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I'll post photos of the hair imprints and give a short story about them this week sometime. No, we didn't see what made the imprints, but the slide marks were so fresh that grains of soil were still falling from them. At first we attributed them to bear, but the running steps at the base of the slide had no claw marks in them and were human shaped with the m. break evident. Basically what happened was we were on a hair pin turn high in the Clackamas. There is a huckleberry field at the apex of the turn. We scared something out of the field. It jumped over the side and made a huge butt print with hair marks. Then it skidded down a steep slope leaving two skid marks, no evidence of four superimposed. At the bottom of the slope it turned left, ran across soft dirt. entered the logging road and amazingly, seems to have dived into tall fir trees in the very steep ravine on the other side of the logging road indicating to us, that it was comfortable using trees. A4-422__Granite_Peak_start_of_skid_left.TIF The hair marks are faintly visible in the bottom part of this photo. When it jumped off the ledge the heels impacted, it started skidding, then sat down hard {see edge of butt imprint next to the upper part of the skid}, shoved itself up {two hand marks were indistinct, but obvious in the dirt on each side of the two skids, and then as noted above, skidded down the very steep slope where it turned and ran. We had a guest from France with us. He became extremely excited because it was obvious to him he was within seconds of seeing what he had studied for years. We looked on it with colder eyes as bears and elk do strange things with frightened; and are so much more common. But I keep forgetting. You need to look carefully at photos of the Skookum Cast to see similar hair prints.

This "fact" you assert is not true. Anyone who has lived in a rural area can tell that. Probably anyone who has ever gone camping can tell you that. Many species deliberately seek us out (not exactly a form of avoidance) and almost all others can be habituated. We had a herd of about 30 deer that would come by our house a couple times a day, maybe half time on our property, half time on national forest beyond. We had a bunch of elk that'd appear on the lawn in the mornings in winter and only leave when we'd start stirring around. Bear and raccoons. My father killed a cougar in the crawl space under the house directly under his bed one year. Regular visits by numerous bird species. A flock of wild turkeys that'd pass the front porch 1-2 times a day. This is NOT "avoidance of humans". The truth is quite the opposite: it was a pretty unusual species that did not show up at one time or another. Even some reason to believe we had bigfoot visits though I didn't understand the evidence at the time. Same thing camping .. even backpacking in wilderness areas where theoretically there isn't time for animals to habituate. Critters figure out real fast who chases them and who doesn't. Those that don't get used as a buffer between them and whatever out there they choose to avoid. MIB