Bigfoot may be dead!!!!

Date: 08-Dec-02

Guess my input is called for.

The first white man to mention bigfoot died about 200 years ago, not a man mentioned in any modern article from a modern newspaper. Native American stories of what we now call bigfoot go back only God knows how long. Of course the Native Americans are not real people with real brains so their input is useless. How would they know the creatures that lived in their forests? They were only stupid red men, without the awesomely superior European brain.

I found some approx 17 inch long by 8 inch wide tracks across a dirt slide in the South San Juan Wilderness in southern Colorado in 1993 that perked my interest in what we now refer to by the stupid name “bigfoot”. Bear tracks just don’t come along that big in Colorado, even for a now extinct Colorado grizzly with the front and rear tracks superimposed upon one another, but there were the tracks right in front of my own eyes. Now I am not your cousins sisters uncles friend, but just a bowhunter with only 25 years experience in tracking, but those tracks I found interested me in this impossible subject. Since we had a ranch in Colorado bear and cougar country, I had seen plenty of those types of tracks, but nothing prepared me for the tracks I found in the SSJWilderness.

I was interested enough in the tracks to do a little study of my own, and found many old references to just such tracks in the area, the earliest going back to about 1450, about a hundred years before the Spanish arrived in that area in 1540. This reference was a name of an old Jemez Pueblo ruin named in the Jemez tongue “Place where the giant man stepped”. I asked Jemez tribal archeologist William Whatley about the name, and he said “it was in reference to a hairy giant human-like creature that the Jemez said they encountered in the high ponderosa forests of that area when the pueblo was built in about 1450, but that it was all just part of the Jemez tribal origin myths.” Since I had found the same incredible tracks in 1993, I was flabbergasted at those 500 year old Jemez origin myths. I wondered if anyone else had found these tracks or seen the creatures that made them.????? Give Whatley a phone call to verify my report here, to see if what I am telling you is true. Should be simple for you to find on an internet search.

So, I went one step further and ask the local law enforcement. Then Conejos County undersheriff Joe Taylor Jr. (now a police officer with the city of Alamosa), told me that he had video taped two sets of these tracks in the winter of 1993/94, when wildlife was driven to lower elevations and out into the open by higher than average winter snows. The tracks he documented were 19 inches and 21 inches long respectively and in a remote area. They were reported to him by a person attempting to photograph mule deer at the edge of the forest in a valley near the Colorado and New Mexico Border, about 20 miles from where I found the tracks that same summer. Taylor had 7 reports involving about 30 people from that year of “bigfoot” from that one winter season, including the one that led to the tracks he followed. He said the tracks were in mud and snow and in places where the tracks were in mud, they were clear enough to even see the human-like toenail prints were the toes had bent downward to get a grip when the creatures were climbing a wet slope. Give Taylor a phone call at the Alamosa police department to verify what I am telling you. Should be simple to find the Alamosa police department phone number on an interenet search.

I also found out that an outfitter who owns the Conejos Cabins in Platoro Colorado had found a set of these same tracks in 1983 about 3 or 4 miles from where I found the tracks in 1993. In that same area, a local hunting guide named Ed Wisinger (He is the guide who was attacked by and subsequently killed the last documented Colorado grizzly in that area in the 1970’s, which he killed by stabbing the sow grizzly with an arrow) led an old shetland pony into the area and killed it as bait for a bear hunter. Something came in the night and flat picked up that 600 pound shetland pony carcass and walked off with it. The thing that took Wisingers bait did not drag it, it carried it. Another area hunting guide by the name of Williams also had just such a thing happen to him, but not with bait, but rather a 600 pound calf. Williams was riding range for a local rancher during the off-season and encounted a calf that had been killed in new fallen snow. The calf had been killed and fully picked up and carried off by something that left huge tracks. Williams was reluctant to say exactly what can fully carry a 600 pound carcass, only occasionally letting its hoofs drag, but he did say that it walked on two feet. Yet another hunting guide in that area had two of his clients report to him that they had come upon what they thought was a bear feeding on a deer carcass. The men reported that they stalked up on the reddish-brown “bear” just to watch it a little closer, as neither had a bear permit. When they got close, it heard them and looked their way with a gorilla-like face, stood up and walked away from them on its human-like back legs with powerful and very graceful human-like steps. They were certain it was not a bear and not a human, but something inbetween. This is second hand from the hunting guide, but interesting.

So, I spent a few years asking around and found some 6 different professional hunting guides in Colorado with either sightings of these incredibly impossible bigfoot or those who had found their tracks, not to mention the second hand reports they had. One of the guides (Jeff Dysinger/Colorado Springs) came forward publicly a year or so ago because he reported watching one of these “bigfoot” from a distance of only 125 yards with high powered binoculars for a period of over 10 minutes as it sat in the sun and scratched itself in an open meadow by a beaver pond. Dysinger had no doubt about what he was watching at the time, but did say that he thought at the time that it must be an escaped gorilla. All this is just damn fine and quite laughable until you talk to the men themselves or look at the tracks themselves.

I investigated a set of tracks found on the Eagle River in central Colorado, along with Eagle area Colorado Department of Wildlife biologist Bill Heicher. Heicher and I neither one can really bring ourselves to believe that a huge primate species who leaves huge human-like tracks is wandering around the Rockies, but both of us agree 100% after that investigation that the tracks were not hoaxed at all. Those tracks were about 19 inches long and represented a foot about 18 inches long, and were made by an animal of around 900 pounds. The tracks showed all signs of anatomical traits normally associated with these impossible “bigfoot” creatures, according to the worlds leading primate foot experts. They were also danged natural in the way they were laid out, for sure, by any track experts opinion. Kansas cougars may not leave many tracks behind after sightings, but Colorado bigfoot have left me a whole file full of track photos, and they are all the same anatomy, differing only in size from case to case.

This is not to mention the stuff I have from New Mexico or Wyoming. In Wyoming I actually have track reports and sighting reports from their own professional wildlife biologists. Two of Wyoming’s biologists have seen them and tracked them in snow. Again, the tracks are the same. One of the biologists is John Myonczynski (sp?). You can call him on the phone if you want and argue with him about what or what he didn’t see or track, but before you do you should know that in that case the critter had to crawl through one of those Wyoming split rail fences, and left behind some hair on the fence too. The hair does not match any other American critter, but is a primate hair, and it went through all the official channels for identification (Check with University of Wyoming anthropology department for verification of the hair samples).

Having said all that, I agree that bigfoot is impossible, and even laughable, but those are the facts and a small part of the physical evidence, non-the-less. You will not get any argument from me about how impossible this whole thing is. I did recieve reports that were laughable and quite ridiculous regarding bigfoot during the time I did that research. We can look at the facts, or we can just laugh and use our superior European brains to predetermine our position on bigfoot. Kansas cougars may be just as laughable, but I still think worth the effort to investigate. I only wish Kansas cougars would leave as many tracks behind to cast, photograph and study as Colorado bigfoot.

To convince myself that bigfoot is impossible and laughable, I am going to say it again. Bigfoot is impossible and laughable. Now I feel better and can get back to bowhunting. I am trying dang hard to forget that I ever found such ridiculous tracks in the first place. I would rather talk about bowhunting.

I am glad that bigfoot is dead now. Want to see something really scary?

Date: 09-Dec-02

Someone corrected me on the name of the guide that killed the sow grizzly in southern Colorado in self defense about 25 years ago. His name was Ed Wiseman, not Wisinger. The account and good reading is in the book “Ghost Grizzlies”, which I recommend to anyone interested in American wildlife. Interestingly, a local conservation group scoured the SSJWilderness for grizzly tracks after the sow attacked Wiseman. They found no grizzly tracks, but did find some interesting clawless tracks of over 15 inches in length in mud of an elk wallow deep in the wilderness. They were more like sasquatch tracks than bear tracks, so they were evidently of no interest, though they did document them. That account is in a past National Geographic, except it does not mention the sasquatch.

Colorado did evidently have some real outsize grizzlies when grizzlies lived in that state. Most Rocky Mountain grizzlies are not all that big compared to coastal grizzlies, but Colorado evidently did have some real brusier boars at one time. Too bad they are gone.