like, well, okay, And I'm like, let's grab our stuff and let's take the shortcut. Let's just go straight down the steepest parts and let's just get onto

the road and get back to the car. So we as soon as we started walking through that bottom plot, this thing started running and Terry looks at me and he says, what the hell is that. I'm like, that's what I was talking about. I'm like, it'll be fine. I'm like, do not freak out and run. I'm like, if it's a bear or a cougar, I'm like, it will chase you if you run. I'm like, it'll be fine. I've dealt with animals in the woods before and I've never had an issue. I'm like, you just need to

be cool about it. And so we start moving down again, and this scene starts running and every time, I mean, it sounds like a truck driving down this hill, just snapping breaking up trees. Like trees that were in there

were twenty year old, fifteen year old reefrod. So they're all about this big round about six to eight inches, you know at the base and Douglas fir they grow in pretty thick, and these things are thick in there, you know, so you can't see more usually, especially once you get off these plots, you can't see more than five or six feet in front of it. Before you have a tree and branches and you can see the

gaps in between there. We start making it off this edge and this scene starts coming and now it's within seventy five feetish of us, and we start and stop multiple times, and I told Terry, I'm like, take your knife out, and he takes out this little pocketknife. I'm in front when I pull my pocket knife out, and I'm like, I told Terry, I'm like if this animal comes down and starts attacking, I'm like, you stab it until it stops attacking, and I'll make sure I do

the same for you. And Terry look quite nervous. I'm like, but do not run. And Terry's okay, you know. And so we stop and listen. We don't hear anything. We start walking, and again this scene starts coming, and now it's coming. It's just coming with a vengeance. And we stop, and this time it doesn't stop.

of my field of view. And this thing is just running straight at us, and I'm sure we're about to get attacked by whatever it is, you know, And so

I'm down ready. It's brush snap and breaking closer. Stops about ten feet in front of me, directly in front of me, and so I'm sitting there looking straight ahead, kind of slightly hunched down, kind of in that batter's position, you know, ready to go, and this thing stops and the noise stops, and looking through the trees with this crappy headlamp in between the Douglas fir branches, there's gaps and I can see this blackish fur and it's got a little bit of a shine to it, and I'm

looking and as I move my head lamp up, I see these splotches of her. And I get to about eight feet where I'm looking up about eight feet tall, just ten feet in front of me, and I can see black fur still, and I can see these lighter pass and I think I was looking at his chest. So I sat there with my knife ready. My buddy Terry had his hand on my shoulder behind me and just waiting for the scene to come the rest of

the way and confront us. And we sat there for probably six or seven seconds, just staring at it, and all of a sudden, I hear it shuffle and it turned, and when it turned, I saw this light flash come through and I think what I saw was it's palm, and it was about the size of a baseball mint, like adults baseball mint. It's just this flash that went through this crapy. My eye was really cussing that headlamp. All I wanted to do was see. You just want to You can't run, and you want to be able

to see. And this thing turned and you can hear it on two legs taking these huge steps going down this really steep slope, and I mean it disappeared out of earshot within five seconds, just disappeared. And we sat there for another minute, and I told Terry, I'm like, let's head back to the truck, you know, And so we hiked out of there, headed back to the truck.

And anyways, we ended up going back the next week and finished up our plants and stuff, and you know, I mean, I didn't know what to think of it, and I really never We chatted about a little bit on the way back to town, but I just didn't know what to think about it, and really didn't have a firm place to put this experience, you know, And so time goes by and it just was one of

those odd experiences. And then, like I said, once that show came on TV Finding Bigfoot and stuff, I'm like, yeah, I was a big foot stand in front of me.

out there. And I talked to Harry about him, like, hey, you remember that like grow we did out in Lane County Line he's oh, yeah. I asked, Terry, you remember that thing that chased us down the hill. He'sa, oh yeah, I remember that.

mountains there and the Lama National Forest. Probably thirty five miles forty miles as crowde fly from here. Just an absolutely gorgeous area in my opinion, being around the state and backpack in the whole state, it's some of the prettiest hiking you can find. An Organ and Linton Meadows in particular, it's this meadow system that comes off the PCT, runs on the top side of it, and this meadow

system drops for miles and miles below. So you get these terraced lava flows that have huge meadows, two hundred acre meadows, and they open up to South Sister, this huge volcanic mountain that's got glaciers on it, and South Sister has a lot of red rock and it's just absolutely stunning. We actually end up getting married out there. That's where my wife we did a wilderness wedding. You know, I got my brother ordained and hiked in my inlaws

again only takes aeve people in the wilderness. And I was starting to get into guiding at this point in time, so I was running some nonprofits as a as a guide and taking a bunch of people out and so I had tons of year for backpacking, and me and my wife decided we didn't want to we didn't want a church wedding, but anyways, we chose a spot because

it's so pretty and it's off the beaten path. A lot of people might day trip it if they're out there backpacking, but it's thirteen miles to the nearest trail head is hard hiking. So Aileen Lake was our main destination.

super dry year, we were running low in water. We had been out of water for the last few miles, and I knew there were springs down there and Lint Meadows, So our plan was to just get into where the meadows start and post up camp, find some water, and then the next morning hike the rest of the mile and a half two Island Lake, which is our destination. We were gonna spend about a week and a half out there. So we drop into the meadow and the sun's got about an hour and a half worth left

a light on it. But it gets start quick up there because everything's so up and down and we're in this valley. You can be a couple hours away from sunset and be in complete shade and darkness.

of trees that come out in between the meadow. So we camped about fifty feet away from the edge of this tree line, right where you come into the meadow where you first start to get to the meadows, set our tent up, got water, feed the dogs they're dehydrated dog, backpack packing food, and made our dinner and we're sitting in our camp chairs, shoes off, just enjoying it.

board and they run straight up this hillside. I mean you'd have to use you know, you'd have to use all fours to climb up that that mountain side.

But we chalked it up to people being out there camping, and the wood splitting stopped after about forty five minutes, not noise anyways, and then we started hearing the sound of the thump on that ground up there, being volcanic and made with a lot of pumuses, a lot of air pockets in the ground, and when you run on that stuff, you get you can hear the foot footsteps, even humans walking on and people walking on it. But

it wasn't footprints or footsteps. It was rocks being thrown towards our tent, big rocks, football size, soft all sized rocks.

a fist fight. And middle of the forest, I'm like, there's plenty room for these people to go camping.

on for thirty to forty five minutes. You know, it's well dark now, and the rock throwing stops, and a few minutes later we hear three or four things standing maybe twenty five feet away from her tent, in between our tent and the tree line. You can hear them talking, but it's not a discernible language.

few large rocks that weren't there. In the morning, you could see where they had hit on the pumissey ground and skidded, and like I said, it was I just assumed it was people, but there was no people there. And so we packed up a tent and hiked up the Island Lake and spent our week or so time up there and join us up. Never had anything else happen up at Lint Meadows that whole trip. Our first trip into Linton Meadows. By the way, we hiked from the Cascade Lakes highwayside of it, so it was a

sixteen or seventeen mile hike. I ended up taking a wrong turn and ended up adding a couple miles to it, and our first hike in there just the only other thing I've had happened our first time up there, we went to Husband Lake, made it in there. We were whooped, The dogs were whooped, and they are laying down in the shade every time we stopped. So it is time

to stop. Our goal is to get Island Lake. When that was our first time up there, we camp on this huge out rock outcropping that overlooks this lake, and as after we set up the tent, this five point black tailed deer just comes out of the bushes and it's within ten feet of our tent. And I have my two dogs there and they're not grounding or barking, they're watching this year. It's just clopping around. It was so close I could have reached out and touched this animal.

And it made me a little uneasy about the health of this animal. It's getting later in the year too, so I possibly could have been rut and so I told my wife and I just don't mess with it, and it'll goa hung around our tent well into the evening to the point to where the sun had dropped down. In fact, actually I was laying in there and it was sniffing the tent and it ended up laying down right outside of our tent, feed away from us, laying down.

And I never put two and two together, but I think what it was that deer had been being chased and it was around us for safety, And that's my speculation on it. Anyways, really odd. Yeah, you could have gotten that thing with a slingshot. Boy, I would have been a hunter streamed. He was a nice looking buck. It was a beautiful buck. But yeah, So that was my experiences in Litton Meadows there and I spent a lot of time in that area, a lot of time

in that area. In fact, actually years later me and my buddy that I ended up starting the back hiking Guide service with we bush whacked eight miles from Linton Meadows. No trail route to get to or Linton Lake to get to the meadow section.

piled up on each other. I always side it as odd as let's just do an I mean, it wasn't treefall. I mean someone had stacked it, you know, And I just thought it was odd. And but that area up there ended up burning later in a fire around twenty.

And it's a beautiful area. But yeah, I took my family up there and they really enjoyed it.

at Marie Lake. Well, we me and my wife had just bought a brand new Arii backpack intent I mean it was the big Agnes sl It was a six hundred dollars tent, really nice piece of gear and only weighed two and a half pounds. It was so nice to really get her pack weight trimmed down, you know, so we could do these bigger trips and not die doing them. And so we set up at Marie Lake and there's one camp spot that's at the front side

of the lake. There there's another one you got a bushback to on the other side, but there's no one in the first so we took it. No people around or anything like that. We set up on the grassy area in between the campsite that was in the woods about a hundred fet from the side of the lake. We were about fifty feet closer to the lake than the grassy area that leads right to the lake's edge. And we did our thing, went to sleep. I had

my two dogs with me, yuey Nori. And we wake up in the morning and my wife's side of the tent, it's got a full rain fly on it. It's a heavy dewty tent for backpacking, three and a half plus season tent. It's stout, this ink can take some storms. And we wake up and the rain fly is ripped on her side, with the zippers rip ripped out of the seam on her side.

this the other night. I'm like, and we just didn't know what to think about what happened with the tent, so we taped it back together to make the trip work. And the funny thing is where it was ripped. Like, as my wife'side, I'm like, yeah, now that now I kN know what was going on. I'm like, you could have had something reaching in over the tent on you.

I don't know why we didn't wake up. You know, that's the only weird you know, I'm not much on the wu side of the phenomenon, but that's unexplainable because you're gonna hear that stuff that rips up nylon to be able to rip it, I mean, it's loud if you rip it, it's super loud and man at least for the dogs to alert. So luckily ari I had their return policy. We took it back and got a brand new tent for free.

I first got out here. And now I was living up here, I could just leave out my back door and in fifteen minutes I could be at wilderness wilderness edge, and it was just so much.

You can tell by looking at the truck what they do, because everyone's got the scrape marks from these branches dragging down inside of their vehicle. So we find this trailhead and this lake drops. This lake's in this bowl that sits well below the road, and it's backed up by this big, thousand foot tall cliff that makes Huckleberry Mountain. There's a fire lookout up on top of it, which you can't see from the lake, but I had my boys were probably about two years old at the time,

so we had them in backpack carriers. Abby was three and a half or four, and I usually open carry. When I started hiking with my kids, I started just bringing a gun just in case I'm not scared or worried about it, and it just fell out. It was a smart move to make, especially where we went and the stuff we did. And so we hiked down to this lake and come up to it and it's really brushy.

There's just a big enough spot to get out of the brush to see the lake when you first come down to it, and there's this really faint fisherman's trail that goes around the east side of the lake and it takes you through this rhododendron thicket seven eight foot tall rohdodendron thicket, and you're stepping over logs and you get to the outlet creek and you got to walk a log to get over the creek to this semi established camp spot that's at the end of the lake,

and it's up in these bigger trees the rhododendron there, so it was a spot to put a tent. We hung out there and had lunch, the kids splashed around in the lake. We spent probably an hour there and I started getting that uneasy feeling again. And my wife, I know, she was packing up stuff. I'm like, are you ready to get out of here?

the truck and get out of here. And it was so strong on that trip that I Abby was about about twenty thirty feet in front of me.

load the kids up, load the backpacks up. And I asked my wife, I'm like, what did you think of that lake? You you probably go backpack in there's right out our back door. And my wife says, I never want to go back down there again. She said, I got the worst feeling coming out of there, and that's when I told her that I experienced the same thing. I'm like, yeah, I actually unholstered my gun, I had all fun safe and called Abby back to me because it just felt so imminent, so eminent.

putting myselves in these vulnerable situations. But we were actually going to go up there and camp at that lake, just me and him, just to understand this a little bit more. I've had so many encounters with this, and now that I'm starting to wake up to what was going on, I wanted with some clarity to experience this and get some more answers. And we end up having a massive fire Cedar Creek fire burnt through that year

we were going to go up there. I mean that couple weeks later was when we were planning on camping, and the Cedar Creek fire burnt through in twenty twenty one and it just cooked all that area of Huckleberry burnt and the lake around it burnt. I haven't been up there since they they've had the road closed off.

I think it's back open now, but I wouldn't imagine it would be the same kind of place to go to, plus camping under burnt out trees that have been there for a couple years, isn't the best to say to make Yeah, it's right out our back door, and the same right out my back door. My property backs up to National Forest. There's private lots around us, but we're this little tongue of houses that are spread out all

on big plots of land like what we have. You know, I probably have one of the smaller chunks of land out here at fourteen acres. You know, almost everyone else has, you know, sixty two hundred acres. But outside of that, it's just National Force. And when I first moved up here, the logging that you saw coming up the road that hadn't happened, So it was a continuous thick stretch of nice eighty two hundred year old trees that are grown up here. I mean you're just driving the trees the

whole way. So I worked in Eugene at the time, and I always did side jobs. So I take customer side jobs in on chainsaws, generators or whatever, just to make some money on the side. And when I get home, I would go out to the shop up there, the Red Shop, and I would work on these things. And sometimes I'd be out there till midnight or later. And as I'm working out there, I had this happen. Eight or nine times. I'd be out there working middle the night and something would come and hit the side of

that shop so hard. I mean it shook that whole the whole shop. I mean the whole shop would shake hard enough to wear. It's a two two story bar, and essentially, you know, hard enough to wear. Dust would fall through the slats from the upper story. Adia you know, I thought it was an animal upstairs a couple times, so I went up there with a pride bar, waiting to clever a raccoon or something. But there was never anything up there. And now I realize it was probably being harassed and.

You know, I run my business from my property now, so I mean I'm already doing forty fifty hour weeks out there, so I'm not out there at eleven o'clock or twelve o'clock a night anymore. But really interesting stuff, And at that point in time, I was pretty well aware about what was going on and felt pretty lucky to have the stuff so close for a guy that's looking for some answers and clarity on it, so I don't have to go two hours away to find the

answers for the stuff that's happened to me. And recently here in December of last year, I went up to kitsen Or, a CT beach area, and explored with the kids. And there's a little bridge that goes across one of the arms of the reservoirs in the winter time, they drank the reservoirs for flood control, and so what would normally be underwater is just back down to mud banks and the river that used to feed the reservoir body.

And I took the kids there after Christmas. It was a few days after Christmas, so December twenty eighth, twenty ninth, and it was a stormy, snowy day, but I wanted to get out and do some exploring. So we went down there and hiked down to the river, parked on top of the no cars, no people around us, And while we're down there, we got almost sounded like gunshots, these sharp cracks ringing out through the woods, and I

almost assumed that someone was up there shooting. So the kids came running over to me, and we're down lower elevation from of the noise is happening, and I'm like that there might be someone over there, maybe shooting their pistol or something like that, you know, So we end up hiking out of there.

definitely a pistol. It sounded more like a pistol. And when people are shooting their pistols still.

oh man, it's super cool, super cool. This was right after the ct Beach incident, and so we go in there and I always wanted to explore it. And they have the whole Hot Spring Foundation for the lodge that these have. They're still hot water coming up through there, and really cool area. We hiked across this little bridge and there's these three sided shelters that the boy Scouts used to use for their summer jamboreez and stuff like that.

And in the mud on these trails and these roads that ran on the other side of there, there were old footprints, big ones, sixteen seventeen inch footprints. There were small footprints. They were all over the place and there from fresh to ones that utel had been up there for a few weeks, and I know people have had run ends and encounters up there before. And I've never

cast at a track, and I would. I'm planning on going back up there later in the year and when things slowed down, and I want to find a good track to at a cast in my collection. So I've had other stuff happened to me. I've had the classic wooden knocks and stuff like that happened. I've never heard screams or yells. I've had buddies that have and the guy that you met one, but I never had other than the murmuring that I heard at Lent Meadows. That's

the only audible noise I've ever heard from it. Also, I want to note something too, I never have had the smell never.

you don't really think much of it. People are always like, oh, why don't you go out there and just see what it is? You have to be in the situation. To understand it, you really have to be in there, and it's just so close to what humans would sound like that that's why I think it gets rid off more than not as people just thinking they're hearing other people out there, and maybe more people would be surprised that may not always be the case.

I'm like, pretty incredible, and I've always intererstained the idea of taking a game camera with me when I'm going out back back and now, but I just I don't know if they can detect it. I don't speculate too much on that, but the fact that there's just very few game camera pictures that are get to be credible enough to even want to talk about, I think it would lessen your chances of experiencing anything.

the middle of a lake. But in come evening time, you get these inflows and outflows of air that move through these valley systems, you know, So during the daytime, as the lowlands heat, the wind moves up valley and as it cools, that colder sinks back down. And Spirit Lake's kind of in this bowl. And so I mean, if you ever watch the win come in on these lakes, you can actually almost see that, you can actually see

the ripples on the lakes. It actually hits the lake from straight up on top and billows out and around. If I saw something like that, I would probably attribute it more to that. I'm not saying that these guys didn't experience something that strange.

were like really spread out like that. Like I actually saw that in real life and I was like, oh, this these can be legit. Usually those tracks look like they're faked, but like it was there. I saw it. They were not casted the way that it was. What it was stepping over would have made it extremely hard to be casted. But there's no doubt there was. Did

I tell you about the apple the fruit? Okay, so yeah, the apple and the orange and banana that was left from the group the day before and that we went back and the apple was left there uneaten and the orange was on the ground uneaten, but the banana was on the ground and peeled and eaten and just things like they've never experienced stuff like that in Iowa. I have had some things happen, but like it is a totally different world out here, and you do have to

be really careful. You go out there and there's no cell service, there's huge predators. You get a flat or your car blows up, you have to hike back to town at least twenty miles, and there's not many chances out here for sure. But it is beautiful.

kind of part of this area. But yeah, that's the way I've always looked at it is I think it should be approached with caution. When I'm not much on the Bigfoot Woo side of things, I've looked a little bit into it, and from my experiences it.

back back quite a bit. I think it's really important to keep an eye on this stuff and realize that this isn't a zoo, You're in a super rugged wild area. If it isn't animals you have to deal with. I mean, it's other natural phenomenon like these wildfires. That we're surrounded by wildfires, and that's been the norm for quite a while up here. And I'm not on the I don't s sscribe to the idea that these things want to

be friendly and want to be seen. I obviously if they want to do harm, they have their chances with me, and they could have. But the fact matter is it's a really thin line from what I experienced to actually having physical altercations with them. And I think if you do it enough, I think you're going to come across it. Like even Ronnie and Dwayne, those guys, they've been dealing they've been experiencing this for decades, and you see all uncomfortable they can get in those experiences.

immediately go out to urgent care in Springfield, Oregon. Supposed to be flying out tomorrow, so Oakridge is going to have to, unfortunately, say goodbye to interviews are not going to happen the or the old This sucks. The old timers are not going to happen unless I come back tonight. But it all depends on what the urgent care says. Yeah, so I made it up to Springfield, Oregon, went into the urgent care per the advice of the Wilderness Guide.

Thankfully it was not staph infection. However, they have no idea what's going on. They say it makes no sense. It looks like something hit a log across my two legs. They say, there's bruising. It looks like blood is leaking out from inside. I have no idea they've did. They did a few, did a full barrage of blood testing, which they'll be sending directly back to my doctor in

des Moine. I'm not gonna lie. I'm freaked. I've got a fever, a little bit of a fever right now, so heed for me to go on antibiotics right away, even before the blood tests are back, just in case there is some bacterial infection. They're saying some sort of cellulatus, one of the causes of which on the paper can be high energy raised. I'm headed back to Oakridge. I got my two hour interview this morning, but I've fortunately

had to cancel a few because of this. This health mishap, but we are headed back to Oakridge, back to the hotel, and then I'll be flying out of Eugene tomorrow and then going directly to my doctor. Okay, I'm going to head back to Oakridge. As of time of recording in late August twenty twenty four, my legs have completely healed. Both doctors in Oregon and Iowa are not quite sure or what caused that issue, but we are in a

great spot healthwise right now. No issues. I'll tell you this, next time I got into the woods, I will be wearing appropriate attire such as pants and not shorts. Take care of yourselves out there, guys, and we'll talk to you next time. Please take a minute to help out the show by subscribing on YouTube, making sure you hit the bell so you don't miss any notifications, and share the episode on YouTube with a friend. Also, if you're listening to us on a podcast, thank you so much,

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