SC EP:1183 Hunting Guides Experience With Sasquatch

It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind. And it either heard me or smelt me. And he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up and that that shocked me. They don't make people that that big. The way it moved. Almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything move like that in my life. They were screaming at each other in gibberish. It sounded like a language and they were chunting away back and forth, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet that what I saw was bears. 911, what are you reporting? Jesus Christ, you better. Sheriff? See ya. Hello? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir? That son of a bitch is about six foot nine, I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I've looked it right at him. This is Karen from New Zealand and you're listening to Sasquatch Chronicles. And I'm thankful that I probably will never have one of these encounters. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you. We'll be speaking with Ian. And Ian comes to us from Virginia. He's an experienced hunting guide, outdoorsman. And he didn't really believe in being a bear. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. He was a hunter. And he didn't really believe in Bigfoot until about 2019, where he encountered something he could not explain. And I'll let Ian go into it. Last night I spoke with John. And John is alignment from BC. They would fly these guys in, in these very remote areas of British Columbia via helicopter. And after being dropped off by the heli, he trekked his way up Tumblr Ridge. And he thought he was looking at a bear. He's kind of at a high position looking down. And he thought this thing was a bear. He ended up not being a bear. And it wasn't alone. It wasn't just one creature he saw. He ended up seeing a whole family group from this Ridge Point. He observed them for several minutes. It was a fascinating conversation I had with them. Here's a clip from last night's show. I assumed it was a black bear. But when I came into this clearing and I kind of, I'm looking, and now I'm maybe that 50, 60 meters away from this black mass. And when I got into a clear spot and I'm kind of low and moving slow and I lifted my head and I look out over the top. And what it looked like to me, and almost instantly right away, it wasn't a bear because this thing wasn't laying on its stomach, but it was in like a tripod position. It had its left hand extended out in front of it. And the scree field is maybe like a 20 or 25 degree slope on it downward. So it's not super steep, but it's got some grade to it. And this thing's hand, and I say hand, it was a hand, like my hand for the most part. And I want to thank John again for coming on. If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email address is west at sasquatch chronicles.com. And if you get a chance, check out sasquatch chronicles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome Ian to the show. Ian, thanks for coming on. Hey, thank you for having me. And you're a pretty experienced guy for the audience. Give us a little background on yourself. Yeah. So what I do professionally, I'm a wilderness guide is kind of what I'll like call myself just because I wear a lot of different hats throughout the year. And I work with the seasons, but my main profession right now is, is definitely like hunting guide. Just cause it's the one thing that kind of makes the most money. And it's also the most skilled thing that I do. Yeah. I started guiding in general back in 20, 21, something like that. It was a couple of years ago and I started as a whitewater rafting guide and did that as to offer two summers. You know, the whitewater rafting guide spent a lot of time outdoors. We lived in shacks. You know, we didn't have running water. We didn't have any of those luxuries. We had one big community kitchen literally lived in the woods. I think I wore shoes like once or twice throughout the summer. I always barefoot and that was in Tennessee. So still in Appalachian mountains. And then after that came ski instructor. So then ski instructing every winter since then two years at Taos, New Mexico, and then one year in California. So ski instructing, you know, outdoors, all that stuff, but it is in a out of resort. So it doesn't feel as outdoorsy. But then I got into guiding Western big game hunts about three years ago. So I'm going on my third ball now. So I guess like two or three years ago. So yeah, I'm about to ship out for my third fall here in a couple of days. But yeah, it's pretty awesome. I've been a part of, you know, dozens of elk hunts, dozens of mule deer hunts and antelope hunts. Spent a lot of time way out in the woods, far from roads, far from cell service, all that sort of stuff. Well, if you would take me to 2019 in Virginia, what were you doing and what happened? So I had just gotten a new tent and my friend Sam, he had just gotten a new hammock that he's going to start hammock camping out of. And we were super excited to go camping. I think this was like early summer, like springtime, because it was just warm enough where you could go camping without freezing your butt off. So we're like, yeah, dude, like let's go camping. Basically, like the way I grew up, I know a lot of people don't grow up this way. I lived in a woodhouse, like a log cabin style house in the woods, like down the dirt road. Front of my house is a field, behind my house is a field and all the rest of it was woods. And we had acres upon acres of woods. My parents had 30 acres. My grandfather had over 100. My uncle had over 100. And they were all kind of connected. And in Appalachia, it's like we don't have giant mountains. We have hills and hollers. And so you're looking out across everything and you're seeing it as like, oh yeah, this is rolling hills. But once you try to cross those hills, you realize that everything is connected with super deep hollers. And everything's super deep in the hollers. It goes really far down. So where my house was situated is on a hill and down below it was a holler. And there's a little stream that goes through there and we deer hunt through there and we would squirrel hunt through there. But we always wanted to go camping down there. So me and my friend Sam, we got our new camping gear. We went down in there and we set up camp real close to the creek. I put down my tent and I put my tent on top of a tarp. Because at the time I had read that putting it on a tarp kind of assists you in keeping from getting all that ground cold going up into your tent. And just like freezing your butt off all night. So I put mine on a tarp. We had a little fire hanging out. I do want to mention we were not drinking because at the time we were both just, we just didn't really drink. You know, like once in a blue moon, maybe we would, but we were kind of, we had hit our phase where we just didn't want anything to do. And we were kind of just focusing on school and everything like that. But yeah, so we weren't drinking at all. We were just down there had had fire. We're sitting there hanging out and talking and there's only so much time that you can go by if you're not party in and you're sitting in the woods where you kind of get a little bored. We're just talking to each other. And we kind of, one of us has the idea. I can't remember exactly who had the idea, but one of us had the idea that we should start doing tree knocks. And, you know, see what happens. And it was kind of a joke, you know, and I'm picking on my buddy saying, I'm like, yeah, man, like we're going to find bigfoot or whatever. So we've got some sticks and it's a big popular tree that we were tree knocking on. And we start tree knocking. And where our camp is situated, we're like right next to a little stream behind us is a super steep hill. In front of us is another super steep hill and other like ravine type canyons that go up these hills and kind of splinter up. Like, you know how if you find a spring and you follow it down, you'll find that there's all these other little springs that join in at a larger creek and all those other little springs are, you know, basically the bottom of these deep valleys, deep cut valleys. That's kind of what we were like looking at. And we're situated a little bit in a flood plain of sorts. So we're knocking and in that area, they'll kind of echo a little bit, just a little bit, you know, so you can hear that it's traveling pretty far. So we do it boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you know, just kind of putting a rhythm to it. After a couple of minutes, we start hearing knocks coming from in front of us. I look at my buddy Sam and I'm like, dude, did you just hear that? And he's like, yes, we do it again. I started doing the knocks again, and it repeats back to us again, directly in front of us. And this isn't an echo or anything because it's like seconds after I do the knock, like I'll do the knock, I'll go one, two. And then it's like one, two, three, four, five seconds and then one, two, you know, it'll repeat back after a couple of seconds. So we're getting a little freaked out. So I just kept pushing on a little. So I keep knocking. And this is where it starts to get a little weird. So the tree not directly in front of us coming from that ravine or that canyon at holler. It goes off. We're standing there like, whoa, dude. And then up the canyon, another tree knock starts on a different ridge, like farther north of us. And then the first one responds back to that tree knock and then down below another tree knock starts. And now we're like standing here, looking at each other. And I'm like, dude, what am I buddy at this point is like, dude, you guys stop like no more of this. Like he's getting really freaked out. And we're both kind of amazed. We're both kind of like, I don't just confused, I guess the best way to put it, what could that be? Like it was that moment where I'm trying to be the naysayer. I'm trying to find anything to say this is this is why it's not real and having a hard time. And we didn't have any neighbors over there at the time too. So we had no neighbors out that way. If somebody was wanting to be out there to do that to us, they would have to hike in. Probably eight miles or so into the woods to a random bridge top. That's private property in a place where you don't go on the private property because somebody might shoot you. You know, like it. So it just didn't add up. I tried to say, well, maybe it's owls. You know, everybody always defaults to owls when they can't explain something. Oh, dude, it's just a owl. You know, and it's always like, that's not what an owl sounds like. You just change what species of owl you're talking about. But anyways, so we hear that. Oh, man, that's crazy. And we go on. So we kind of put away the sticks. I'm like, okay, I'm the one pushing the envelope at this point. I'm like, dude, we should do some owls. We should do some whoops. It sounds like, like, man, I don't know about that. Like, it seems like a bad idea. Like I'm getting a little freaked out. I'm like, no, man, come on, like let's do some whoops. So we started whooping. We basically do exactly like you'd see in the documentaries. So you know, like Dr. Jeff Meldrum and like all those guys, we basically do like exactly what you see in the documentaries, how those guys will do it and talk about it, just to ape howl pretty much. So we're going like whoop, whoop. Like kind of like in the intro of this show, there's like whoops and stuff. We did it like exactly like that. And not hearing nothing. And at this point, like it's kind of silent for a little while. And I'm like really jumping on that. Like they say our horse being like, aha, I told you, it's not real. Well, after a couple whoops, we hear a whoop. Clear as day, directly in front of us, call that. And all in mind, you all of this is going on pretty much at nighttime. Like we had waited until nighttime to start doing this. So we hear a whoop coming from directly in front of camp where the first tree knock came from, which I found interesting that it came from the first one came from the same place as the first tree knock. And at that point we're like, dude, are you kidding me? Cause you can, you know, a tree knock, it's like whatever coincidence, blah, blah, blah, blah, a whoop is like, hold up a second. There's nothing here that sounds like anything that doesn't make any sense. So here the whoop, we call back to it. Sam's freaking out. He's like, stop, stop, stop. Don't like quit it, dude. You're freaking me out. I called back to it and then we just set off like a chain reaction of the holler. Another whoop directly in front of us a whoop down the holler. Another whoop. And they're just chattering back forth to each other. Like just, just like you hear all the time, like you've heard on this show multiple times about they, they're just talking to each other. And we're looking at each other like, dude, at this point, I kind of got a little afraid. At this point, my naysayerness wasn't enough to protect me anymore. And I'm like, all right, maybe there is something going on here. Maybe we should stop messing with it. But at that point, it was kind of too late. Right. Like we had already made ourselves known in the area. And where we're camped, like I was saying earlier, it is like a long hike from where my parents' house was. It was way down in the holler, way down in there. We had to pack our stuff in pretty far to get down there. And there's no rows, nothing around. It's just the woods. So yeah, we're pretty freaked out. And at this point, we basically give up antagonizing it. Both of us, like I finally agree with Sam. I'm like, okay, let's stop antagonizing it. Then we sit around the fire. We don't hear nothing for a while. And I'm telling Sam, like, yeah, dude, it's just an owl. You know, I keep holding on to that. Like I just didn't want to be like, yeah, it's a big foot. Because I guess I thought to myself, maybe if I just, I'm like, no, it's not real enough. Then if it is real, somehow it'll know that that's my attitude and it'll come out and show itself. You know, like that's kind of how I felt. So yeah, and we're hanging out around the campfire. I could tell Sam did not want to go to bed. He did not want to go to bed. And we had a gun with us too. We had a 30-30 rifle. Anytime I went in the woods, I'd bring a gun. Like I never went to the woods back home without a gun. I'll go into the woods out west without a gun, depending on what, you know, where it is. But back home, I never would. And it's weird because, you know, out west, I've been in Grizzly territory. I've been in Cougar territory. But back east, you know, you don't have as many Cougars and you don't have the Grizzlies. But I still just feel a lot of times like, I don't know, it's a weird feeling back home. Like I always have to have a gun. Out here, I feel a lot safer. Which is strange. So we had a 30-30 with us. And Sam did not want to go to bed. Didn't want to go to bed. And I know why is because he's in that hammock and he's afraid that he's going to be a Sasquatch hot dog that night. He just did not want to go to bed. And so he's just talking and talking and talking and trying to keep us from going to bed. And finally, I'm tired. I've had enough of hanging out around the fire. So I tell him, like, all right, like it's time to go to bed. Like, come on, let's go to sleep. So we lay down to go to sleep. And we had a little pile of firewood saved up. We didn't have much and we didn't bring firewood with us because it's too far of a hike to bring like stacks of firewood. We just brought a saw and an axe and we had cut some before we had gone to bed or before the night had fallen on us. And so Sam had like a little reserve of firewood. And I had crawled into my tent and basically just, you know, forgot about the world. I was trying to go to bed, but I could hear him. Every time the fire would go down, he'd get up and throw a bunch more firewood on it. So he didn't want that fire to go out. And I know why is because every time the fire, you know, went out and it was pitch black again, because, you know, especially down in those hollers with big trees and woods, it don't matter what kind of moon it is. Don't matter how clear it is. It's dark at night time. You know, you're nestled in between two, you know, tall ridges. It's just dark and can be kind of spooky. So every time the fire would die out and comes dark again, is the weirdest thing. No birds, you know, no critters like that moving around camp, but you could hear something moving around. It's really freaky because you spend enough time in the woods. Like I grew up hunting, grew up fishing, you know, we would cut cut wood for for heat in the winter. You know, we'd cut wood and that's how we heated our home in the wintertime. Spent a lot of time in those woods and you get a sense for what movement is what you can hear as a squirrel goes through the brush. It's a squirrel. You can hear as a buck goes through the brush. It's a buck, a bear, so on and so forth. And we could hear around camp something big for sure. But we weren't sure what exactly it was, you know, but it was something big and it and the weirdest part about it is it was circling camp. And it's not uncommon to have like a deer or something walk by your camp when you're sleeping. But this is like walking around our camp and the freakiest part is as the fire would die down, it would get closer and closer. And that's why Sam kept freaking out throwing all the firewood back on and getting it built up to keep whatever that was at bay. And every now and then he'd say something like, yeah, yeah, do you hear that? Do you hear that? Like, dude, tell me you hear that, you know, he's freaking out. And I'm at this point, I got a little short with him. I got a little upset. I'm like, dude, it ain't nothing. It ain't real. It's just like you're hearing things. You're hearing the wind and you're hearing a possum that's coming over here because it wants to get. Food or something. It thinks we have food at which we didn't. We didn't bring anything with us. But that's what I wrote it off like all these you just you're hearing a possum. So we keep camping and eventually Sam runs out of firewood because where we didn't bring firewood with us and we had cut it up. We're cutting up really dry. Just like soft wood type firewood like poplar, you know, things like that that burns just real quick pines and stuff like that. We didn't have any good hardwood because that's a lot harder to cut down. It's a lot harder to saw. So we didn't mess with hardwood. We were just using those softwoods as easy to gather quick. So he burns out of his firewood really quick. So now it's pitch black and he's hidden in his little hammock. I got the gun next to me and I'm thinking of myself finally he ran out of firewood so we can go to sleep because I was pretty annoyed of hearing him jump up and down and throwing all these logs on the fire and everything all night long. So we finally started going to sleep and you can hear all the noises around camp. I mean, just like movement all over all over and there's this like oppressive feeling that like we're just being watched or something. It's kind of how it is just a weird feeling. It's like hard to explain and still in my mind, I'm like, it's not real. It's nothing not real. And also I have a gun. Therefore, I'm the biggest baddest thing in the forest right now. So I actually started nodding off to sleep a little bit. I was in this dream state that was like halfway between sleeping and halfway between being awake. You know, when you're just about to fall asleep, but you can still hear things. I'm hearing all these noises around camp and it's getting like louder and louder. And I'm thinking like, I'm in a dream. You know, I'm thinking I'm hallucinating. I'm in a dream. You know how that all happened. You'll hear things from your dream and you'll think it's in the real world, but it's just from your dream. So I kind of ride it off in my mind. I don't see it as an alarm. Then far off in the woods, I hear something just break out into a run. Just a dead sprint straight towards us. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Just crashing through the brush. Just breaking twigs, breaking limbs, just hauling it right towards us. You know, and I hear it and it's getting louder. And there's a certain point where I start waking up and I start like rising up and I open my eyes and I think to myself, this is real. This isn't a dream. This isn't an hallucination. Nothing like that. I'm not halfway between sleeping and being awake now. I'm fully awake and I'm like, it's real. Like whatever it is running towards. This is all happening within the span of like four seconds. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I hear the steps go from leaves to tarp. So it goes from leaves to tarp. Well, my tent is situated on the tarp. So it's standing right next to my tent, like right at my tent. And I'm laying here and I actually, at this point, I'm fully awake and I'm like frozen. I can't move. Like I'm literally frozen. Could not move. And I guess it was partly just because I was so afraid. You know, I think at that point the jig was up. You know, we had just heard eight howls coming from three different ridges and train ox. You know, like, so my mind at that point, I'm like, all right, this is a freaking big foot. You know, I'm like, I can't be a nice air anymore. This is a freaking eight man. And there's nothing else to it. I can't, I can't write it off anymore. So I hear this goes from the leaf to tarp. This is all one fluid motion, right? I'm laying here. I'm frozen. I hear up above my tent. Probably, who knows, you know, seven feet, eight feet in the air. It was high up above my tent. Sounded like it was directly above my tent. I hear this noise. It goes like an eight. Like a like a gorilla or something. Like when you watch on National Geographic, like the silverback gets pissed off and he's like, Like it literally went. And then turn and back into the woods. And I jump up, Sam leaps out of his hammock. He's like, dude, you have to have heard that. I'm like, yeah, I heard that. He's like, let's get out of here. I'm like, all right, let's get out. So we, we grabbed the gun, our flashlights, our phones, wallet keys, you know, important stuff. And we left everything else. We left the tent. We left our clothes. We left the hammock. We just left anything that we didn't absolutely have to have. And we stuffed a pocket full of things that we absolutely had to have. Sam carried the flashlight and I carried the gun and we, we hiked out there. Put one in the chamber and we hiked out. And we were like, oh, pretty long ways. We didn't get back to my parents house until dang it was probably like two or three in the morning. Maybe more like three in the morning because it was getting close to where like the sun kind of starts coming up, but it's not coming up. It's just like, you could tell it's going to be light than a couple of hours. And that was, that was pretty much it. That was pretty much the experience. And I've had other experiences in that area specifically multiple times and my brother has as well. And I could talk about that too if you want me to. Yeah. Scary night. It's kind of hard to put it to a known animal. You guys never got to look at what this thing was. Did you? We never did. And as you, that's the thing that like this, this story I held on to for a long time. I didn't tell anyone about it. I only recently put it on my blogs for, for friends and stuff to see. And then also started sharing it with people because I'm like, man, like you got to share the story. But I never did actually see it. That was a big thing. A big reason why I didn't share it because I always felt like people, you don't actually see it. People discredit it really quickly. But I don't, man, with my experience and being, I've been around bears, been around Cougars. I've been stalked by Cougars before. Like I've literally been stalked by Cougar before. You know, so I, like, I know the energy of these animals. I know what it feels like to be around them. I know what their eyes look like in the dark. Even if I don't see them, it's, it's literally my job. So, and I look back to that and I'm like, there's this, I couldn't have been anything else. Yeah, I will say, you know, most of the time when these things come into people's camp, they never see it because they never get out of the tent. A lot of times they're frozen in fear like how you described. And it goes to show how scared you guys actually were. I mean, you know, as a hunting guide, you don't get up middle of the night and hike out of an area. A lot of times that's more dangerous than sitting through the night waiting for the sun to come up. Oh yeah, dude, we were terrified. Like that's something we would never do. When you guys went back, did you find any sort of evidence or anything around the camp? So we went back the next morning and we found nothing. We looked for tracks. We looked to see if it mess with our tent. Didn't find nothing. We looked for scat. Didn't find any scat. We didn't find anything at all, which was really strange, but I have found stuff in the, in that holler before. I went down there one day in the winter and in the winter it's like rainy just above freezing. It's probably like, it's like 35 degrees and rainy, you know, and it's a good time to squirrel hunt. But other than that, it's not good for much. Most people won't, you know, go out in that time. Just miserable cold weather. And I went down there squirrel hunting and I, something I do is I always check, or I always check, but just past a log or something or a stick in a trail. Because that's where you're going to find tracks. Because the animal, it sees that log or that stick going over the trail and it steps over it. And so you get a good consistent track just beyond that obstruction. And there was a log with some mud just beyond it. So I see that little mud patch, see the log. I go down there to see if anything had traveled past. And I found, I kid you not, a perfect human footprint. Like perfect looking human footprint in the middle of the woods, way deep down in there. Miles from the nearest road and tens of miles from the nearest house that didn't belong to my family. So I get real close to looking, looks like it has dermal ridges. Perfect human footprint, but here's the catch. It's not 15 inches long. It's not 22 inches long. The sucker is like eight inches long or so. It's like, it's super tiny. And that, that was the thing that got me. I was like, dude, what? Because it could, it couldn't be a person. Nobody's down there. If you were out there barefoot, you'd freeze. Like in that kind of weather. Like you'd get hypothermia. That was the weird thing. It was like literally a human footprint, which kind of got me thinking about people have those theories about Appalachian feral people. And that, that one I've always written off the Appalachian feral people thing. I've always been like, you know, I could believe in a big foot, but like feral people, no dude, like I grew up in Appalachia. It's not real. Like no, no way. But seeing that, I was like, because if it was like 20 some inches long, you're like, okay, this is a big foot. You know, or whatever. Okay, we got a big foot track. But if it's within the realms of possibility for the length of a human footprint, it's just weird. How do you explain that? I don't understand. Yeah, I don't think every track you're going to find is going to be 20 inches long. I remember David Ellis from the Olympic project. He had to actually give me a cast of a footprint that he took. And it was like a baby footprint. It was a little weird, but I mean, I would compare the size to like a baby. When you and your friend actually talked about this incident, what was the conversation like? We basically like, dude, this is real. Like this is real. And then also we kind of joked about it. We joke about things all the time. We always were joking about something. We kind of joked about it where we're like, okay, well, now we have a story that we can't tell anyone ever. Because like in my personal life, I'll tell some people, but I don't, you know, I don't tell people this story very often, unless I think there's someone who's going to actually like believe it because we talked about it like you're cursed with the story you can't tell. And I do like the fact that people are getting aware they're talking about this more and more because it makes other people feel better about being able to talk about this. And that's part of why I came out to start telling the story. But yeah, that was kind of our conversation. It's just like, well, now we got a story we can't tell and that was crazy. And we're never going to do that again because that was scary as well. Yeah, I get it. There's always a chuckle inside when you have a skeptic banging on a tree. I often think be careful what you wish for. You know, in that area you you had said there was other experiences. Tell me about them. I had one. This one is really crazy. So I mentioned earlier my house is it's on a hill. And in Appalachia, you got hills and haulers. So you got the hill and then the haulers can be super deep down next to the hill. So my house is on the hill and it was situated in the middle of one acre that was just a yard. We had some fruit trees and then in front of it was a field and behind it was a field. So the field behind it, it's gently sloped down pretty far. So my house is at like, or my childhood home is 2600 feet, both sea level. And then the bottom of this hauler was like 2000 or so. So it goes down really like 600 feet. It goes way down in there, but it's a gentle slope all the way down. It's pretty steep. So that was a good place to go squirrel hunt because at the end of the field started this big pine barren and the squirrels love the pine nuts. And then right next to it as well was a bunch of oak trees and the squirrels like acorns. So I would go squirrel hunt a lot. And I know a lot of people that aren't from Appalachia find it weird or that they're not used to it. But you know, out in Appalachia, you eat squirrels. It's just something we do. You make squirrel dumplings. So you go squirrel hunt and you shoot like three or four of them, take them back home and cook them up. So I'm going down there and at this time I was probably, I don't know, 15 or so around that at 14, 15 or so. I was pretty young, but I wasn't like super young. And I'm going down in there and I've got a 22 and the 22 that I had, it was one of those that you load through the stock. You put all the bullets in the stock and you put a rod down it and you twist it. And that's how you put all your bullets in there. Well, if you want to take your bullets out, you got to do that, undo that rod and you got to get through this whole process to get the bullets out. So generally when I got done using that rifle, I would just shoot all the bullets that I had left in it. It was also more fun that way. And 22 is a cheap round. So I wasn't really concerned with saving them. So I go down in there and at this time I'm still hunting and I get through the field and I get to the pine barons and I've had another experience in that pine baron. I could tell as well if you want to hear another one. But anyways, I'm in this pine baron and I'm kind of walking the edge of it, the pines and the oaks because I don't, I never really liked going in the pine baron real far. I would go a couple, you know, a couple of steps into the pines, go through a couple of them, but I never really liked going to the middle of that pine baron because it was just creepy in there. So I'm kind of walking the edge and I'm chirping. When you're squirrel hunting, you're making a squirrel noise, you kind of chirping, you go like that. I'm doing that noise. And, you know, in Appalachia, it's like the part that I'm from is the Blue Ridge Mountains and it's like a spotty rainforest. So here and there are areas that get so much rain that they're considered rainforest, temperate rainforest, but it's not the entire area. So it's like all these isolated thunderstorms and isolated storms. There's a lot of water, it's warm, a lot of life. And you're always hearing birds. You're always hearing squirrels. You're always hearing something is flying around making noise, buzzing, bugs, bugs, especially in the summertime, you're always hearing bugs. I'm going through and everything just gets silent, totally silent. And I'm like, hmm, you know, and I get that weird feeling, you know, back home, going through the woods every now and then you just get that weird feeling. And you know, you got to go home. Like you got to, like you got to get out of the woods, you know, like get out of the woods as quickly as possible. If that means going up to the road and walking along the road back home, do it. If that means going into the field and walking back up to home, do it. You know, you just got to get out of the woods. Sometimes you just get that feeling. And I'm down in there. Everything goes silent. I kind of get that feeling. I'm like, okay, so I start walking back up towards the field. And so that's what I'm doing. I'm going to hit the field and then go straight up the field because I don't want to be in the woods. I want to be out in the open. I don't like having the trees and the thick brush and stuff because it makes me feel like something could sneak up on me. And at the time I was thinking bear, you know, and I, as I'm walking up, I heard a big, real loud thump. You know, and I didn't, I didn't really know what that was. I don't know how to explain that. I thought maybe a bear, you know how bears will stand up on their back legs and then they'll sniff around. Like if they catch a wind of you or they catch wind of something, but they can't see you, they'll stand up on their hind legs and sniff. And then when they come back down, depending on what they smell, depending on how they're feeling, sometimes they thump. Sometimes they thump real hard and that's an aggression. Bears will send that aggression to kind of tell you to, hey, get out of here. So that's what kind of what I was writing off as I start going up the field and I can't shake this feeling. I'm being watched and I can hear in the woods to my right as I'm walking up the field, just soft like movement through the leaves. You know, like something's moving through the leaves, but it's like trying to be silent almost is what it sounds like. And I'm like, dude, what is that? I get back up to the yard and I'm at the edge of the yard now. So I feel really safe and we had a dog over there that was tied up to, it's tied up to a chain. So it was one of those chains that allows it to run up and down the yard. So I'm like, okay, I'm here with the dog, the house is just right there. You know, it's super close. I can run up to it if I need to turn around and I start shooting the bullets. You know, like I mentioned earlier, it's easier to just shoot them and get rid of them. So I just started laying out on my bullets just off towards the pine barons. And as soon as I'm done shooting all those bullets, something in the woods goes crashing up the woods and not running away, not running towards me, but running up and down the woods because there's a tree line. You know, once you cross over the tree line, you're either in the field or you're in the yard and whatever it was would not cross the tree line. It just goes up the woods, back down the woods, just up and down. And I'm like, no way. I've run up to the house. I get my parents that have them come outside and they're listening to it. I'm like, what is that? And my dad's like making his face. He's like, super confused because a bear don't like bears don't do that. Bears aren't afraid to show you, hey, I'm a bear. Like bears, bears will just appear. Those will just be like, hello, you know, like, I wonder if they're afraid of you, they'll run away. You know, they're not like a bear isn't trying to hide itself within the tree line. My dogs start going crazy. They're barking. After a minute of the dog barking, it goes in a hide in its doghouse. And my dad's looking around. I'm like, dude, and we didn't ever see anything that time either. So whatever it is wants to remain hidden, I suppose. And I always grown up, I wrote that off. He's a bear. That's what I wrote it off as, even though it just doesn't really line up. My family has been there since the 1700s, like not just in that town, but I mean like in that patch of woods. There's a old foundation of a house way down in the holler, like down from where we were camping from the original story. There's a old foundation of the house down there. And it's not like it has wooden boarding or anything like no, like this is a house from 17 something. This is a house from before people were legally allowed to settle in Appalachian. It was still quote unquote Indian territory. And it's just all it is just the stones that they stacked up to have as their foundation for their house. And you can go down there and you can metal detecting stuff and find little scrap pieces of metal from that period. And from later on, when people still lived in that one little spot, we've been there a super long time and it's still just woods. And down below my house a little bit farther, like if you follow the creek that we were, or I should say stream is a really small stream, the little small stream that we were camping there. If you follow that down, you'll end up at a creek. And that section of the creek real close to where I live, just a couple miles away. That also, you know, my family used to live over there and up until I don't know about 15 years ago, no one lived down there at all. And it still has some of the only old growth timber in the county over there because it's where the creek cuts through the mountains. It's so deep and so steep right there, like the hills are so steep that some of those hills you can't, you could never get the logs out. So they never fooled with logging over there. And growing up, I used to, I would walk down to that creek to go swimming all the time. I would walk in there. And when I was growing up, I still remember at a really, really young age, nobody living down there. It's called a copperous hill. It's what it originally called. Nobody lived down in there. And it was one of the last, like, wild, wild places of our county with old growth timber. And I would walk down to the creek and we would swim and then we'd walk back home. And then probably when I was around eight or nine, they put a gated living home or a gated community over there. And so there's like three or four log cabins down there now. And they're really spread out away from each other. It's all dirt roads. But yes, now there's some people that live down there, but there's only like one or two people that live there 24, seven year around. But I've always thought that whatever it is, as people settle the area, it kind of shrank its range into the old growth. And that's why it's, you know, over there is because of that old growth timber over there that hasn't been touched. And there's caves over there too that I found as a kid and old mines, old copper mines. So. Sounds like a good environment for them for sure. Kind of going back to your encounter for a moment, even a skeptic would have hard time describing what natural animal came into your camp. I mean, if you don't believe in Bigfoot, a gorilla must have come in. What do you think Sasquatch is? What's your take? Man, it's really hard to say. Because I want to just because the whole idea of Sasquatch, I think is really like that's like the most believable or the most, I don't know. It's the one that just makes the most sense. No, it is like, yeah, like that's possible that, you know, North America has a large ape that is still undiscovered in some kind of way. Who knows. But the idea of like feral people is to me is just like, that's just so far out. You know, I'm just like, I don't really see that maybe somewhere like in West Virginia, really far out. But where I'm from, I just I have a hard time believing that as much. But also at the same time, it's like, dude, I don't know how you explain it. And also at the same time, for me, it seems like whatever it is has it's more complex than like flesh and blood. That's what it seems like to me. And I have other experiences, I can tell you about that that kind of lend me to feel that way. One specifically about the pine variants, but part of me is like, maybe some kind of Sasquatch type being and I feel like maybe they have some kind of advanced spiritual powers or something. I have no idea. But there's just a lot of weird stuff that goes on out there. Beyond Sasquatch, I mean, you're out there in the woods a lot. What's the weirdest thing you've come across? So that creek, a lot of times when it's snow, we didn't get a lot of snow. But, you know, once a year, we give maybe a foot two feet of snow. That was a good snow for us. So one year we got two feet of snow. So I was in high school at the time. School's closed. Nothing else to do. Can't get to town. You know, I didn't live near town. I lived way out in the woods. So I go hiking down to the creek anytime it snowed. I love going down there. There's one hill is a. All this hill in the area is around like 3,300 feet. You get to the top of it and look around and just see everything covered in snow. It's beautiful. And then you can hike down that hill all the way down to the creek. So I go down there and I'm looking at it. Creek was always super beautiful in the snow. Sometimes I'll try to fish it. So I go down there and I'm looking and this is fresh, fresh snow. No tracks on it. Just fell that morning, you know, had just fallen over the night in the early morning hours. And this is like morning time as I'm hiking around. And I find this set of tracks that is coming out of the creek. Like coming straight out of this cold water creek. It's pretty large creek about the width of a road, maybe a width of the road and a half or so, you know, like three or four lanes of traffic with the road. Pretty big creek. And these tracks are coming out of it and they're spaced out because I'm really tall. And ever since even at that time, I was about six foot five or so. And so I can measure things with my stride. You know, my stride is around six feet or so, you know, I'm a pretty long stride or I don't know if six feet, but I have a long stride, you know, so I can usually measure things against my stride. And this thing, even if I stand there, I've got super long legs. If I match my foot with the first track and then stretch it out to the next one, I couldn't match this thing stride. It had a stride that way more than mine is way taller than me. And the weirdest thing was is the tracks. So these tracks, very similar like what I've heard of is the Jersey, Jersey Devil. You can do it with your hand right now. If you wanted to hold down your pinky finger with your thumb and you spread out your other three fingers, your pointer, your ring and your middle, you make like a three with it. It kind of was like that three prong track, except like the thumb, you hold the thumb out in the back. Right. So I had a three prong in the front and then one prong in the back. That was the track and it was deep, like super deep in the snow. And the stride was like super far apart. And it just came straight out of the creek and went up the hill and I followed them for a ways. And it went all the way up into the woods and then just disappeared. The tracks just disappeared. Was it like an extra toe? This thing at the back, it looked like it had another appendage. It had like three in the front, one in the back. And that's the story. I don't usually tell people because I'm like, people are just going to think I'm crazy, you know, but I mean, it's something I saw down there. Yeah, that's really weird. The track sounds weird and then having it disappear in fresh snow is even weirder. You know, I wanted to ask you out of all your time out there in the woods, people were reporting these lights. A lot of times when people had big foot on their property, they will say, and I'm also seeing these weird lights. But having said that, I've talked to a lot of people who've been out in the woods who haven't had a Sasquatch encounter and they come across these weird balls of light. Out of all your years of being out there, have you ever seen these lights that people talk about? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And the lights is another one that would. When it's like a UFO type light, it's easier to, I don't know, show people or like share with people because people are more open to it, right? They're like, oh, you saw UFO, no way. I hope I get to see one. But like I've seen, I've only once in my life, I've seen an orb, which was just like insane. I literally just saw an orb. It started about 20 feet away from me. And it just, it had a, it was yellow. It looked like it was the like eight foot diameter, big orb. And it just floated through the sky, made like a little wispy kind of movement and then disappeared. And it had a tail too. It's just one of those things you just don't tell people. That's one thing that I'm like, I never tell people about because they're just going to think I'm crazy, but I literally saw an orb. And that was one thing that after seeing it, I felt very upset because I was like, that was amazing. And I was crazy. I won't tell everyone, but I just feel like I can't. That's another like thing I'm cursed with. And I had another experience down below the house. So I mentioned the backyard of my house meeting with that backfield. So we had a little burn barrel down there, you know, and back home in the country, you don't take your cardboard and all that stuff to the dump. You burn that stuff because they weigh everything you take to the dump. So if you could burn it, you could save a little bit of money. So that's what we would do. And a lot of times when we had a lot of cardboard saved up that we needed to burn, I would call over my buddies. This is in high school and they'd come over and we would hang out down the burn barrel and have a little bonfire. We'd burn the cardboard, but we'd also burn some wood and just hang out. So I have my buddies over and I've got some buddies over at that night in particular that never go outside. They just weren't outdoorsy people. They lived in town. They were townies and they just didn't hike and do all that stuff. So we're hanging out. And we see off in the sky this crazy looking like orange light that looks like a lantern almost. Like, you know, those lanterns that people light and they just let it fly away, the paper lantern. So it kind of looked like that, except it was almost like too big. And then also the movement of it was crazy because those things will go up and then they'll go along. So this thing is like, it's kind of floating around and then it starts zipping. It goes up and then goes over. Super fast. Down super fast. Sharp like 90 degree turns. We're like, dude, what is that? You know, like what is that thing? And it's yellow and then it starts to turn red like a slow shifting of colors to red. And then it turns back to yellow. And then as we're looking at it and we're talking about it, it and it was pretty large. It kind of like sucks in. That's the only way I could describe it. It looked like it literally was like sucked into a wormhole or something like it was like, like that. Like that's the sound it would have made was like that. And it goes and just shrinks until it disappears. And then it blinks like this white light blinked like twice and then it was gone completely gone. And we were like, dude, you know, like, no way. Like, what was that? You know, I don't know. It was too big to be like a drone. It didn't have like the drone lights on it. It had this like, it literally had like this big large yellow look to it. And right after it shrinked and disappeared off to the left of us. You remember the story earlier about the thing that wouldn't come out of the tree line off to the left of us. We hear these crazy noise like this roar. Dude, I'm not kidding. I heard a roar off in the woods and then busting up and down the woods. And we all look each other. Oh, dude, and we just throw our water on the fire and we ran up to the house. We all ran up to the house and went south and hidden there. And what's so crazy to me is like, I understand it because I've done it too. But my friends that don't spend any time outdoors or don't spend a lot of time outdoors. I shouldn't say no, no time outdoors, but they don't spend a lot of time outdoors. They all go, dude, that was crazy. Like we saw that UFO thing and then we heard that cow. And I was like, there are no cows over there. And they're like, well, somebody's cow almost got loose. I was like, even if somebody's cow got loose, that's not what a cow sounds like because my father has cows, my grandfather has cows, been around cows. Not what a cow sounds like. And then B, no cow in this country would ever go down that holler. They got no reason to go down that holler. There's no food for them down there. They're like, they're just going to go down the woods sometimes, but it's mostly just to get to another field. And they wouldn't have gone over there. I know the proximity to that area and where a cow could have escaped from and where he couldn't have escaped from. And there's no way a cow would escape from those areas and then go into that holler. No way. They wouldn't do it. And on top of that, that's not what a freaking cow sounds like. And then on top of that, cows don't move that quick. They just go through the woods. And my friends still are just like, no, I just had to be a cow. And me and my buddy Sam from the other story, we're sitting there like, dude, that was not a cow. We're like, dude, that was not a cow. That was something freaking whooping and roaring in the woods right after we just saw a freaking UFO. It like sucked into the hyper space. Yeah, I've seen the lights on two occasions. I would say the average size is from a baseball to a soccer ball. But I have taken, gosh, over the last 10 years, many reports of these lights. And even for my witnesses that describe a larger ball of light, kind of like what you're talking about, Ian, what's your take on those lights? What do you think that they are? I don't know, man. I go back and forth on it. I look into it a lot where part of me thinks is, people talk about like secret technology, maybe. So I was guiding in New Mexico. New Mexico is a UFO hotspot. There were nights when I was out there at midnight, one in the morning, packing elk out, walking through miles of back country with an elk on my back, or pieces of an elk on my back, just trying to get it back to camp. And you would think at that moment I'd be afraid. You would think at that moment I'd see a light or something. But the area that we were in, never saw anything. I never saw anything. Never felt weirded out, freaked out by the woods out there. It was comfortable, happy as could be. I was literally stalked by a cougar one night out there, literally saw it. I mean, something that I saw with my eyes stalking me in the middle of the night. And I still, to this day, would go out there in the middle of the night with less fear than if I were to walk down to where I'm, you know, this place that I grew up right next to and I'm describing to you. And the lights, man, I don't know. Because out there in New Mexico, I never really saw that many lights. I've never really seen anything. I can't think of anything that I saw in New Mexico. I lived there for two falls and two winters. Never experienced anything crazy out there. I don't know. Some people say it's like secret technology. To me, it's like maybe some people try to say it's aliens. To me, it's like maybe. I don't know. I've got no idea. I think the idea that it's secret technology is probably a better idea. I've heard the theory that they're going to try to say like aliens are invading or whatever. And then basically declare ultimate martial law over the entire world. You know, and maybe that's it. Who knows? I got no idea. But personally, I just don't really think about it a whole lot. And what's strange is like my whole career has followed this vein of curiosity. Like, I love the woods. Love spending time outdoors. I've always been curious about these things. And you hear the story of the hunting guide that saw this or saw that. You hear the story of the fisherman, the experienced, experienced that, whatever. So I've always heard that growing up and thought, man, like I want to get to the bottom of this. Like I want to experience that. Like there's no way that's real. But I want to see it if it is real. So and I love the outdoors. And so I got into the outdoor industry, you know, and now I'm at this point where I'm like, okay, I've experienced things and I can't describe them or I can't write them off, you know, and I've experienced things outside of Appalachia as well. And I can't write them off. And then I've also met people who've experienced things and told me wild stories from all over the country. And now I'm kind of like, I feel like cursed a little bit. Like I keep saying that you're cursed with this story or you're cursed with this experience because there's a lot of people that aren't going to believe you, but it happened. And you know, in your heart, it's real, you know, and even me growing up when I was interested in Bigfoot, I was still skeptical. I'd hear people's stories and I'd go, wow, that's interesting. I don't know if I buy it, you know, and now I'm on the other end. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your experience in the lights are a mystery, man. I, you know, I wish I had a great answer for what they are. It is kind of interesting though that you saw the light blink out and then heard the vocalization from the wood line. That's very interesting. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share what happened to you. I really enjoyed chatting with you, Ian. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate you having me on out of curiosity. Would you care if I linked like my sub stack for people to find if they wanted to find it? Is that something you do? If not, it's okay. No, I don't mind at all. What's your sub stack? Yeah. If people are interested in hearing what I'm doing or keeping up to date with me, if I have any more crazy experiences, I'm probably going to call you or email you and hit you up again. But if people want to keep up with just my travels and everything, and then I put stories like this on my sub stack as well. I also have a written out version of this of the tale on my sub stack too. If people want to go find that. But my sub stack is called Stretch Times, and it's just on substack.com, but it's called Stretch Times, kind of like the New York Times except Stretch, which is my guide nickname. Yeah, I'll include a link underneath the show Stretch Times, and people can go check it out. Thank you again, Ian, for coming on. Yeah, thank you, Wes. It's awesome. It's really cool to be a part of the show. I've been a long time listener, so it's really awesome. Thank you. Thanks, brother. And that's it for tonight, everyone. Remember, if you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles.com. And if you get a chance, check out Sasquatch Chronicles.com. You can become a member and get additional shows. Have a great weekend, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.