Years ago I sent emails to the guy who had the California BigFoot web site.
I figured he would be interested in these stories of my encounters and he was, so we got into a correspondence.
He was very interested in my sighting in the area of Oak Grove.
If you look at this picture of Oak Grove (from Virtual Earth) , you see a forestry road going up the ridge above it and goes up the mountain.
If you go up this road far enough, then jump into one of the canyons below, you could end up where I had one of my encounters.

He told me he had been searching through micro-phish of old newspapers (from the late 1800's) and found this story in the San Diego paper of this happening at Oak Grove.
He was fascinated by this story and was trying to find any info to use to further illustrate it.
I did my own search (on the internet) about nine months ago and found a lot of sightings from the Warner Springs area, which is further up the valley from Oak Grove.
I do not know what this guy ever did with the info he had.
(I think Warner Springs was the dateline on the story because it is more of a real town. I do not remember the Title, I lost those email from a hard drive crash.)

[edit on 13-8-2008 by jmdewey60]

They didn't. That's why sasquatch are extinct. I'm pretty sure they managed to last quite a while, but by the 1800's it was a losing battle. The real question is what their relationship was like with the natives of this and other countries that were invaded. If anyone who knows a bit about those mythologies could pipe in with where apemen or a similar sort appear throughout, I'd be so appreciative I'd want to buy you cookies.

I guess the tens of thousands of people reporting sightings every year to websites and 911 are wrong.

In answer to the OP's original question...

How did they gain the knowledge to stay out of range of firearms?

I assume they watched.
The Native Americans, by almost all accounts, had a hands off sort of diplomacy with the Sasquatch. How far arrows shoot is moot.

All any bigfoot had to do was watch from a concealed location the behavior of the new comers and they would, after not very much time at all, have seen the effects of bullets and become familiar with the sound.
They probably saw a deer get taken, and then an Indian. The new comers were as figured out as they needed to be and the bigfoot went into seclusion.

I've never seen bigfoot, and oddly enough anyone who has ever gotten photos of the big guy has printed out fuzzy images.
But if he does exist, I'd like to think that he is extremely intelligent, and the reasons he has not become a dominant species is because he sees the everyday stresses humans deal with.
Now who in their right mind would want to take our place?

I think i've read that early white settlers encountered plenty of Native American lore about Bigfoot. Also, in Oregon what about "Ape Cave" that early white settlers were plenty aware of? Think the premise of this thread is not wholly correct.

Wow, this thread is full of so many misconceptions about a number of things.

First off,
The first white settlers were noisy smelly they brought cattle and horses and fire, it would be easy to avoid them, and they didnt really penetrate that deep into the wilderness.

There are many species of primates in the americas,
south and central america are full of monkeys.
There are certainly undiscovered species deep in the rainforest.
A new species of chimpanzee was discovered in just the last few years.

In fact I seem to remember reading in the local paper a few months ago the announcment of a couple of new species of primates, from asia and the americas.

There is an old photo taken in the late 1800's in brazil of a very large primate that was shot.
They have it propped up in the photo and its big, and it aint no big monkey either.
I saw it on the history channel program on Gigantopithicus, the 7-8' tall human cousin that lived in africa, asia and possibly europe.

Certain chinese anthropologists speculate that giganto might have survived untill fairly recently (25,000 years ago).

For those of you who think we a re packed in like sardines in the US, that is not the case. There are great cities and the east/west coast are very urbanized,
but out west is a totaly different story.
You be amazed at how empty this country really is, I have roamed all over the western US and I know of so many areas to go where I could be there for weeks without hardly seeing another person.

In fact in all of my literally tens of thousands of hrs out in the abundant wilderness areas available to us, you what I have never ever seen.

The remains of ANY animal that happend to just die, they all do at some point.

Not one deer, raccon, bat, any bird, no bears nor squirell have I ever found laying around, after they died.


But several years ago, in the Donner Pass area, I noticed a very odd scat on a rock.

We were riding our trials motorcycles through a very remote private ranch, and we were working our way down a very shallow seasonal creek bed. It was very densly wooded and were were following a sort of game trail that went down to a nearby lake.
We came to a small clearing in thr trees/brush and right on top of a small rock was a turd pile.
Im pretty famailiar with the scat of all of the large mamals and birds of prey. It wasnt bear or mountain lion or coyote, and those are the only animals big enough to leave a big pile like that. And it looked like human feces, except it was full of plant material, and berries and bugs.
I kinda looked at it and thought it odd while I waited for my buddy to catch up, but really didnt think about it , I was six hrs into a twelve hr ride.
When I was on my five hr drive home, it dawned on me that I had missed the possible opportunity of a life time.

There have been many hair samples found,and some hair and blood samples taken this year were indentified as an "unclassified primate".
The researcher was saying that it was closer to human than to the great apes, but was not human.

And I remember as a child roaming around the mountains hunting, I would occasionally find swatches of long reddish brown hair stuck in buckbrush or in the tree branches. back then I just though it was cows, but now I dont know, as I think back to them they were usually prety high up a little higher than cattle are tall.
And cattle around hear dont have long hair.
Then theres the matter of this small town that is at the base of this part of the mountains. Its been there about a 130 yrs maybe an old logging town with a reservation nearby.
They used to have a set of giant foot prints painted through town, on the road. I never really though about it back then, 40+ years ago.
but recently as I was riding around some of the back roads nearby there are many "bigfoot" related items decorating local homes.
There are a couple of bigfoot cutouts hiding in the trees on different peices of property, and there is one house with a big foot statue.
And when the footprints were first painted in town, was well before the patterson film brought bigfoot into the public conciousness.
So next time im up there I think I'll stop at the local tribal council and ask about their tales of bigfoot, I think my uncle told me the name in the local laguage, but it cant for the life of me remember what it was.
When I would go roaming around my dad and uncle would tell me to watch out for "?", and it was kind of like a boogey man in the forest.


Almost every native north american tribe has a tale of a large hairy man beast that lives deep in the forest.

And the tales have similar features, except there are two exception that I have heard, in most of the tales bigfoot is peaceful or at least not interested in us, but in the Iroqoui legends, in times of severe hardship, like bad winters, he becomes a predator.
And there is a tribe that live in a region of oregon, that absolutly feared bigfoot, and would not cross a certain river and venture into his territory.

Then there is the Yeti in the himalayas, and oran-pendek in indonesia.
The european probably even have the tales, they have just been transformed through the ages into other tales of giants and ogres and such.

There is a book called ,"Spy at the Top of the World"
an amazing true story of spying, the himlayas and tibet in 1957?. A must read,
anyhow as the author and his companions are hiking from india to nepal, they have a yeti incounter, I think with footprints and vocalizations.


Another fascinating read is "The Story Of Ishi"
the last survivor of his tribe and how he lived in the wild hidden from the white man in northern california, till he got old and tired of hiding and came out.

There is a similar story of an native american doing the same thing in New York City, I'm not sure of the date but I think it was in the 1850's, he was the last member of his tribe and they had been hiding in the central park area, since before the city was there. And as his habitat shrank and became ever more urban, he finaly got old and tired of struggling to survive and came out of the wilderness.

Well considering illegals avoid ICE so well, I'd just say its from simple observation. LOL!

Maybe they saw how the early settlers (NOT ALL WHITE BY THE WAY!!!) slaughtered the natives and stayed even further away. That's assuming they had the ability to learn through observation.

If they have a canine/ape look about them then maybe they share the amazing sense of smell that those animals do and avoid us much like a deer avoids the hunter's scent. Mix the sense of smell, fear of being slaughtered by the hairless bipedals and some above average intelligence, when compared to HARD TO HUNT animals and you have one elusive mofo!!!

Most hunters think deer, bears etc. If you saw a bigfoot high tailing it out of an area your mind would automatically say bear or another hunter maybe or even a bigfoot. There's been lots of sightings and tales so maybe they just barely stayed out of view and it is us that failed to see them. We think of roads, buildings, technology and hearing hunter's tales usually sends us into a trip down oh-god-grandpa-wont-shut-up lane.

Most of my life I have been fairly skeptical that a large primate could live in north america and not be discovered.
The anecdotal evidence I found to be interesting but, not conclusive to me, until I had my own sighting.
But not, an actual visual sighting, dammit.
Me and several buddies were doing a very grueling 65 mile mountain bike ride on one of the toughest 4WD trails in the sierra.
We got a very early start around 6 am for the 20 mile climb up to the highest point. We were about 6 miles into the wilderness climbing up a fairly steep dirt road. 2 of my friends were about 5 minutes ahead of me and paul. As we climbed we laid down the first tracks of the day, over the top of deer and bear from the night before.
While the road went along a small draw that was thick with manzanita, and buck brush and a grove of fir and pine trees. Paul had gotten about 30 seconds ahead of me, just far enough to go out of site at each corner.
He had just gone around a bend when I heard a pretty heavy thrashing in the brush, moving down the draw.
When I came around the next bend, Paul is off his bike standing in the road looking down. I though he had lost something off of his bike and was looking for it.
Then he looked up at me with a really wierd look on his face pointing at the ground, and said to me" Dude, you got to see this".

When I get there, there is a track several strides long, in the fine silty soil of the road, of footprints 14-15 inches long, on top of the tracks from my friends ahead of us.
They came off of a rocky knoll, went down the jeep trail for a few yards,
it stopped and #ed around a couple of times, went across the road and down into the draw I had just heard noises coming from.
The fine soils, preserved so much detail that it was amazing, you could see the lines and wrinkles on the toes and on the bottom of the foot.
It was somewhat flat footed, with the toes being very splayed, with big gaps in the toes.
We stood there for several minutes, trying to decide what to do, we had no camera, its about 8:30 am were at 8500' 35 miles from the nearest town, which has an ace hardware, PLASTER. So we decide that we'll try to catch our friends, then the fastest two of us will ride down to the car and run into town get a disposable camera and try to get some plaster.
As the road switch backed up the mountain we came across the track again 2 more times as we climbed. From the third set of tracks we could see that it was headed straight down the hill, because we could see the lower portions of the road.
We knew there was a spot up ahead where our buddies would likely stop, and just before we got there we found another set of tracks, as we stopped and looked at this track, almost in disbelief, a jeep with three guys bear hunting came up, and asked us what we were looking at, to which paul , not wanting to say bigfoot, replied" A big bare footprint", they got all excited because they thought he said, "A big bear footprint"
and hopped out of the jeep to have a look, as one of them looked down at the track, he looked at me and said "That aint no bear foot print", to which I nodded.

They stood silently as we told them about the rest of the tracks headed down the hill, after a couple of minutes they went over to the jeep and talked amongst themselves for a little bit. We walked over and them we going into town to get a camera and try and find some plaster.
Then they told us the only reason the were driving around that early on the trail was that there were 200 jeeps on a poker run behind them, and that they were trying to get away from them. They said the first jeeps should be here in about an hr.
CR$%.
that shot our idea, there was no way we could stop that train of jeeps, or have them go around any of the prints.

I asked the hunters what they were going to do, two of them just shrugged and the third mummbled that he didnt see nothin, he looked somewhat shaken by the event.
Me and paul decided that we would still try to catch the other guys, and we could turn around go back down the hill to try and show them the first set of prints, which might not be damaged yet.
Well unbeknownst to us the other guys had gone off on a flier and there was no way we were going to catch them.
We rode our asses off trying to catch them but we got to the pooint of no return, the top and we stil hadnt caught them, so we gave up and resigned it to a personal experience, and we jokingly told ourselves it was just some size 25 hillbilly walking around bare foot on 6 miles up a 4wd trail on a 35 degree morning, and we continued on. Our friends never noticed the tracks because they were to busy racing each other.
I had almost forgotten about the experience, until I found the BFRO website, by accident. I was actually looking for something else and went to their site.
I thought it was kinda cool, and noticed that they had sighting reports broken down into regions and counties, so just for fun I clicked on my county, not really expecting to find anything. But there were many reports going back for 50 years. Then I noticed a report in the same area, around the same time we had our experience. Then I noticed that most of the sightings are within a 5 mile radius of a set of small lakes.
hmmmm

I know this is a little off topic but...

For any of you thinking that halloween could be best enjoyed in a bigfoot costume... DON'T DO IT! Don't perpetuate the current hoax circulating and certainly don't help to monetize it!