As one who found physical evidence of sasquatch in Colorado about 12 years, and have investigated several other track events since, I need you good bowhunters to help me find more. Nearly every winter from December through February for the past 10 years or more, long lines of apparent sasquatch tracks in snow have been found in an area triangulated by points of Kenosha Pass, Pikes Peak and Manitou Springs (generally in the Pike National Forest and Lost Creek Wilderness). This track maker might be there all year, but only in snow can one readily find it's tracks. The large sets found consist of individual tracks of about 19 to 22 inches long in that area with a step length of about 5 to 6 feet (whereas adult male human step length is usually close to 3 feet). Because the tracks are huge, they are fairly easy to see from a vehicle if one takes notice of tracks of wildlife. Sasquatch also apparently lift their feet high and don't drag along like humans, so it is pretty easy to tell the difference from a distance. From a distance it will look like large depressions spaced quite a distance apart and nothing else makes similar tracks series. If the tracks have been snowed in since being made as very often happens, one can blow out the newer snow and see the compressed icy sasquatch track below in detail to identify positively. A gas powered lawn blower would work well for that.
In any event, if you are of the mind to look for such tracks in that area, or if you drive through that area on a regular basis and just want to keep your eye out, I would like to know about tracks found. The reason I need this info is that I am trying to see if there is a pattern to sasquatch movement in the area so that I can eventually form a team and hire a logging helicopter and pilot to track down the maker of these tracks found there annually. Humans just can't keep up fast enough to ever track down a sasquatch to source on foot or even probably on horseback in broken country. If we are ever going to solve the mystery of these tracks and apparent sightings of the track maker, that area is the area we could do it in with planning, teamwork and a helicopter.
To give you some idea of where to look, the last three sets found were 1. A set crossing FR127 on Long Gulch about 2 miles due north of North Tarryall Peak in January 2001. 2. Right on the Highway 285 on Kenosha Pass on 12/14/2002. 3. Near the Crags Campground, 4 miles northwest of Pikes Peak in January of 2005. However, tracks could pop up anywhere in that general area at those general times. If you find a set that you are certain are too large for anything else, please contact me as soon as you can and also contact the local sheriffs department as some in the local departments are also interested and would like to know in time to do some of their own investigation. Photograph the track lines, as many individual tracks as possible with something in the photos for scale, and record the location as precisely as possible, also noting direction of travel in your notes.
Attached is a photo of what a set of tracks might look like from a distance. In this case each track is about 24 inches long and stride is from 5 to 6 feet in distance with each step. Human tracks are beside the large tracks in this photo to give idea of size and step length. Even going uphill they seem to still take pretty long step lengths and seem to walk tirelessly. Gives one some idea of how hard it would be to follow one of them and actually think you might catch up close enough to see it. But, with such large tracks and in such an area as that area, one might be able to follow and see the tracks from a helicopter.
I am pretty dang certain these tracks are very very real, so I hope to find out what makes them. If I spend the money on a helicopter and find some guy on stilts with big feet on the end of the stilts at the end of a long line of tracks, he is likely going to get the full dose of tranquilizer from my tranquilizer gun anyway. After seeing some of these track lines, I don't think I have to worry about some hoaxer making a long line of tracks as has been found.
BTW, if I do ever get one real sasquatch tranquilized, I will not bring it out. I plan to take tissue samples, dental impressions, foot and hand impressions, stomach content samples, fecal samples, lots of measurements and lots of photographs. Insert one radio transmitter and let it go on its way.
If you are in southern Colorado, another good place to look for tracks in winter is down near San Antonio Peak just across the border into New Mexico. The harsher the winter, the lower elevation the tracks will be found. Generally, where elk concentration is the highest is where the probability of finding sasquatch tracks will be highest. For some reason, they seem to hang around the elk herds, summer and winter. I think there is a fair possibility that they prey on elk.
Sasquatch are not behind every tree in Colorado, and of course most believe that sasquatch are not behind any tree in Colorado. But, entertain me with the idea that these tracks just might be real and the creature that makes them might be real too. All it will take is you personally finding and following one set of these tracks yourself to see why I pursue such nonsense. I agree, sasquatch tracking is nonsense, but only until you actually do it yourself.
Even if you don't think sasquatch can be real, you can at least go coyote hunting in the mentioned areas and maybe you will find something you thought completely impossible. Sure better than sitting in front of the television in January. I was once also completely and fully skeptical of sasquatch until June of 1993. I understand logical skepticism, but I don't understand joking about others pursuits or hobbies. I also have a hobby of bowhunting and building bowhunting bows and I am sure there are plenty of left coast people to make jokes about those redneck pursuits too. One could also joke about my belief in God, and many do lately.
Keith Foster [email protected]
I noticed on a program on the history channel the other day that Wyoming senior biologist (bighorn sheep biologist) John Myonczenski has retired and gone public with his personal sighting in that state. He and another biologist with that state also collected hair samples off a split rail fence after the other biologist ran one of them through the fence rails when he surprised it and tried to get closer to it with his pickup. Those sample hairs are deemed primate by two labs and morphologically closest to chimpanzee hairs. So we have hair samples from a sighting by a trained wildlife biologist, collected by pro biologists. One sample still resides in a mammal hair collection in New Mexico but has not been dna tested yet. The testing will destroy the sample. I'd still like to see if they can get the dna from it, even if this valuable sample is destroyed in the process. Maybe dna extraction process will eventually progress to the point where the testing can be done without destroying the hair itself.
Wonder why two professional Wyoming wildlife biologists would claim to have seen a sasquatch, when all it brings is laughs from their more skeptical peers? Guess they just like being laughed at, or alternately they care enough about wildlife to tell the truth and withstand the jokes. I think the second hypothosis is more logical. Colorado has some law enforcement officers in the same boat, having seen these creatures themselves too. Why? I think it is because the creature itself is most probably real, leaves real tracks and can be found at the end of a line of real tracks. Thats all I want to do, get to the end of a line of those very real but very rare tracks and find out what is there. Thanks for volunteering to search and find. Kind of the ultimate hunt. The rareist and smartest quarry is at the end of the line of tracks. Kind of like a puma with the brain of a chimpazee or smarter, and so large that they are naturally very rare and have very large individual territory. A needle in a large haystack that keeps moving around.
Gunnison
I have also looked into and wondered if satellites would be helpful in finding a sasquatch. I used such images in my job in hopes of finding large acreage size patches of invasive plants, but gave up on it. I could see my house and my gas guzzling SUV by satellite however, but could find no bedded deer with it either. Resolutions are not good enough, even if one devoted the best of them into looking for such nonsense as sasquatch. Plus, the smaller you look, the less area you see and one needle in a haystack is very very small indeed. Sasquatch may be big, but they are small in comparison to the forest. That is why you don't see elk head counts by satellite.
My questions about the reality of sasquatch are 1. During the late 1800's, when people were killing every big animal that lives in western North America, why did no one shoot a sasquatch then if they are real and lived there? 2. If sasquatch is real and leaving tracks near Pikes Peak, why hasn't one wandered into NORAD defense zones at Cheyenne Mountain and been detected. They surely have to go on false alarms for bear, deer, elk and cougar there that penetrate their "no go" zone.
My only answers to these two questions is, maybe sasquatch are too humanlike to be shot offhand by any moral human, even in the late 1800's. We know of plenty of sightings by humans in the 1800's, even in Colorado. Actually, some miners hired a hunter in the 1870's to track and kill a sasquatch in the Leadville area of Colorado according to a Leadville newspaper archive. So I guess they tried to kill one then. I would have never search archives in Colorado for sasquatch had I not found tracks in 1993, as I had never heard of such a thing in Colorado. Prior to 1993, sasquatch was a myth to me, and certainly not in Colorado of all places. Maybe I was right then and am on a wild goose chase, maybe I was wrong. The track evidence I have seen since is telling me I was wrong. My logical mind tells me it is all nonsense, but 13 years of intense research into the physical evidence tells me that something is really leaving these outsize tracks out there.
My only answer to the NORAD thing is that there are so many large critters running around that general area that to follow up on every moving critter would be costly and futile. If you don't jump the fences at the Cheyenne Mountain facility and knock on the door, you are pretty safe from armed soldiers. I think sasquatch "seek and find" would be a good practice exercise for the military, so maybe I should work on getting that going. Good mountain training. Maybe they could use the training to get Bin Laden finally. I would kind of like to go hunting for him myself, but my hair is light brown, skin tone light, and I have no prowess for learning new languages, especially arabic languages, which makes it hard to blend in over there. A 24 year old young son of a friend of mine was killed last Friday in Iraq fighting terrorists, and it makes me wonder why I am not over there rather than our young men. Our military really needs a very large unit of us older guys to go in harms way, and save our young men to preserve the American way. For some reason they won't except guys like me that can't hike as far as I used to. I guess "special forces" does not include "special medications" for shoulder bursitus brought on by too many years of drawing back overly heavy bows. Had I known a 55 pound flatbow would shoot clean through the lung cage of any American big game walking with a nice heavy arrow, I would have been using less bow poundage sooner. Oh well, live and learn.
After nearly 30 years of bowhunting, I have found a "magical" way to track down game after the shot that works much better than Brown's mystical magic. Make dang sure you put that broadhead through both lungs and you don't have to track far. If you don't, you might need some magic. one "magic" to getting close enough to game before the shot that I have found is patience, make that "extreme patience". I've blown way more stalks on grand mule deer bucks with impatience than anything else, so I am still learning that magic. The other magic is to bring game to you, which I am relying on more and more as I grow older, and it works well.
Herd Bull
I have read that indians of the past - way back when, could run some unrealistic distances without stopping at incredible paces...if bigfoot exists - wouldn't he still be able to outperform the old indians?
I have a question for you - If you were in the areas that you mention, what makes you so special that others wouldn't be or have been there too?
I know that I have been in some pretty cool places that I though no other human had ever been - just to turn around and find an old beer can or a tree cut with a saw or an axe.
When we investigated a set of very huge 19 inch long tracks found by a fisherman along the Eagle River in 2001, one of the things that convinced me, at least one local CDOW wildlife biologist and the local sheriff department, was the location and specifics of the location itself. The tracks were found on the mostly untraveled south side of the river at the location. The tracks were in not so good tracking soil, when less than 10 feet away was very good soft fine tracking soil. It was almost like whatever made the tracks was trying to keep them from being seen as best it could at the location. I really don't think it was particularly trying to hide its tracks, but just traveling through the area and its tracks fell where they did. Had a hoaxer made the tracks, why not on the north side where more people travel and why not in the very nearby soft fine tracking soil where people could see them better? The fisherman that first found them thought the tracks were 13 inches long because he did not see the heel marks when he first contacted the sheriff department, thinking the ridge pushed up by the middle of the foot in stepping forward was the back of the track. All of us who investigated that particular set are completely convinced that the person who found the tracks and reported them had nothing to do with their construction. We think the tracks were made by a living 18 inch long foot, resulting in very dynamic 19 inch long tracks of a very unique unhuman, but human-like, morphology. That particular set of tracks was investigated with a very skeptical eye, and those tracks erased many local officials skepticism. Guesss one had to see them to know the detail involved. I can't convince skeptics that just want to say "sasquatch is an impossibility", without ever having looked at the evidence themselves, either in the field or by inspecting the evidence in collections at Idaho State University or other universities. I do know one thing, the media is full of misinformation about the subject, and not to be trusted at all. If you want answers, go to the universities or straight to the source itself and completely ignore television shows and news stories on the subject.
Like I have said many times before, I have a very very hard time believing that sasquatch could be a real breathing creature, but I have no other answer for the tracks I found and others I have investigated. I got sucked into this seemingly ridiculous subject quite accidently. If you find a set, I want to find answers to what made them. That is all I am after.
About all I have got out of the whole subject is that most people think I must be a nut case or just stupid. I probably should have kept quiet about the tracks I found and just gone on peacefully with blinders firmly on my eyes. But then again, I'm kind of nutty, and often stupid.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060126/ap_on_re_as/malaysia_bigfoot
I think it is interesting that hunting guides, especially bowhunting guides, represent a very small portion of the human population in Colorado, but have a vastly greater percentage of sightings of sasquatch than any other portion of the human population. Wonder why that is the case, if sasquatch is not real? If sasquatch is not real, then it must be that hunting guides are vastly more prone to hallucination or more prone to telling fabrications than people in other professions that go into the woods. I really don't think that hunting guides are more prone to those things than other people. So why would bowhunters and bowhunting guides be the ones that have the greatest chance of having a sighting of an unreal creature? That is even stranger than sasquatch itself.
That may very well be fact:-) But they also spend lots more time in the woods sneaking around that couch potatoes. Hunters don't stick to the hiking trails all the time either.
Seems to me someone photographed or located a 7' ape of some sort in Malaysia last fall....
Keith, any more reported sightings in the Craigs/Mentonite/Pikes Peak area in the last year ?
Steve
