Big Foot - Alaska

At times one felt very isolated living in Alaska.  Now and then however somebody would come through that one would not have had the opportunity to meet otherwise.  For instance when was it the last time you ever met anyone who had really seen Big Foot.

I really do not recall the exact circumstances surrounding the telling of this tale nor all the intricacies and facts related.  I do remember the guys name who described the events herein but I am inclined not to reveal his true identity due to the fact that he is still alive and well and a fairly well known author.  I do not want to embarrass him or subject myself to some sort of litigation.  But this is the story as I remember it.

During his lumberjack days in Oregon my acquaintance was instructed by his boss to go to such and such an area and cut a small road about six miles into a forested area that was scheduled for cutting.  Seventy years prior there had bee a large fire and no one had really been to that desolate area since and now the timber was ready for harvesting.  He loaded his equipment which consisted of lumberjack stuff and a couple of horses and traveled fifty miles to where the trail was to begin.

He fell the trees, trimmed them and used the horses to pull out the fallen trees to a clearing next to his base camp.  After several days of cutting, trimming, and hauling he had covered about a half mile.

That night the horses seemed restless and the next morning they were hard to control on his journey back up the road.  He had left most of his equipment where he had quit the day before to keep him from carrying them back and forth. When he got to the new starting point he found that all of his equipment had been broken and scattered.  He also found huge claw marks about twelve feet up the side of a few trees.  He became a little unnerved and decided he needed to tell someone about this.  

He returned to his base camp, loaded up his horses and drove the fifty miles back down the old logging trail.  He and his boss returned to the site the next day, walked up the path and surveyed the wreckage.  His boss seemed to be more interested in what had caused the carnage than my writer friend, but rank prevailed and they started trying to pick up tracks of some kind.  They found none in the immediate area because of all the trimmings on the ground but eventually snaked their way up the hill and further into the forest which was becoming increasingly dark due to the forest canopy.

They kept looking for tracks but none were visible.  Then as they were walking up a small rise they both looked up and saw three large figures looming ahead of them.  The figures they soon realized were some kind of animals  They were no more than fifty feet away.  He remembered one was crouching on all fours between two larger creatures.  One he later assumed was the mother, the crouching one a baby and the gigantic one, well over seven feet tall, the daddy.  A family he thought after is shock allowed him to think.  The male looked at them, straightened up to his full height that looked a lot more than it had just a few minutes previously and thrust out its chest.  His boss said not to make eye contact and they backed down the hill.  The road into the forest was never completed.

My pal tells the story much better than I of course and says he has never written about it nor does he tell the story much for fear of be tagged as crazy.

Going to Alaska widened my horizons about many things.  Now I believe in Big Foot and if I return someday I cannot wait to meet someone one who actually was abducted by aliens, knows who shot Jack Kennedy, and in which village Jimmy Hoof is hiding under the witness protection program.