Chris (7:02)
Well, I was an iron worker. I was building a fish ladder there. So I was there for quite a while. Year and a half, long project. I'd go there sporadically. One summer day in august, on the weekend, I decided to take my family up there camping. And we camped along the eastern side. There's a bridge there. And we like about a quarter mile after the bridge, Down a gravel road, There's a nice little camp spot right on the river's, Right on the waterfall, Water's edge. Beautiful camp spot. Driving in, I noticed that on a gravel pile on the left hand side of the road, There was a tree that had been stuck in to the top of it, and the roots were sticking up into the air. And the roots kind of looked like a skull. And I thought, oh, that's cool. I wonder who did that. I didn't know that this was a bigfoot thing until years later I saw a documentary. And then I thought, oh, I saw that going in in my encounter. So I drive, I see this, this tree upside down, tree. And I, we go, we park, we set up camp, we put the kids to bed. They're about three and one. We put them to bed, we get some steaks out. We're gonna cook up some ribeyes. So they're sitting out. And the ex wife and I went over to the car and we kind of started having some intimate time together over the car. And as that's happening, My dog starts kind of whining and comes in between us and which was unusual because this dog, you know, Was very familiar with the woods. We had a couple black bear encounters. And she was always handling them like a pro. Never had any issues with her with bear or elk or anything, but this time she was whining. So I grabbed my 9 mil out of the center console and I listened. And I could hear faint footsteps. Sounded like they were coming from the top of the hill. And they sounded very loud, Like a heavy bag getting hit with a baseball bat. It was about Five or six steps. They were very slow. It was like a boom, boom, boom. They were very slow and very deliberate. It sounded like two steps, like two separate feet. It didn't. You know, right away I thought, wow, it's really big, and it's trying to scare me. So, like, there was some kind of comfort that I had there that whatever this thing was, I could, I knew that it didn't have hooves. I could hear that it wasn't hooves. So I, I, I thought, man, this thing is some kind of predator or a person. I thought bear, but it just didn't sound right for bear. And the bear there are tiny, and this thing sounded huge. Within five or six steps, it covered about 40 meters from the top of the hill to about halfway, almost halfway to my campsite with all the underbrush. I didn't hear any underbrush moving. I didn't hear any sticks or branches breaking. I only heard the footsteps, which also was weird. You know, it just kind of, I don't know, it made me feel uneasy. So I'm trying to think of what this thing could possibly be. And I tell my wife, get the kids in the car. We start making our way back towards the tent. Along the way, we turn on the. The car headlights, turn on the brights, and the car just happened to be pointed towards the tent and into the wood line where this thing was approaching from. So me and the wife get to the tent. I kind of step off to the side, and I'm trying to listen. And in that time, this thing kind of advanced a little more. And the wife took the first child back to the car, put them in the back seat, and. And as she was coming back, it took a couple more steps and made it to about 40 meters out. And I decided that because this thing was coming straight at me, I'm gonna let off some warning shots. It was all mountainous terrain. There's no that, you know, it was safe to shoot in that direction. There was no people. There was zero chance of me hitting anything. So I shot high, but high enough to kind of get that cracking sound. If you've ever been shot at, you kind of know what I'm talking about. And my goal was to. To get a bullet cracking overhead of whatever this thing was to elicit a reaction. And so I shot once, and there was no reaction. And I'm listening, and everything's really quiet. Just before I shot, I. I let out a warning. I said, whoever's out there, I'm armed, and I'm. And I've got my family Let yourself known. And. And there was no response. I don't know why I thought it could be a person. It was just simply too big. But it was. It was on two feet. So I talked and I. You know. But I was fairly certain that I was dealing with an animal. So I shot my first warning shot. And I'm listening, and there's no reaction. And I noticed that everything's quiet. I can't hear the wind, no crickets, the water hitting the shore of the reservoir. I can't hear that either. And not only that, but my ears aren't ringing. Anytime I've ever shot a weapon, it's always made my ears ring. Doesn't matter how much adrenaline pumping through me, my ears always ring. And this time there was no ringing. And it sounded like the. The pistol was suppressed. It sounded very, very quiet. And I'm thinking, what is out there? What is that? And something very intrusively like a very intrusive thought, like how I imagined schizophrenia. I heard something say, you know what I am? It was so intrusive that I. My arms went to my side and I looked down at the ground, wondering if I was going crazy. And I thought, oh, my God. Something could hear me thinking. I thought, I don't know what you are. And then I remember, like, the sudden realization that it could hear me think. I wanted to. Like, I thought, I don't know what you are, and I don't want you to kill me, and I don't want to kill you. So that happened after the second warning shot. As that happened, I turned around to my wife and told her to get the second kid and put him in the car. And she started. As soon as I turned around, this thing started advancing even closer. And it stopped at about 20 meters out. And I kind of had to advance to get myself in between it and my wife and my kid that's inside the tent. And so I kind of put myself on the dark side of the tent. And as soon as I did that, I could see much better into the woods. And so this thing was about 20 meters out then and still taking steps towards me. And the wood line was only 10ft away from me. The tent was very close to the wood line, so this thing was able to get right up on me. And I could hear my wife getting. Getting our son. And. And as this thing got closer and closer, I'm thinking I should be able to see it, but I can't. And then, I mean, with. After 20 meters, Wes, every footstep, I could feel the reverberation in my knees. I was wondering if I was. If I. If my knees were shaking because I was afraid. And I actually looked at the. Some point, I looked at the ground to kind of confirm that the ground was shaking because it was just that intense. When it was about 12ft in front of me, I was looking deep into the wood trying to see anything, and I just couldn't see anything. Then I realized that there were bushes that were in front of me that I was able to see that were now black. And I started looking up and I mean, it's 12ft in front of me. And I was an iron worker at the time, so I got my disc. I worked with a lot of rebar, 10, 12, 14 foot rebar. And it was right about 10 foot tall. I had a pretty good eye about judging distances at the time. So I was looking up and it took for me to see the trees and see where the black ended to where I finally was able to make out its head and shoulders. As I saw the head and shoulders. I was looking for eyeshine to. To blind it. To kind of. I was looking for eyeshine to blind it. Since when? It was 20 meters away and expecting to see it. And as it was standing in front of me, it's. I could see its two arms hanging off to its side and its head and its shoulder. I couldn't see its hands. I couldn't see any facial features. Just black. And even though the headlights were pointed right at it, I saw no eye shine. Either it had its eyes closed or. Or its back was facing directly towards me. I thought this thing was going to kill me. And my plan was just to give my wife enough time to get her, let her get out of there. It stopped right at the wood line, though. It didn't get out of the wood line. And the wife. I could hear the wife get our kid. And I slowly backed up when I heard her get in the car and I started making my way back to the car. We backed out of that campsite, took a. Took about a couple minutes to back out of it because it was just such a little two lane road, little two lane trail. And leaving the reservoir along the eastern shore, there's a bridge. The only place I felt safe enough to stop was that bridge. And we stopped in the middle of the bridge and I kind of looked back, kind of expecting to see something pop out of the woods out in the. You know, we were leaving a fire in national forest during the summer. So I felt uneasy about that. But I wasn't about to take my kids back. So as the ex wife and I were spitballing what to do, I'm watching the woods, we get dressed, and we decide we have to leave. It's just not safe. We're not taking the kids back there. So we leave, we get dressed, we start driving. And maybe a mile and a half down the road, mile, not too far. We saw a federal ranger pulled someone over. He had someone in his. In the back. And you could see that, you know, he had pulled someone over. And the car was empty. So I pulled in front of both those cars, and I get out of my car. It's middle of the night in the woods, in the mountains, middle of nowhere. So I know I'm. I'm about to freak this cop out, kind of. So I get out, and right away he's like, can I help you? And, you know, kind of. Kind of uneasy and confrontational. And I tell him I just had to leave my campsite. There's a fire there. It's along the water. It should be safe, but I got charged by something big, and all my stuff is there, and I'm. I don't know what to do, but I'm just letting you know. And his eyes kind of went wide, and he said, hold on right here. And he goes back to his truck. He opens the back, the guy gets the guy out. The guy cussed the cop out a little bit, got back in his car and then peeled out of there. I say, cop, he was a federal ranger. He comes back over to me, he's like, show me where your campsite is. I'll follow you there. So I take him back to the campsite. I explain what happened. He gets out of his car, and we found a nesting site. A nesting. Like a big nest right next to our campsite. All the. All the grass had been smashed down. There wasn't a single blade of grass that was standing up. So this thing looked like it was used that. That entire day. Like it had just been abandoned 30 minutes ago is what. What it looked like. And it was 10ft away from my. From my campsite in the woods. And in those deep woods where it was able to move silently through. It was so dense, I just didn't see it. We went looking for tracks, looking for any kind of evidence. We hiked kind of deep in there, and we looked and looked, and we settled back on the nest, and he said, well, here's some raccoon hairs. And he kind of picked up the hairs and he bagged them, and he's like, well, it seems safe now. And he must have been there for like, two hours. So by then it was like 2. 2 in the morning, pretty late. And I don't know why Wes, but I felt safe. He asked me what I was going to do, and I. I could have gone home. I only lived an hour away. But the same feeling that made me feel scared when it was charging. I felt that same way, but in a safe way. Like, I don't know. I don't know how to. To describe it, but after that federal ranger there left me and the ex wife made the decision to stay the night, and I was able to fall asleep really pe. It was really peaceful sleep. I. I felt really at ease there afterwards. I don't know why we stayed the night. Everything went fine. It was a very peaceful night. Oh, the ribeyes hadn't been touched. We came back, and they were still sitting exactly where they were when we left. So nothing was disturbed. I kind of expected to come back to just a destroyed campsite. And it was further from the truth. Everything was left exactly as is. The next day, four gentlemen showed up in a minivan, and they kind of blocked us there because it was a thin little road, and. Oh, you took our campsite. They kind of struck me as government individuals, and they were asking all sorts of weird questions. They asked me. You stayed the night. Wow. You stayed out here with no cell phone, no radio, like, just. I was uneasy with them asking me these questions with my family out in the middle of the woods. And I think they kind of picked up on that, and they left after that. We decided to leave. It wasn't because of the bigfoot incident. It was because of those. Those gentlemen that we decided to leave. I've been camping a lot since then. You know, I'm always uneasy in the woods ever since then. But that night and whenever I go back to that spot, for some reason, I feel kind of comfortable in those woods. I don't feel uneasy there when I know I damn well should. I go camping in other places where there's fewer bigfoot encounters, people that don't go missing. And I'll feel way more uneasy there than I do in that part of the Cascades. That's it. That. That. That's what happened.