After thirty five years of living in metropolitan Portland, Oregon, I moved in late two thousand and six to a tiny incorporated town of Springdale, Washington. The population there is two hundred and ninety four. It's about an hour northwest of Spokane. I began a job doing community development planning and grant riding for the Northwestern Indian Tribes. In the early summer of two thousand and seven,
I was driving home from work. I had just left the Spokane Indian Reservation, heading north on a country road that is the eastern boundary of the reservation. Along the east side of that road is a steep embankment, and looking down, I spotted a small sasquatch. It was maybe four feet tall that had scraggly and dusty looking charcoal hair that was about four inches long. It had wide shoulders like a human, and no visible tale or ears. I
couldn't determine if it was a male or a female. I saw it only in profile as it stepped forward nearly on all fours. I never got a glimpse of its face. When I asked my coworkers the next day about Sasquatch sightings, I was told that they were not uncommon, but were more often seen in the western side of the reservation that bordered there by the Columbia River.
The ute Indian grandmother with whom I became friends in Springdale, shared with me that she and her grandson, who attended elementary school, had seen a sasquatch a couple of years earlier as they entered the town from the east. It crossed the road in front of their car and an area dotted with a few houses in the woods. Now they claimed it was carrying a full green trash bag over its shoulder, as if it had just rated a garbage can.
Well. While in Springdale, I began following Sasquatch reports and discussions on YouTube. I particularly enjoyed hearing Coombo's encounters and information sharing David polattis Sasquatch and Missing four one stories and West Gurmers Sasquatch chronicles. I realized I had a loose connection after hearing Garmer Zone riveting encounter near Ecult, Washington, so as a planner, I used to drive there to help the town develop public works
grant applications. In twenty sixteen, I moved back to the west side of the Cascade Mountains, this time in the backwoods of Washington, west of Mount Saint Helens, a place rich with the recorded reports of sasquatch sightings. My highway area is partially forested, but with open fields and scattered homes, and I have always thought it likely that there were sisquatch frequenting this area. Well. One night in the wee hours, I was sitting in my living room
watching a free YouTube movie. I was suddenly startled by an awful crashing sound that shook my house. I could hear metal being bent and twisted, and I thought something was happening with a vent to my kitchen range. There was a noise so loud that it caused me to envision my kitchen cabinets falling off the wall. I checked around my house and I found nothing but a mirror
that had come loose, and it had not broken. I decided that multiple tree limbs must have landed on my roof, and I planned to check the damage the next morning. I'm seventy four years old and my vision is poor, so I phoned a neighbor and she came over to check the roof with me, but she saw no fallen limbs. But what I did find was that the decorative little wash basin I keep filled with large seashells had five of them removed and arranged in a perfect semi circle. I asked the neighbor if
anyone had reported strange goings on recently. Apparently, an elderly woman to the east of my house was awake in the night before by something repeatedly hitting the back wall of her house. I decided that I would camp out in my utility room with the back door propped open and see if my unruly visitor return well that night. It was cold and uncomfortable and scary, so I gave up after about an hour. A few mornings later, however, shells were
being removed from the tub and arranged in a semicircle. Again. The shells became a running theme, ending up in various places around my home, arranged in the same similar pattern. I wondered if my Sasquatch friend had a flare for decorating. Perhaps it was meant as something sinister, a calling card for future violence. The fall rains have arrived and it's been quiet. I really
do not want to be face to face with a sasquatch. Us Indigenous tribes believe there's strong evidence that shows the crypto to be a human hybrid and not an animal, and as such, I will likely be looking over my shoulder as our garden in the spring. I'm a Vietnam IM veteran from Clarksburg, West Virginia, and my story happened in Gandy, West Virginia. I come from a family that taught you to hunt at a very early age. Hunting was one of the main sources of food for most families in those days.
I spent most of my childhood running through the woods for fun. I helped start a boy Scout troop in my area. During the camp outs, the boys and Scout masters would play tag. It could get pretty brutal, with the adults and the older boys giving out Charlie horses and shoulder punches when they tagged you. So a friend and I decided to escape and go into the woods. We climbed a big rock formation and we hid out. The rock formation was pretty high up and we could see the camp while the others had
no clue where we were. In the darkness. Behind me, I thought I heard heavy breathing in the sound of something walking toward us. I counted off the seconds between each step, and I could tell that not only was it large in size, but likely something standing upright. I thought maybe it was a bear. We never saw whatever it was because it freaked U south. We got out of there and preferring to face off with our scout masters then whatever was lingering out there in the dark. As an adult, I've
been back there several times to troutfish. There's an awesome stream that runs through the area, and a lot of scouts from those days remain fishing buddies. But in Gandy, every time I've been there, no matter how many friends
and family tag along, always get that feeling that I'm being watched. In nineteen eighty, my ex wife's grandfather Bill and his son Johnny asked if I wanted to go fishing in Gandy. Well, I didn't have to work and it was going to be a beautiful weekend, so naturally I was all in. The place was packed with people, so we struggled to find a decent spot to camp. We decided on a small valley nestle between two mountains. The place was a little grown up with tall grass and strewn with fallen trees.
You could tell it wasn't used often. It had a creepy feeling about it the way it was lit up in the moonlight that night, but it had firewood in a huge fire pit. The stream wasn't but one hundred yards behind our camp. The dirt road we drove in on was about thirty yards from the tent, and we had just fixed a little something to eat right before Bill and Johnny turned in for the night. I started putting a few pieces of wood on the fire when out came this cry from beyond hell.
It sounded like a woman being murdered, and then morphed into a lion, growling and howling. I heard Bill yell from inside the tent, what was that? This huge hickory tree, at least four feet in diameter and one hundred and fifty feet tall, started swaying back and forth like something had gripped the trunk and was trying to shake apples down from a branch. It was across the road, forty feet deep into the woods, just out of the
reach of my flashlight beam. Bill claimed the only thing that could shake a tree like that was a bull elephant. He needlessly added that we didn't have any animals like that in West Virginia. The campfire, by now was a raging inferno because while all this was going on, I was throwing any kind of wood I could get my hands on to make sure that that fire stayed in nuclear We didn't have any weapons on us. Bell and Johnny never came
out of that tent while I stood guard outside all night long. Finally, when daylight came, the danger seemed to have passed, and I went over to see if there were tracks near the tree. The bar, about fifteen feet from the ground was all ripped off, with claw marks about one and a half inches deep into the tree. I placed my hand over them, and I couldn't open my fingers that far apart. There wasn't a track to
be seen. We ate breakfast and I went fishing, and when I came back into camp around noon, Bill had everything packed up and he was itching to leave. Back then, I had never heard of Bigfoot or the Patterson Gimlin film, but it hit me about two weeks later when Bill was watching a Bigfoot documentary and in the soundtrack I heard the same sort of noises similar to that that we heard in Gandhy. Now I know a cat or a bear couldn't make those sounds or do that kind of damage to a massive old
hickory tree. I am of Aboriginal to scent, and I have hunted all my life. A friend and I decided to search for a new area to track moose and deer, and we both live in Prince George and we know all the areas within fifty miles or so, but we had the itch to go see some new country. We hooked a jeep to the back of the motor home and off we went toward the mountains and Pine Pass. We found a perfect spot just off Highway ninety seven, eighteen miles south of Chetwynd.
It was noon when we disconnected the jeep and immediately drove up the older trail to see where it would take us. To our surprise, the road was in pretty decent shape. As we immediately started to climb up the mountain, we came to several awesome clearcuts that allowed us to see in all directions. We were in the middle of one of these clear cuts and decided to hide the jeep back in the heavily forested area and walked to a good vantage point
that was in the middle of the clearing. We were sitting on a knoll that was about well feet above the skidder trail, which we could see through the willows. We figured that we would enjoy a couple of sandwiches and didn't really expect to come across anything unusual, as we had driven through with the jeep twenty minutes earlier. It was a beautiful day and we were sitting with our backs to each other, me watching the downhill and my partner watching the
uphill. The grade was ten to twelve percent, with small willows not blocking our vantage point, and we could see five hundred yards in all directions. Four massive bucks came out of a patch of trees that were only one hundred and fifty yards on the downhill side. Well, that was a good sign, and since it was the day before the season opened, we headed back to set up camp and we decided that we would walk to the same spot in the morning. We set out before daylight because we figured it would take
us an hour to get there on foot. I have to admit that this was a bit unnerving for me because I like to see my surroundings when I'm in grizzly country. But nevertheless, off we went My partner had done this night walk hundreds of times, and he said that we would be fine. He was such a nice guy that if we happened to come across a grizzly in the dark, he was going to trip me and get the hell out of there. He didn't get the chuckle out of me that he was expecting.
Anyway. We arrived about twenty minutes before shooting light, and we just sat there and listened to all of nature's sounds. Now, this next part is very important and it needs to be explained. There was no way in hell that even a coyote could be in the vicinity without one of us spotting it. There was nowhere for an animal to hide unless there were crouched within the same small clump of trees that the bucks had emerged from the day before.
It was an uneventful first few hours, and it was now approaching the same time of day that we had initially seen the deer. There wasn't much wind, except for a slight breeze from time to time. I had just remarked to my buddy about how quiet it was, when all at once I could hear a high pitch buzzing sound, and I thought it might just be my ears ringing. The best way to describe the sound was as if someone had put a tuning fork to my head. I looked over to my buddy
and he said he could hear it too. On the skitter trail right below us appeared a dark shape that we could see through the willows. There was literally no way that this thing could have walked up on us, because we could see ninety percent of the terrain all around us. It had hair rather than fur, and then all at once it stood up on two legs and it was staring right at us. That freaked me out, and my buddy with the cooler had warned me not to shoot, but to take the safety
off and be ready. This thing stared at us for what seemed like in eternity but was probably only seconds. It dropped back down on all fours and it let out a scream, and it shook us to our core. We should have caught a visual twenty feet down the Sketterer trail, but clearly it had serious stealth going for it. The high pitched sound was hitting our ear drums again as we sat there for another hour, concerned that we had not seen it leave the area. We knew it was still close, and being
ambushed was on both of our minds. The stalemate drug on until my buddy finally said that he was going to walk down to the skitter trail and have a look. Well. I was terrified, and I was about to see my friend get torn up right in front of me. It only took him a minute or two before he shouted to me to help him estimate how tall this thing was by raising one end of his gun up in the air.
His arm sockets were straining as he held the weapon above his head. We guessed the beast appeared to be at least ten feet tall, judging by my buddy's rotator cuffs. I've heard stories over the years about sasquatch and always blew them off as folklore. Whatever this thing was, it had somehow eluded us and vacated the premises. I was shook by my experience, and I chose
to leave. On the ride home, my buddy told me about several encounters he'd had with sasquatch over the years, and based on his well worn travel tales, I assumed that they must be everywhere. When he invited me out into the wilderness for another overnighter, I declined I couldn't bring myself to get back out there. He tried to convince me that sightings were few and far between, and that the sasquatch would rather be left alone. It's why he
warned me off from shooting my gun at it that day. After letting the encounter simmer in my head for a few weeks, I let my buddy talk me into another hunting trip. I thought facing my fears by going out to the same general area would be good for me psychologically. All was nervous as hell while we were there, but after bagging two really nice mules and an
immature bull, I started feeling like my old self. It's always mystified me how the thing I saw that day managed to vanish without us viewing its escape something they travel through portals, or that the high pitched ringing we heard was something to do with their ability to teleport I don't know if I believe that. It doesn't make me feel any better knowing that these things can appear wherever
and whenever they want. I don't want to stop going out into the bush, so I'll continue on as I've always done.