The Writings of Keith Foster, Pt 8

New Bigfoot Info

Date: 09-Jan-03

For those interested in bigfoot, there is some new information. Some of you know that my family encountered a bigfoot and we found tracks of them down in the South San Juan Wilderness of Colorado in the early 1990’s. I have since been slammed pretty bad for going public with this, but it really happened nonetheless. Anyway, I am not alone now. The naturalist that wrote “Ghost Grizzlies”, David Peterson, also ran into a sasquatch down there in that same area while searching for grizzly bear sign. Yet another hunting guide has also had an encounter down there. This now makes a total of 6 professional hunting guides in Colorado with either personal close range sightings or track finds of this unbelievable animal. I don’t really blame people for not wanting to believe me, as I agree this seems impossible. David Peterson was not expecting to see a sasquatch down there any more than we were or these hunting guides were. This animal came as a complete surprise to us too. I spent too much time in the outdoors in out-of-the-way places and paid the price. Maybe the scent of San Juan ponderosa pine trees causes hallucinations. LOL

There is a new documentary on sasquatch that airs on the Discovery Channel tonight Jan 9 at 8:00. It will also be aired on Jan 10 at 11:00pm and Jan 11 at 2:00pm

Bigfoot is not dead. There were at least three of them in the San Juans of Colorado in 1993, because three different size tracks were documented there in that year. If you don’t believe me, believe Peterson or the hunting guides.

Makes Kansas cougars seem downright plausible doesn’t it. LOL At least we know that cougars are a real animal.

Date: 09-Jan-03

There is a new documentary on sasquatch that airs on the Discovery Channel tonight Jan 9 at 8:00. It will also be aired on Jan 10 at 11:00pm and Jan 11 at 2:00pm

Makes Kansas cougars seem downright plausible doesn’t it. LOL At least we know that cougars are a real animal.

Date: 11-Jan-03

Ever hiked through the South San Juan Wilderness? I have. I have spent a total of about 300 days in there through the last 30 years. There are just a few human trails, and for the most part that is where the humans stay. No vehicles are allowed of course anywhere. By the time you get 4 or 5 miles back into it, you are generally too tired to get more than 1/4 mile or so from the few trails, let alone penetrate the really wild country. A few people, like Dave Petersen, might get off the trail a little further, but then he has seen a sasquatch there so he doesn’t count. I have been there quite a number of times during hunting seasons, and the hunters are very predictable where they go and where they don’t go. Many places never see a hunter. Humans are generally very predictable in movement patterns. I try to figure out those patterns and go places no other hunters go, and it works pretty good for finding the game who escape the masses, but then I also found sasquatch tracks there, so I don’t count either.

I spent the 4th of July at an alpine lake in the South San Juan Wilderness, catching a few trout that are measured in pounds instead of inches, camping beside the lake for three nights, and never saw another human soul besides the two other men with me. I caught one trout that we cooked over the fire, turning it as it cooked and eating off the meat. There was still meat left on that one trout by the time we were all full. If that place was overrun with people and roads, I sure couldn’t find them.

Looks kind of easy on a topo map to get from point A to point B, that is until you actually get there, lace up your boots and try to actually walk from point A to point B. What looks like a little 3 or 4 mile hike on the topo turns into a blister and cramp causing hike from sunrise to sunset because you have to go around cliffs and old growth forests with so much deadfall that you can’t negotiate it. By the time you get there you wonder why in the hell you went back in there to bowhunt for elk because no idiot would actually shoot an elk back in there and have any hope of ever getting the meat out unspoiled. You would never find a way to get a horse into and out of there in the time required, and packing out the meat would take a week. I have had perfectly easy shots at elk back in that situation and was smart enough not to shoot. I don’t know why I even carried my bow in there with me, because morally I couldn’t use it. I might be able to pack out the antlers, and one small backpack load of meat, but the rest would likely be wasted and claimed by a bear or coyotes before I could get back for a second load. So why shoot? I now will only bowhunt in the places that are more easily accessible, where other bowhunters also tread, and where sasquatch rarely ventures.

We have never had a sighting of a sasquatch in Rocky Mountain National Park, in spite of perfectly good habitat there and thousands of citified hikers traipsing all over that country to misidentify a bear as a sasquatch. Why is that? Why don’t the city folks see the sasquatch, and the experienced outdoorsmen who penetrate the more wild places do see sasquatch and their tracks? If sasquatch is only a misidentified bear or burnt stump in poor lighting conditions playing on the minds of scared hikers, then it should be the city folks visiting Rocky Mountain National Parks that are reporting seeing them, not Petersen, Dysinger or myself.

I sent a survey to about 30 Colorado outfitters asking if they had ever seen a sasquatch or sasquatch sign. 6 of them responded positively that they had either seen a sasquatch or come across some tracks of them. One of them had come across a huge set of fresh sasquatch tracks while trailing a lion with dogs. He reported that the dogs were frightened, confused or agitated by the scent of the tracks and quit hunting for the day. So I am not sure if dogs could be trained to follow a sasquatch. Maybe if we get a dead sasquatch to use for training scent we could get the dogs to know what to follow. At present the dogs are trained to specifically follow a certain scent and not others. It would do no good to hunt cougars with a dog that got on an elk scent trail and followed it, or a sasquatch scent trail for that matter, if cougars were your goal. Cougar trained hounds are trained to follow cougar scent by doing it with dogs already experienced in following cougar scent. The young hounds learn from the older hounds what the goal is. Those hounds then teach the next generation of hounds, and so on. I don’t know how the very first hounds were trained to follow only cougar scent, I suppose with scent from a dead cougar. So give me a sasquatch body, and I will see if someone can train up some sasquatch scent hounds. That would sure make it easier.

Date: 13-Jan-03

The man who died recently was a known hoaxter named Ray Wallace. Wallace made wooden feet that he belted to his feet to make tracks that were ridiculously easy to tell they were fakes. Wallace also did make a film of a person in a bigfoot suit, but that too was more than laughable. It was his wife in an floppy gorilla costume and was nothing more than a joke. The film that is still being studied by scientists is the 1967 Patterson film, not the hoky film that Wallace made. Associated Press said that Wallace started the whole bigfoot legend in 1958, evidently ignoring all sightings and track finds prior to that, including the historical accounts from all the native American tribes of the west. AP was also the one that confused the fake Wallace film with the Patterson film. It only takes one AP writer with extremely limited knowledge and a quick pen to kill bigfoot. All the sightings will stop now that Wallace is dead and his wife is too feeble to hike into the woods dressed up in a hoky gorilla suit. We should have shot her when we had the chance down in the San Juans.

Date: 14-Jan-03

Kirk, I live in the Garden City area of Kansas. My family had two ranches in Colorado however. We spent much time at a cabin we rented for about 20 years just outside the north edge of the South San Juan Wilderness, and had hunted and fished that area for about 10 years prior to that, which is how I came to know that country fairly well. I’m 45 years old, and I was going there as a small child.

I only know of one sighting in the Weminuche Wilderness area, by a hiker with some llamas that camped in some back country there. I have never spoken to him personally, so can not attest to his sighting. I think the grizzly sightings have also ceased from the Wiminuche too. Too bad, as it was nice country for grizzlies 50 years ago, and could be again.

Most all of the sightings and tracks in southern Colorado have occurred in and around the South San Juan Wilderness and over into the eastern portions of the Southern Ute Reservation forests toward Ignacio and then down into the northern part of New Mexico along the Continental Divide. Quite a few winter sightings and track finds occur in the area around the base of San Antonio Peak in New Mexico, just east-southeast of the South San Juan Wilderness. The sasquatch sightings and tracks apparently occur where the elk are concentrated at any one time of year. Many of the professional Colorado hunting guides and experienced hunters I have spoken to with personal sasquatch sightings were bowhunting elk at the time of their encounters. One father and son team of hunters watched a sasquatch feeding on an elk carcass. A local rancher near San Antonio peak said he watched two large sasquatch trying to catch an elk out of a herd that was feeding in some sage scrub at the edge of the forest on his ranch. A local deputy got some video of two sets of huge tracks in that area a few days prior to or after that incident. So I guess they are eating on elk they catch or find dead. I have some old memoirs from a man who hunted bears for the bounty in the late 1800’s in what is now the South San Juan Wilderness who evidently had some meat stolen by a sasquatch that he had hung high in a tree out of reach of bears. Though a few sightings occur irregularly outside of a certain area, almost all of the sightings and tracks come from fairly specific locales from year to year. Still a pretty big area though. I have spent more than 300 days in that Wilderness area, most nights spent in a tent on the trail, summer and fall, and only had the one encounter that set me to investigating the matter.

I too was not impressed with the recent Discovery Channel show on sasquatch. It did not get deep enough into track morphology and fingerprint patterns in the tracks that have led so many scientists to conclusion that sasquatch has to be real. There was a reason for that lack of information. I am involved with some of the people who made that documentary. The scientists involved to not want the public to know the intracacies in detail, because they do not want people to know how to make a fairly convincing fake track and such. Tracks found and documented have to pass a long list of criteria to be of value or considered real. A one hour documentary is far too short to give detail anyway. They wanted the documentary to show the public the general position of sasquatch, and the jury is still out on the subject until such time as a sasquatch body comes into possession of science, no matter how good the other evidence. Many anthropologists who have long been staunch critics of sasquatch are now completely convinced that sasquatch is real, one of which is retired professor emeritis Daris Swindler of the University of Washington. For Swindler to back the recent evidence is kind of like having a group of athiests suddenly start preaching the gospel. Complete turn around. Such well known primatologists as Jane Goodall and George Shaller are also supporters of sasquatch research after looking at the evidence. Our top forensic scientists who have looked at the evidence are convinced, along with many of the top physical anthropologists. About the only scientists still skeptical are those that have not looked at the evidence at all. They base their conclusions on nothing at all, no study at all. Shouldn’t we start listening to the top scientists who HAVE looked at the evidence, instead of listening to the people that have taken no look whatsoever?

I do not come onto this forum to lie to you about what I have seen, but rather to tell you what I have seen. The hunting guides who have come forward are not lieing to you so that you can laugh at them, they are dead serious. They are also very experienced in outdoor things and not prone to misinterpretation. Most of the sightings by them have been so close that there was no room for error anyway. I am telling you, these men are seeing exactly what they say they saw, whether we like it or not. Even if you prefer to ignore me or the professional hunting guides, when you look at a well cast set of fresh sasquatch tracks and can see the detail of the dermal ridges on the foot pad and also see the little scars that have re-healed on the bottoms of the foot, the wooden feet theory is out the window. Scientists have identified over 100 different cases of track casts from hundreds of miles apart and a span of over 50 years of track casting that all conform to a very specific set of anatomical characteristics that fit no other animal yet match each other precisely and in find detail and most collected well before the general public knew anything of that expected anatomical detail. Why? Well, a black bear track is a black bear track and a sasquatch track is a sasquatch track. There have been some fake tracks made, but very few, and they did not fit the criteria. Besides the many high quality sightings by experienced outdoor professionals in Colorado, we also have documented tracks that do fit the criteria. Sorry, but rather we like it or not or whether we can accept it or not, sasquatch are real and being seen and tracked in Colorado. Ask Colorado bear biologist, the worlds leading bear biologist, Tom Beck, what he thinks of sasquatch in Colorado. The answer might surpise you. Ask outdoor writer Dave Petersen what he thinks of Colorado sasquatch after he has spent so many days in the South San Juan Wilderness. Every person who can not believe that sasquatch exists in bodily form should pitch their tent for a couple of months in a few valleys that I know about in the South San Juans and take long walks in the dark forest there to see what comes poking around. A simple name like Canyon Diablo “Canyon of the Devil” take on a whole new meaning. These sasquatch are not really “devils”, but they sure scream like one and leave tracks that will make you feel very small indeed.

Hope you get to experience a sasquatch some day. With a little effort, you might find sasquatch tracks down around San Antonio Peak about this time of year if so inclined to look around for a few weeks. Some really big tracks have been documented down there in the past 10 years, especially when the snow is deep at higher elevations. More remote areas seem to be the normal abode of sasquatch at any time of year however, but they have been known to cross roads every once in awhile, probably mostly at night. You never know, you might find some if you know what you are looking for. Big big tracks. One does not really realize how big they are until you see them yourself. Awesome. My size thirteen feet look like toddler feet in comparison. How does something that big hide. About like a moose hides I guess, and moose are sometimes hard to find for sure and surprisingly hard to see. For the most part though, sasquatch don’t hide well enough not to be seen, as thousands of eyewitnesses can attest. They may have hidden from you and I, but they have not stayed hidden from everybody. We’re just not paying attention to those who have seen them, preferring to think its all impossible. I know, because I was there with you in complete skepticism of such ridiculous things as sasquatch prior to my experience. Hope you all can listen better than I did. Those thousands of tall tales of sasquatch sightings are not just tall tales.

Sleep tight in your tent in the South San Juan Wilderness, for the fuzzy giants mean you no malace. At least I don’t think that man is on the menu yet. Elk flank is much better I guess. There are hundreds of square miles of forest there, so odds are you will be in a different square mile than one of the few sasquatch there anyway. Even if you occupy the same square mile, odds are that you will never know it, but the sasquatch might. He lives there 24/7 and knows every tree in his home range, so will have no trouble finding one to hide behind. Ever see a bear hide behind a tree? They do it and will let you walk right by them if they think they are hidden well, and they have a weasel brain, not a primate brain. Sasquatch must be the supreme wild creature, and I think it is neat that at least a few of them are still around, dodging skeptics.

Date: 20-Jan-03

For those who do not get Bugle magazine, here is what was written in it by several outdoor writers regarding their own possible sasquatch encounters. A couple of these occurred in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, not far from where I found sasquatch spoor that got me interested in the subjects of sasquatch and Kansas cougars.

In the November/December 2002 (Volume 19 Issue 6) issue of “Bugle” magazine, publication of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, several writers shared their possible encounters with sasquatch.

One article titled “Bigbutt” in this issue of Bugle was written by David Petersen, author of the book “Ghost Grizzlies”, which deals with the possibility of a few surviving grizzlies in the mountains of southern Colorado. Petersen is also a regular contributor to many outdoor magazines and has also authored other books on outdoor subjects. Petersen’s article in “Bugle” details how he met a sasquatch on an old road-cut at dusk while bowhunting in a forest in southern Colorado. Walking quietly around a bend in the road-cut, Petersen was startled to see an odd upright creature coming down the road-cut toward him at a range of only 20 yards. Petersen described the creature as somewhat over 5 foot tall, perhaps 200 pounds, having somewhat short legs compared to a man, longer arms than a man, thick through the torso, upright posture, bi-pedal locomotion, and Petersen was struck by the creatures apparent large butt as it eventually turned and stepped off the trail. (A description rather reminiscent of the female sasquatch in the Patterson/Gimlin film, but on a slightly smaller scale). It was too dark to see facial details beyond the fact that it had a flat face. The two strangers stopped and stared at one another for awhile on the road-cut before the creature eventually stepped toward the edge of the road, where it swayed back and forth for a time as if trying to get a better sense of the bowhunter it had encountered on the trail. Eventually the creature walked off into the darkening forest and Petersen went on his way.

Other articles in this addition of “Bugle” also dealt with possible sasquatch activity. Experienced bowhunter James Slack of Farmington, New Mexico wrote in his article of finding a very large, human-like track in a sandy wash while bowhunting elk in the mountains of northern New Mexico. (This would have occurred not too far south of the sighting experience of author David Petersen in Colorado)

Chris Mortenson of Avon, Utah wrote an article titled “Keeping an Open Mind” about an experience he had while hunting elk near the Utah-Idaho border. Mortenson describes a long series of incredibly loud animal sounds he heard, “a very loud, low-pitched sound that I had never heard before—like a cross between a shout and a growl” with each blast of noise “lasting maybe one or two seconds”. He could hear the animal as it seemed to approach him, screaming and popping brush and limbs. Mortenson wrote “The most eerie thing about the noise was the sheer volume,?.” He also wrote, “What I heard that October day was not an elk, moose, cougar, bear, wolf, coyote or anything else I have ever heard in the wild”.

48 year old veteran bowhunter Terry Coon of Nampa, Idaho wrote an article titled “It Had to Be Big” which details an experience he had while bowhunting elk in Oregon in 1991. Coon describes how he began bugling on his elk bugle in hopes of luring a bull elk, but the answering call was not an elk but rather “the loudest and longest scream that I have ever heard”. The screaming thing kept screaming then began to loudly approach Mr. Coon and his wife with a steady walking sound. Coon wrote “The scream that erupted would make the hair on your entire body stand straight out. Whatever it was was clearly outraged by my bugle”. He also wrote “in all my years in the mountains, I have never heard such a sound”. The couple departed hastily in fear after the outraged screamer loudly circled them off trail in the underbrush to within 50 or 60 yards.

The Writings of Keith Foster, Pt 8