I was seventeen years old in nineteen sixty nine when my brother asked me if I'd like to join him on a three day hike up in the back country of Yosemite National Park. He had just come home from Vietnam. Even though I had camped out many times with my family, I had never been on a hike for that long before, so I said yes. The first day, we followed a steep path that dropped a thousand feet to the river. It was about the end of April, which is early spring in the high
country, and Yosemite is a big place. We didn't see anyone else throughout the entire trip as we traveled over hill and dale in the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains. The first night, we camped near a babbling stream. After lunch the next day, we walked through a sunny alpine meadow covered in light green, knee high spring grasses and flowers. The meadow was situated in a valley surrounded by tall wooded hills, and it was a spectacular sight. And then
we entered an aspen forest dappled with sunlight. There we noticed the faint smell of a skump. It was weak enough that We figured the skump must have left some time ago, so we kept on walking further into the grove, we came across a newly built windowless ranger shed constructed of thick corrugated steel. All the necessary tools and equipment to repair trails in the back country were kept
there so the forest strangers wouldn't have to haul them back and forth. We knew this because the front and one side were torn off, with the heavy metal corrugated panels scattered all over the nearby woods. We stood there gawking at it for several minutes, trying to figure out how this could have happened. My brother said it must have been a big bear, freshly awake from its winter hibernation that did it. But on closer inspection, there were neither claw
marks nor teeth marks on any of the eight foot long panels. Some of them were curled into themselves like a sea, and others were thrown up to thirty feet away. It was as if someone tall had peeled the sheets off like peeling a banana and tossed them aside. Nothing inside the shed was disturbed. Whatever peeled away the panels had no interest in the contents The bears in
California are mostly small brown bears like on our state flag. A doubt a bear like that could have reached high enough on the shed to grab the top of a panel and rip it away. It was unnerving to consider what might have been able to do that kind of damage. Let's get out of here and put a few miles between us and this place before we stopped for the night. My brother said, I was more than happy to comply. Neither of us had ever heard the word sasquatch or bigfoot at the time. My
brother was carrying a small hunting knife, but that was it. We had no guns and no bear spray. A small, steady breeze kicked up in the late afternoon that stayed with us all night. When we got there, we were too tired from our long hike to build a fire, so we had supper of salami and cheese on bread with a sigh of fruit, and then we hung our food pack up in the tree and went to bed, and the wind gently swayed our tent for the whole night. The sun had
not quite set behind the tall trees when we fell asleep. Some time later, something woke me up. I had been dreaming that I was having a conversation with someone who reminded me of Little Abner. I know I'm dating myself now, so I should explain that Little Abner was a comic strip character in the Sun Comics when I was growing up. He was a big, dark haired man with muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm not entirely sure the person in
my dream was human, or that it was even a dream. In any case, we talked for a short time, and then something completely woke me up. Instantly, I realized something heavy just outside the tent was hitting the ground next to my head, and I could feel the vibration of the impacts. I laid there, frozen in fear as it, whatever it was, took a long inhaling sniff only twelve inches from my head. There was no doubt that it had taken in my scent right through the thin material of our
pup tent. Too afraid to move, I listened intently to see if it would move to my brother's side of the tent and sniff there. Instead, it grabbed the tent pole by our heads and started shaking violently. Wake up, Wake up, I screamed, and as soon as I began to speak. The shaking stop so my brother didn't see it. He accused me of having a nightmare induced by the sight of that shit, and told me to go back to sleep, and then he rolled over with his back to both
me and the tent pole. Again, something grabbed the pole and shook it violently for three seconds. There's something outside shaking the tent, I said, It's just the wind, he answered angrily, Please go back to sleep. My brother is more than just a brother. He and I are great friends. Never before nor since had he ever spoken so gruffly to me. That was as much a shock as the tent shaking. I was between a rock and a hard place, and I was sweating bullets from the fear of what
was outside, and thoroughly crushed by my brother's reaction. Well, I laid there and fought back the panic and frustration, and listened for anything that might be moving around outside the tent. The gentle breeze covered all the subtle noises, and finally, either from shock or exhaustion, I fell asleep. At daybreak. We got up. There were no signs of anything having been around the tent, so we took down the pack and had some water. We
decided we walk a couple of miles of then stop and eat breakfast. My brother was like a mountain goat, and I had twisted my ankle on the first day, so I was constantly lagging seventy five feet behind him. But as we walked along, I began to have a dialogue in my head, as if someone were interviewing me in a sort of a get acquainted, friendly talking manner. It was as if someone else was asking the questions and I was answering them. We were still in that high valley, so there were
no trees on either side of our trail. Clearly there was no one around me, but the conversation continued in my head for a mile or so. I felt a presence, so I kept glancing around to see if anyone was there, But no one was there, and still the questions kept popping into my head and I kept answering them, and then suddenly it stopped. It was as if the interview was over. And when it was over, I felt a little silly for having thought about myself and my life as if someone
were there listening to me. It was a bright, sunlit day, but I was alone. Why would I go on and on about my life and my family like that. I've only recently learned about mine to speak, and knew nothing of it at the time, and it was a very strange feeling. Well, at that point I decided to enjoy the walk, and eventually we were back at the Big Trees again. There we came across a log jammer around a deep pool blocking our way. The trees were about three feet
in diameter. My brother went around to the riot, where it was real swampy, and I chose to go to the left and jump from log to log while keeping my feet as dry as possible. Well, one log turned out to be a bad choice. The far end was anchored on the bank, but the end closest to me was under the log that I had been standing on, and I soon learned it was just floating in the water, and as soon as I jumped down on it, it began to sink.
The crystal clear pool was about eight to ten feet deep, and as I jumped, I heard run in my mind. With a burst of speed, I made it to the other end of the twenty five foot log before it sank too deep and dumped me in the icy snow. Melt. It was the easiest run I had ever experienced. It felt like I was feather light, even with a pack. It was almost like someone was pushing me while lifting up the pack to take the weight off me. The log was sinking
fast, but I seemed to be flying over it. I managed to get across with only one wet foot. Even as I was running, though, I couldn't help but think, what is happening to me? At the other end, my brother was blanched white as he fumbled to get his pack off. He thought he was going to have to dive in and help me out. At seventeen, it hadn't occurred to me just how dangerous the route I
had taken was, and that maneuver in particular was very dangerous. If I had fallen in with the backpack, the water absorbed by the sleeping bag alone could have been enough to drag me under. This probably all sounds ridiculous to anyone listening, but it is how I remember it. Something weird happened on that log. There's no way anyone could have been behind me. No one
was there but my brother, and he was in front of me. Even if someone had been there, their weight would have caused the log to sink even more. The explanation I have come up with is absurd, to say the least. Many thoughts have run through my mind. Was an invisible, hovering sisquatch pushing me along and holding up my backpack? Or was something helping a human to save a life. It's definitely one for the book of the Weird. Now I know I'm probably making a mountain out of a mole hill.
I wouldn't blame you if you laughed at my story. I'm laughing right along with you. The only reason I think sisquatch is because of the destroyed ranger shed and the smell of the skunk just before we found it. And I suppose it could have been any benevolent spirit who saved me, but something did. As unbelievable as it sounds, it is exactly what happened. Nothing
else of any significance happened on that trip. We never spoke of it again, and I forgot all about it. In recent years, I've listened to a lot of bigfoot stories on YouTube. It wasn't until recently, though, when another person mentioned being sniffed through their tent, that all that came back to me having something large sniff you through a tent is incredibly unsettling. Perhaps that's what caused me to repress the memory until now. I never saw a
side squatch, nor do I know what the interviewing thing was. I'm just glad that whatever or whoever it was was there to save my life when I needed it on that law and God bless them for that