Archive 103 Bigfoot

I had forgotten to feed my chicks. My mom handed me a mostly empty box of Quaker oats, and my cousin, my little sister, who was three years younger than us, and I went out to feed the chicks. My cousin's driveway had just recently had a new load of white gravel poured on it, and the moon was full that night and we could see just fine without the flashlight, but I took one with me anyway, so I could

see inside the shed. The shed door was standing half open, so we walked inside and I flipped on the flashlight. The shelf where the chicks were on was six feet up. I had to use the ladder to reach them, but I wanted to make sure they were out of harm's way, and as I swung the beam around to face the shelf,

I got the shock of my life. Standing there on its hind legs with its front paws on the shelf was a huge white dog like animal, well one of a screened I couldn't tell which one of us it was, but that prompted the dog thing to drop down on all fours. My sister and my cousin took off running for the house, but I was frozen in place. This thing was hunched in its back, and it started moving toward me with one of my baby chicks still in its mouth. Its face was covered in blood and it snarled,

showing me its teeth. As it moved closer, I could see red eyes glaring at me, and I knew it was going to pounce on me, but still I couldn't move. Please, dear Lord, let me move, my mind, cried, as it got within five feet of me. Instantly I felt myself spring into action. My sister and cousin had already reached the house when I broke into a hard sprint. The new gravel pulled my feet out from under me, and

I found myself spilling across my cousin's driveway. As I tried to get up, I looked back and saw that thing, that monster, standing on its back legs in the moonlight. It reared its head and screamed a terrifying howl, like a dying woman, and then it looked at me, and by then I was back on my feet, and I took off for the house. I bolted through the screen door to find my cousin and my sister trying to explain to my dad what had happened what they saw, and I tried to tell him too. We wanted him

to go check, but he wouldn't go outside. He insisted that we didn't see anything, and to tell you the truth, I think he was afraid. I heard a lot of stories about men out raccoon hunting when their dogs wouldn't leave the campfire, and maybe that's what my dad was thinking of that moment. I don't know what I saw that night, but if that was what kept good hunting dogs from leaving the safety of a roaring campfire, it made perfect sense to me. Two years later, we moved

five miles down the road. We had a big Collie. Then that dog wasn't afraid of anything, or so we thought. One summer night, when the moon was full, we heard it scratching at the door trying to get inside. Daddy opened the door and that dog almost knocked him down trying to get past him. About that time, we all heard the same ungodly scream I recognized from that night in the shed, and my dad and I stepped outside

to see what it was. The field next to the house was that same white doglike creature standing on its hind legs in the moonlight. Dad ushered me inside, where we watched from the window as that thing dropped down on all fours and walked away. And the next day we went to the field to look around. We found some white hair in the barbed wire fence around it, but we never saw the creature again. I've since heard

stories of others who have seen it. Though to this day I think about that monster that killed all of my baby chicks that night, and it ate most of them. This encounter took place on October sixth, two thousand and five, in the desolate desert of southern Utah. My late wife and I were to meet some friends for a multi day hiking trip through some slot canyons. For those who are not familiar with what a slot canyon is, it's a narrow sandstone canyon formed by water runoff with vertical sides.

By narrow, I mean some areas are several feet wide, and while others are barely large enough to fit yourself through. It's common to crawl, climb, and repel your way through, and sometimes swim scattered pools of standing cold water left over from the storms. This particular hike we were doing is well known for having these cold pools of water. My wife wasn't keen on that part, so she and I opted to hike in a different way and join the rest of the group halfway and hike out together.

The very nature of how these canyons are formed is why you do not want to be in them when it's raining. Storm water moves swiftly through these canyons and immediately becomes a deadly flash flood. Often the walls are sheer and vertical, so there's no climbing out for escape. In fact, every year people die when entering these places without concern for the weather. For this, the weather had been clear for days leading up to our planned departure

and was predicted to be a storm free night. Also, there is no self service in much of this area, so you're on your own. Self sufficiency is expected. Our original route traveled through one slot canyon and met up with another slot canyon, and carried on further south as a tributary to a larger reservoir downstream. Looking at a map, it would look like a capital y where these two canyons came together. The west entrance is more technical and takes more time to traverse, while the east entrance is

largely a sandy wash bottom and can be traveled much easier. Basically, it's like walking on a beach. Just upstream of where both canyons meet is a clearing wide enough to camp away from the wash. That was the place where we planned to meet the others. The main group set off on October the fifth, with plans to meet us either late on the sixth or early on the seventh. My wife and I planned to leave our home and get to our meeting point all in the same day, so

we set off on the sixth. Getting to the trailhead for us required a six hour drive, then about eight miles of hiking. As usual, we were running late, so By the time we were on foot with our gear and in motion, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. The hike was incredible. The two hundred foot wide wash slowly narrowed as the miles went by, and halfway we were walking through areas where we could almost touch both sides.

The colors would glow especially strong as the sun lowered, making some of the hallways glow in ways not thought possible. It was the golden hour. We were progressing well, spirits were up, the map had us just about to the confluence. Suddenly we were rocked by the awful stench of death. The canyon walls were over four hundred feet tall and the canyon was ten to fifteen feet wide, and that stench was so concentrated you could almost feel it. Yet there was no sign of where it was coming from.

Nothing nothing in sight on the ground up or down the canyon, and with near vertical walls, we were really confused. We kept on using our shirts and whatever else to filter the air as the canyon continued to twist and turn, and then there it was a full size adult mountain sheep or ram just a few days dead. I say a few days because that was the time since the last storm flooding in this canyon, and the carcass wasn't covered with runoff debris. It was obvious it had showed

up afterward. Our suspicion was it slipped and fell down into the canyon from above. The gender was impossible to determine because the entire abdominal area ribs to pelvis and all the way to the spine was missing. Not to say the introls were strewn about in the process of being devoured or in decomposition. It was outright missing all of it. The head was turned away and down into the crevice between the ground and the wall. Once we identified the source of the stench, we quickly ran past

it to get to fresher air. Just as we were clear of the odor, we walked right into the confluence. The joining of three four hundred foot tall large sandstone hallways was an awesome sight. I stood in the center, and I looked straight up to see the sky in the shape of a wy, and I could tell that

we needed to find a spot to camp soon. Luckily, the clearing where we were camping was just a few hundred feet away up the west canyon to our surprise, the West Canyon was wet, meaning it had a small amount of water flowing through it, so much so that we were jumping from sand mound to sand mound trying to keep our feet dry. We weren't concerned with flooding because we were confident with our weather forecasts, and it's also common to have water springs or seeps in the

desert canyons. As we walked through a particularly narrow section along the way, the walls gradually widening to around two hundred feet with large sandy banks on both sides, and they were gaining elevations safely away from the wash bottom. We chose to stay left as we hiked up stream and found a clearing large enough to camp for the night. It was about twenty or so feet up from the wash bottom and about thirty feet away, with small trees

and bushes between to give us a little privacy. After setting up camp, we had just enough light left to look around a little. I personally wanted to see if anyone else was around that we should be aware of, and just as I hoped, we were alone. It soon got dark, so we started back to our tent. It was then we took notice that as we walked along the wash, our footsteps sounded like a splat splat as

we stepped. I remember jokingly telling my wife that it would likely wake us up should our friends arrive before we got up the next morning. Before long, we were zipped in our tent and down for the night, when just minutes later, out of the pitch black night, we were met with an absolutely insane roar coming down through the canyon. It was of such volume and force that we were instantly beside ourselves with fear bordering on outright panic.

Everything about it seemed impossible. The sheer capacity to create such a sustained volume was outside my understanding. Out there. At worst, maybe you would see a mountain lion or a black bear on a very rare occasion, but nothing that would come to the combined guttural roar of an African lion mixed with that of a silver backed guerrilla. What still has my head spinning is the duration. It spanned, almost ten full seconds, with no change and intensity throughout.

Instantly we knew first we were not alone as previously thought, and second we were definitely not on top of the food chain. It was then that I took notice of my wife, who at the time was having an absolute melt down. She was yelling and squirming around in her sleeping bag as if she was possessed. It was everything I could do to get her to try to be silent, and as I held her down with both arms and a leg so we could hear. Easier said than done,

but done nonetheless. And there we sat, holding each other in our tent, whispering and wondering what the hell was happening. My wife, having grown up on a farm, told me she had never heard or known of any animal that could make that kind of sound, except on television. I'm a city boy, having spent most of my youth mountaineering, and I've met up with mountain lions, black and brown bear, moose,

wolves and whatnot. And I was absolutely stumped. Neither of us had a clue what could have made that sound. So we lay there in dead pitch black silence for around ten minutes, when I eventually mustard up the nerve to sit up. Very slowly. My mind kept racing around for anything that we may have had with us that could be converted to a weapon of defense. The two metal bars in my internal frame pack A three inch

pocket knife, tent, poles, a rock. I didn't find anything that I thought would keep whatever this was off of us if it attacked. Suddenly, whatever this thing was showed up. As I sat in the dark, something very large and very fast ran down the wash toward us from the upstream at my left, passing in front of us, and to my right, out and down toward the confluence. And

it did it in seven unmistakable bipedal steps. It was pitch black, and I stereophonically heard the splights of the steps that had to have been more than fifteen feet apart as it ran past me, no more than thirty feet in front of where I was seated. The creature made a breathy, gruntle sound, almost matching the pace of its steps, and had passed through the one hundred and thirty foot clearing and under three seconds. If we were scared before, it was nothing compared to how we felt now.

All we could do was sit and wait and wait, and that is what we did for hours. I don't remember when we finally fell asleep, but I was sure wide awake when my wife started packing to leave at first light. I spent a few minutes looking around in the daylight, trying to find anything that would give me an indication of what it could have been. But I didn't find any footprints, and my wife was making it clear she was leaving with or without me. I think it either climbed out of the canyon or it was

stepping in water the entire time. I don't know what I'm confident with. However, while not having seen anything, I know what I heard, and that is enough for me and our friends that we were to meet up with. They were delayed with minor injuries. There was absolutely no keeping my wife there a single minute longer than necessary, and I wasn't about to let her walk out alone.

I left markings in the sand washbottom and put a note for our friends in the hiking register before informing the ranger at his station that our friends were still out there. He said another ranger was making the track that day and he'd let him know to keep an eye out. It turned out that our friends were around six hours behind us when they called. They claimed they neither heard nor saw anything out of the ordinary during their entire trip, and that a few nasty blisters were

the reason they decided to leave early. Strangers still They all say they didn't see any dead animals along the way either, while I clearly remember taking notice that the sheep had not changed in any way when we ran past it again on our way out. We still haven't told those guys anything about our experience that night. My father was a logger, a for a stranger, a mechanic, an iron worker, and a welder. He and I spent a great deal of time in the woods together. My

father was no stranger to the wilderness. My paternal grandfather had been a fisherman until he enlisted and went to fight the Kaiser in World War One. A short time after arriving in Belgium, a shell explode did three feet from him and practically ripped him to shreds. But he survived, and he spent about a year in the hospital in England until the doctor sent him home to Newfoundland, telling him that he would never fish again and probably never

work again. He went home and proved the doctors both right and wrong. He never did fish again. Instead, he chose to start logging and sawing lumber with the assistance of his sons. My grandfather's mill was located at the mouth of a short heavily timbered valley, where they cut about fifteen to twenty percent of their lumber. They practiced selective cutting and did a five or six year rotation, moving to a new area each year. As each son came of age to work in the mill or the woods.

Grandfather warned them to never, under any circumstances, be caught in the valley after dark. He never did give a reason, but Grandfather was star enough in his warning that none of the brothers ever disregarded his advice. My father told me that sometimes late in the evening, when they were doing their post work day maintenance by lantern light, they

would hear strange sounds coming from the valley. There would be wood knocks and growls and screams, and owl hoots and whistles, and brush breaking, and occasionally the sound of an animal dying. None of the brothers ever saw anything, and Grandfather never admitted to seeing anything, but they all knew that there was something terrifying in those woods. The neighbors nearby and in surrounding villages knew that the valley was occupied by demons, and nobody went there after dark.

The fear lasted up until the nineteen sixties, when I was a boy, and it was my father who delivered my warning. The mill had been shut down in nineteen forty nine due to political issues, and everyone found alternative employment, but the brothers and grandfather still operated it now and then for personal use. One day in the early nineteen fifties, a friend of my grandfather's arrived at the mill with his horse and slay to go into the valley to

cut some firewood. Well, grandfather was there at that time, and since it was late in the day, he reminded his friend to be out of the valley before it got dark. The friend scoffed at the advice and headed out anyway. Grandfather finished sawing his lumber around dusk, and he loaded his trailer and began oiling and greasing the bearings in the mill, and all of a sudden his ears picked up the sound of pounding hoofs and a

voice yelling at the horse to go faster. Grandfather looked up in time to see his friend and the horse coming tearing out of the valley towing an empty sleigh, and grandfather intercepted the horse and managed to bring it to a halt. Both man and horse looked wild, and it took a while for grandfather to calm them both down. When his friend regained enough of his composure to speak, his first words were, I should have listened to you. He had gotten about halfway through the valley when he

saw an ideal spot for cutting. He gave the horse some feed and water, and then he went to work. A couple of times he noted that the horse had seemed fidgety. He couldn't see anything wrong, so he returned to his work. He recalled several times hearing something moving around in the brush, but passed it off as being a moose or some other form of wildlife, and he ignored it. By dark, he had a load cut and was almost ready to head home. He picked up his gear and was about to secure it with the load

ropes when all hell broke loose. A huge, hairy, manlike creature burst out of the trees. It was a giant. It was eight feet tall and probably weighed five hundred pounds, said, and it was screaming and gnashing its teeth and breaking off trees as it rushed forward. According to the man, it probably broke off more wood in a few seconds than he had cut all afternoon. What scared him. Most were its eyes. They were glowing red and contained more pure evil than he had ever encountered in his life.

I'm never going back into that valley again, he swore to my grandfather, and with that he snapped his reins and headed home as fast as he could, And he kept his vow, and he never returned. As a child, in the nineteen sixties, we used to ride our bicycles near the mill to play in the shavings and saw dust in the nearby river. We always had fun, but we never felt comfortable there. In the evenings, we always felt like we were being watched, and we always made sure to be home after dark.