[Birds chirping]
If you've ever been 30 miles from the nearest town, standing over a dead snowmobile in the middle of a spruce tunnel, and you watch something step out into your headlight beams that's way too big to be any kind of a man, well then you already know the feeling I'm about to try and put into words. And if you haven't, well I hope you never do. You can call me Nate.
I live in northern Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, and I've been running sleds on snow since I was big enough to hang on for dear life behind my dad.
I've spent most of my winters ripping up and down those trails between the little towns, the lakeside bars and lodges, and I thought that I had seen everything that could surprise a guy out there, drunks out there on rentals, moose standing right in the middle of the trail, even a timber wolf who once trotted along like he owned the whole place and was showing me around. I never believed in Bigfoot.
I'm still not sure I believe in the same way that a lot of people do, but I do believe in what I saw that night. And every time I think about riding alone after dark now, I get a tight feeling right between my shoulder blades. This happened three winters ago, late January. Now, winter up here in Minnesota is darn serious. This isn't the polite, "Oh, you got six inches of snow dropping overnight," kind of winter. No, I know people from all over listen to your show.
So let me give some of them some context. Just a couple winters back. Duluth, Minnesota, broke its own record of getting over 11 feet of snow that winter. For people using the metric system, I'll make it easy. That's dropping 3.35 meters of snow. And I'm a lot more north than Duluth. So I know we get a lot more, although I don't have a total for my area that year, but I know it was more than Duluth got, it always is. So serious winters was serious snow up here in Northern Minnesota.
Now, we've got a whole network of snowmobile trails that connect the small towns and lodges out here. They're kind of like winter highways. There are some sections wide and flat like a county road, and some dropping down into the ravines, some squeezing between spruce trunks so tight, you're not sure you're going to make it through. Now, the locals ride these trails all the time.
We head out to the next town over just a grab dinner, or bounce from one bar to another, or just make a loop of it for the fun of it. The trail I was on that night runs between my town and another little tiny place about 40 miles away. I've ridden that route a couple hundred times easy. I know where the bad corners are. I know where the trail crosses the swamp, where the groomer likes to leave a heavy ridge. And up until that night, it was just the trail to me.
After that, I started calling it where I saw it. It was a Friday, and I'd worked a half day at the shop, and then a couple of my buddies decided to ride over to a place that we know to go get some fish fry in a few beers. Nothing crazy. Just one of those winter nights where you want to get out of the house. And the trail looks a whole lot better than the highway. When we left out round four, it was still light.
The sky was that pale blue that you usually only get over heavy snow country, and the groomer had just been through on the trails. Perfect conditions. We made it there in a little over an hour, took our time eating, and somewhere along the way, my couple of beers turned into three. I was not drawn by any means, but I'm not going to swear that I was as sharp as I would have been stone sober. The plan had been to stay the night at the lodge, but to our surprise, they were full up.
There was an ice fishing tournament that weekend. We had no idea about it, and my buddies had grabbed the last room when they got there before me. Just crashed on the floor, they said. Now I would admit that my pride got a little involved here. I did not want to be that guy stretched out in the corner, snoring while they tried to sleep. The sky was clear that night. I knew there was no new snow coming in, and well, I've ridden that trail at night many, many times.
So I confidently said, "Yeah, that's okay. I'm going to head back. I'll take it easy." Now that just might have been the dumbest decision I've ever made as an adult. Even the bartender raised a eyebrow at me. "Are you sure?" she said. "It's going to be pretty dark by the time you're halfway home." "Yeah, I said, I'm going to be fine. Trails true and straight." I wish I had listened to her instead of myself. By the time I had my helmet on and the sled warmed up, the sun was already gone.
The sky had gone from pale blue to that deep, inky navy. You get right before full dark. The temperature was dropping fast. My breath puffed out white inside my helmet, fogging the visor for a second before the vents cleared it. The first couple miles of the trail run across a big frozen marsh. You can see the lights from the lodge behind you, and on a clear night, a glow from the next town way off ahead. It feels big and open, not too spooky.
My sled hummed under me, the track biting nicely into the groomed trail, the skis hissing on the packed snow. Once you cross the marsh and dip into the timber, though, it's like someone closes a door behind you. The trail narrows, and the trees crowd in. Spruce and balsam lean over from both sides. Their branches heavy with snow, making a tunnel that your headlight paints and shades of white and gray. Your engine is the loudest thing around.
Sometimes you see another sled coming the other way, but that night, though, I didn't meet a single other sled once I left the marsh. I told myself, "Well, that's normal. It's getting late. Most people by now are tucked up somewhere nice and tight inside on a night like this." I opened the throttle a bit, letting the sled stretch out on the straightways, and I eased off for the corners. About 15 miles in, the trail runs across a low ridge and drops into a long, shallow valley.
That valley section is part of what we all call the tunnel. Three, four miles of trail where the trees on both sides are tall, close and thick. In the daytime, it's pretty. At night? Well, it's not. And that's where things started to feel different. Wrong. The first time I noticed it, I was about halfway down the tunnel. My headlight was spearing ahead into the trees, carving out the trail ahead from the darkness.
Snow dust kicked up behind the sled, and hung in the air for half a second before it settled. And then I realized I couldn't see any stars. Now, that's not unheard of down there in the tunnel. Those trees are really tall. But most nights, you can catch a glimpse of the sky every now and then where the trail crosses some little opening. But that night, it was just black above the white and grey, as if the whole sky had been shut off. It was a bit weird to not see any stars at all through there.
But I shrugged and kept writing, telling myself, "Don't be such a kid about the dark." I came around a long left hand bend, and I saw something ahead that made me let off the throttle. There was a low drift across the trail. Just a soft hump of blown snow, maybe a foot high. The groomer must have passed before the wind had really kicked up. I'd hit worse without thinking twice, but this one it sat right at the bottom of a dip, right where the trail crosses a little creek.
I rolled off the gas and coasted down toward it, figuring I could just ride up and over. And that's when I made my second mistake. As soon as the skis hit that drift, I felt it. The sled bogged down, the front end nosing in deeper than it should. I tried to feather the throttle, but the track just spun, digging itself a cozy little hole instead of climbing. I killed the engine before I buried it up to the seat. The sudden silence slammed into me harder than the cold.
All at once there was no engine noise, no track wine. It was just me, my own breathing, loud inside my helmet, and a faint ticking as the engine started to cool. The headlight stayed on with the ignition keyed, throwing its beam down the trail and into the trees beyond the drift. Snowflakes sparkled in the light, but the air felt heavy and dead. I was muttering some choice words to myself about myself that are not fit to repeat in polite company.
But let's just say that I called my own parenting, my mother's honor, my intelligence, and every other personal quality I might have or might not have had into great question. And I did it in a very colorful way. Let's go with that. I swung a leg off and stepped into snow that came up to mid-calf. My boot squeaked and that dry, bitter cold snowy way. I walked around to the front of the sled, and I saw what I already knew.
The skis were plowed halfway into the drift, packing that snow deep under them. It wasn't a disaster exactly, I mean, I'd been stuck far worse. The solution is straightforward. Stomp down a little trench ahead of the sled, then rock it, and ease the throttle while you pull. If you do it right, you'll be out in just a minute or two. I set my helmet up on the sled seat to cool off, pulled my thin glove liners on, then started stomping.
My footsteps crunch loud in the stillness. My breath popped out white in front of me. And somewhere deep in the woods, a tree popped as the cold shrank it. I was halfway through, packing down the path, when I heard something else pop. But I knew it wasn't a tree. It was the clear unmistakable sound of a heavy foot breaking through, crusted snow. Crunch. I froze, half bent over, my boot hanging just above the drift. Another step. Crunch. This time it wasn't directly in front of me.
It came from off to my right, up the bank a little, out there in the darkness beyond where my headlight cut off. My first thought was probably just some deer. Maybe a moose. They are around there. A big animal moving through knee-deep snow can sound like that. I stayed still and listened, hoping to hear that for-hoof pattern of a deer.
What I heard instead was an even and deliberate step, with a pause between each one, like somebody walking carefully, picking their footing up high out of the snow before setting the next step. And the way it sounded to me, it was a two-footed individual. Now the hair on the back of my neck went straight up, and I was really paying attention. See, unless someone was stranded out there like I was, there shouldn't have been anyone out there at all.
It's too far out, too remote, too cold, and too dangerous, and no one lived within several miles of that spot. I knew that for certain. Now the thought flitted across my mind. If they were out here, they might be up to no good. Maybe they helped that snow drift appear, knowing someone would have to stop. I mean, it's a great place to rob someone, or do worse to them out here, where no one would hear a thing.
Now I had never heard that happening out here, but I was just trying to piece things together quickly as my mind got information, you know? I turned slowly toward the sound. Without my helmet, the cold biddened my ears. The breath, from whatever was out there, steamed faintly into the air. That's the only way I can describe it. I didn't see what it was yet, but I somehow felt this little puff of warmer air move across my cheeks, like the kind of air you get when you walk out of a deep freeze.
You feel that warmth around you. The headlight beam was aimed straight down the trail, so the area off to my right was just on the edge of that light, where more shadow lay than anything else. The trees there were mostly spruce. The trunks, dark and vertical, branches heavy with snow. Something moved between two of those trunks. There was just a hint of motion, a darker shape that was shifting against dark background.
"Hey," I called out, much louder than I'd meant to. "Who's there?" You see, I still thought right up until that very moment, "I thought it was another person." Then again, maybe it was some idiot like me who had decided to take a trek off trail and was now trying to get back to the main path. But the steps stopped, and for a heartbeat or two, nothing moved. Everything was silent and still. And then, very slowly, something stepped forward. It came into the edge of the headlight beam.
First, just a leg, a thick, fur-covered leg pushing through the snow, snow dust puffing off around it. Then the rest of it followed. "If I had been wearing my helmet, my jaw still would have dropped. That's how much my brain was not ready for what I saw." This thing, this big foot, walked out from behind those two spruces until it was standing just at the limit of the bright part of the headlight, maybe 30, 35 yards away, just up on the little slope above the trail.
It was upright, completely naturally upright. No stooping like a bear trying to balance. No waving of its arms for balance either. Just a big, heavily built figure, standing sturdily on two legs, looking down toward me and my slugged. The first thing that registered was its size. I'm right at six feet even in height, and I've been around some really tall men.
And I tell you this was taller. Even standing from far on the slope a little, I could tell it was a good one and a half, maybe two feet taller than me. The top of its head lined up with the low branch on the spruce behind it, and I know for a fact that branch is a little over eight feet off the ground, because I did go back and check. And I'll tell you about that in a while. But the second thing that registered was its build. It wasn't lanky like a basketball player.
This was thick. I mean really thick. The shoulders were wide, and they were rounded with muscle. I could see it under the hair. The chest was barrel-shaped, huge, wide. I don't have the right words other than those. The arms hung down past mid-thigh, hands big enough that I remember thinking that could wrap all the way around my head.
Its whole body was covered in hair, fur, whichever you prefer. In the headlight beam it looked dark, almost black, with the light picking up individual strands in places. Around the shoulders and upper chest, it lay flatter. Down along the arms and legs it hung longer, with clumps where snow had gathered or melted and then re-frozen. The head, it sat low on those shoulders. There was no neck to speak of. Truly classic bigfoot.
And the shape of the skull, another classic bigfoot. It was definitely domed. But the heavy brow bridge made it kind of hard to tell from that distance. And then there was the face, what I could see of it anyway. I had always pictured bigfoot faces, more like the goofy drawings you see, more monkey-like. But this was not bad at all. The face on this thing? Well, yes, at first glance I would call it very ugly. But it was very human as well.
The brows stuck out, shadowing dark, deep-set eyes that seemed to be set wide apart. The nose was wide and flat, with big nostrils that flared just a little as it breathed. The mouth was broad, then lips a darker shade than the skin around them. It was hair on the cheeks and along the jaw, but sparser around the nose and mouth, so I could see leathery-looking skin. It looked down the trail at me and the sled, and it tilted its head just a little bit.
In that moment, with the snow-light washing over it, I had this horrible crystal-clear thought. That is not supposed to be real. That is not supposed to exist. I don't know how long we stared at each other. Ten seconds maybe. It felt like five minutes. And I'm guessing on the distance, because oddly enough, though we went back and checked other things, I never measured the exact distance.
We might have been much closer for me to be able to see all this. But I did see it all, and it was very clear. I remember seeing the breath puffing out in the cold, big clouds of steam that were gone almost as soon as they came. I remember seeing its chest rise and fall. It did not look panicked at any time, and it didn't look aggressive either. If anything, it looked annoyed, perplexed, curious maybe, but more so in the way that a person gets annoyed when they find their usual path is blocked.
I remember seeing it flick its eyes from me to the sled, to me to the sled over and over. That's when another detail slid into place in my head. The trail. The groomed path that we all ride cuts right across a natural low spot in that valley. You can see where animals cross there all the time. There are lots of tracks in the snow going up one side and down the other. My stuck sled was sitting right smack in the middle of that crossing.
It hit me that I was literally parked in this big foot's way. I swallowed. My throat was dry, though. I stood there like a fence post, defenseless, not moving. Very slowly, the big foot shifted its weight from one foot to the other. I heard the snow creak as it shifted. It then took one step forward down the slope. Looked at me, then took another. Each step was deliberate, here to toe, sinking deep into the drift with a soft oomph.
I watched as it approached, my insides going cold, unsure of what to do. I was pretty defenseless. It stopped again, right there on the edge of the trail. Standing there, lit up with my headlight. It turned its head and looked right at me. I wish I could tell you more about the eyes, their shape, their color. It bothers me to this day. All I can really tell you is they were very dark and very shiny in the light.
And all I know is when our eyes met, it felt like someone had just put a nine-volt battery on my tongue. There was intelligence in those eyes, and that's what rattled me more than the size of this creature. I didn't feel like I was looking at some animal the way I would a deer or even a bear. I felt like I was looking at someone who was thinking about what they should do with me. My instincts screamed at me not to move, not to run, don't make any sudden gestures.
We were still looking at each other, and it took a few more steps, and it stopped. It was close enough now. Two arm links away. I was able to see a lot of detail. The way the hair lay on the body. And when it blinked, oh, I saw that clearly. And it did. It blinked, slowly, a couple different times. Then it made a sound, like a deep, chuffing sound, as if someone with a chest full of air was blowing it out through their nose, but there was a rattling sound in their throat at the same time.
I felt it more than heard it. It was a vibration in the air between us. It had stopped, and after that it didn't move at all. It just stared at me. Very carefully, keeping my eyes on it as much as I could. I backed toward the sled until my calves brushed the seat. My helmet sat there with a little halo of frost crystals on it. I grabbed it, slid it on one handed, and flipped the visor down more for courage than warmth. I took a slow breath than another.
All right, I said, "Morning myself than anything. Let's get it done." I turned the key just far enough to bring the sled's electronics back up without hitting the starter. The headlight flickered for a second. Then came back full strength, painting the trail and the creature in a harsh light. It squinted, and turned its head a little bit away, but it did not retreat. I moved around to the back of the sled, grabbed the rear rack, and gave a gentle lift as I nudged the throttle with one thumb.
The track turned, snow spitting out from underneath. The sled lurched a couple inches forward, then bogged down again. I risked to glance up the trail. It was still there, still watching, still not moving. I could see its hands flexing slightly, fingers curling in and out, like it wanted to do something that was holding itself back. I shoved even harder, every muscle straining, and I worked the throttle again, careful not to overdo it.
The sled rocked, the track biting just enough to climb up an inch or two. "Come on," I said. "I don't know if it was the third push or the fourth, but finally the skis popped up out of that drift, like it was breaking free of heavy cement." The sled rolled forward into that little packed-down trench that I'd stomped out earlier. It lurched to a stop-mid trench, still not completely free, but enough that I could feel it wanted to go.
I swung a leg over the seat, thumb hovering over the throttle. My heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears. For one last second I met those eyes again. For some reason I nodded to it. Then it made that low, huffing, chuffing sound again, and then it did something I did not expect. It stepped backwards away from the trail. One, two strides up the slope, and then it was out of the headlights core beam.
It was just a dark shape between dark trees again, like it was giving me space, and some kind of weird permission. And that was all I needed. I squeezed the throttle just enough to get the track grabbing. The sled rolled forward, climbed the rest of the way out of the trench, and eased over the rest of the drift hump. Once I felt it level out on the pack trail, I gave it a little more gas. I didn't go wide open. That would have been asking for a crash.
But I gave it enough that the wind bit hard at the edges of my visors we went along. I did not look back. Well, at least I didn't mean to. But I am human. So maybe a hundred yards or so, I risked a glance back in the mirrors. For just a moment in the darkness as it fell behind me. I thought I saw its shadows standing at the edge of the trail, watching me leave. Maybe that's just my mind filling in the blanks. Maybe it was really there? Maybe not. I don't know.
I do know that was the tunnel finally opened up, and the stars came back into view over the marsh. I breathed hungrily like a man who had been underwater far too long. The ride, the rest of the way home, felt twice as long as usual. Every shadow against the snow looked like something standing just off the trail, something waiting for me. Every bump made me flinch. When I finally did roll into my driveway and killed the engine, the silence of my own backyard felt like a blessing.
The next morning I almost convinced myself that I'd imagined the whole thing. I could sleep, a couple of beers, and the weird isolation of night writing in the snow. Well, it could have all added up to my brain somehow spooking itself. Almost. By 9 a.m., my buddy Mark was knocking on my door with a thermos of coffee. "Hey, man, you look like hell," he said. "Did you ride back last night?" "Yeah," I said. "I did." And I saw something. I'm gonna go back out there today. He looked at me.
"You're gonna do what?" he said. I didn't answer. I just said, "Are you coming?" I grabbed my jacket. I told him I needed another set of eyes out there. Less than 10 minutes later, we were in his truck, backtracking to the road crossing that was nearest that valley. On the way, I told him what had happened, as carefully as I could, trying not to sound insane. We parked where the trail crosses a little access road, then snowshoed in along the packed-down sled path.
In the daylight, I'm not sure it didn't look very spooky. Sun might speared down through the trees, making the snow sparkle. Birds hopped from branch to branch, and a couple squirrels yelled at us. It was all perfectly normal. We came around that long left-hand bend, and there it was, the drift, flattened some from my crossing, but still visible, as well as the little trench that I'd stomped out on one side. "Right here," I said, my heart thumping all over again.
We walked over to the bank where I had first seen it. The slope there had a crust of snow, maybe eight inches thick, with powder underneath, and there, coming down the bank from the woods toward the trail, were large impressions. They weren't crisp anymore, but we could see them plain enough, and they were big. Each footprint was longer than my boot by a good half-size again, and about half as wide again, as well. The heels were sunk down deep.
Front showing a broad, slightly splayed shape to it. There was no boot tread at all. No sign of a heel edge or other pattern as if it was from a snow shoe. Just big, flat, oval-ish shapes, sunk deep in the snow. They stepped down the slope and aligned. One, two, three. Then one flatter spot right at the edge of the trail where something had stood with its weight, and more evenly centered there on the snow. And the steps, they weren't spread side to side like ours would be when we walk.
I don't know what to call that. But the marks that I took to be footprints, they were closer together from side to side, but they were not directly in front of each other. But they sure were closer than a man's would be. From there, another line of impressions went back up the bank at a slight angle. Deeper this time, like maybe it had to push off against the ground, just a little harder there because it was climbing.
There were no other prints leading to or away from those weird impressions until we walked over to them. Mark knelt down and laid his gloved hand over one of the impressions. It looked like a child's hand against a dinner plate. Then he let out a low whistle. "Man, I don't know what made that," he finally said. "But I know it wasn't you, and it sure wasn't me." I looked at him and said, "Do you believe me now?" He straightened up, squinting off into the trees.
"Well, I believe something really big was standing right where you said it was. I know you sure didn't imagine it." He then looked back down at the trackway, then again at me. "So, you're going to report it or what? You're going to call somebody?" I snorted, "Who would I call?" I said, the sheriff. "And tell him I got blocked in by eight feet of a hairy legend after having a couple beers up at the lodge?" I was really laughing then.
"And how do you think that would go with him?" He didn't have an answer for that. I had come to see what I wanted to see that day, and I had another set of eyes, look at it with me, and I felt satisfied. That was enough. Since that night I have ridden that trail again many times. Life does go on, and life doesn't stop just because you get spooked or you run into a large legend. But what I don't do is ride alone there after dark.
If the sun's going down and I'm still out, I make sure I'm on a stretch where I can see houses or town lights, something in the distance. The idea of being out in that tunnel with the engine off and the trees pressing in, it makes my palms sweat in a way I've never had done for anything else. I'm no expert on Bigfoot, and hey, by the way, is anyone really? But I am about as certain as I can be that I ran into that big legend called Bigfoot.
I've done all the usual things people do after a sighting, research, reading, watching every documentary under the sun on the subject, and I searched out other North American cryptids. But with all that I still haven't found a single suggestion that what I saw was anything other than Bigfoot.
I will also tell you that I think about its behavior still a lot. It waited, it watched, it was working things out, and it assessed what I was doing, and when it got it all figured out, it made a decision to back up and give me room. If I hadn't gotten unstuck, I sometimes wonder what would have happened. Would it have gone around somewhere else? Would it have stepped over the sled as if it was nothing? I'm just glad I didn't find out.
Now I've heard you say on your channel, and it rings true to me now. "Whatever these things are, they're not stupid, they're not mindless animals." They know where the easy paths are, and just like the deer and the wolves and us, they use the same corridors, river bottoms, power line cuts, and yeah, snowmobile trails through the woods. Like us, they take the path of least resistance. They take the path that's already cut for them when they can.
So if you decide to tell my story, you can say it came from a guy up near the Canadian line who thought the only thing he had to watch out for on a winter's night ride was thin ice, bad corners, and maybe a stray moose. That was until he got a sled stuck in a drift, and found out that he was parked on somebody else's night highway. These days, when I kill the engine out there, and the last bit of motor noise dies away, I listen a lot harder to the quiet.
And if I ever hear that slow, heavy crunch, crunch, crunch coming through the snow off trail again? Well, you can be sure. I'll be doing everything I can to make sure I'm not standing in the way. You've been listening to the Buckeye Bigfoot podcast. Find more stories, hundreds more, over on our YouTube channel. just look for Buckeye dickfoot.