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In the pacnw Indian legends tell us about sasquatch who live in the mountains in small numbers that occasionally dropped out of the mountains to steal from them, or cannibalize on them. Today we are to believe that Sasquatch resides in 49 states and all Canadian provinces IN viable breeding populations? Even evidently right outside Chicago....but we cannot find one? Evidently because of their extreme bushcraft in the corn rows and cottonwood bottoms of Illinois!??? Come on man!!! Not happening... I'll stick with option two or three. They are absent in much of the landscape....and rare were they are found...as the legends proclaim. The popularity of this subject is outstripping common sense.

So we don't know anything about them, but we know they are doing very well?

That still doesn't explain the final authority in the wilderness.....mother nature. You would think that avalanches, mud slides, Forest fires, rock slides, volcanic eruptions, raging rivers, starvation, old age, logging truck grills and grizzly bear predation would account for something as it does with every other species on the planet including man. But evidently Bigfoot has an answer for all of that as well.....or they just aren't there or we have been horribly unlucky finding bones.

We have no proof IMO because we're not as wonderful as we think we are, and boy does this species of ours think we are wonderful a lot of the time..;)

BigTW, it's good to be out and about again, believe me. The long recovery after last summer's surgery was harder for me to take mentally than physically, I think. I made my last visit to the wound clinic on Dec. 30th, so Jan. 1st brought me a New Year, my Birthday, and freedom from 3 times a week appointments for dressing changes, which was my biggest reason to celebrate! Our snow situation here has been very similar to what you describe

My two cents, there is only one reason and one reason only that a Sasquatch, or a family unit of Sasquatches or whatever it would be called, would need to leave (travel) for example the Olympic Peninsula, and that reason is to breed. I'd suspect that if that is the case where the Olympics are concerned and a place with such an abundance of food sources and water then it most certainly is the case throughout the rest of the lower 48 for sure. H have you ever come across a Guy called Jimmy Chillcut (sp) ? The Guy is/was LE and a fingerprint technician and crime scene investigator if i remember rightly. Anyway he went on record to say he found footprints of the same subject 15 years apart, one in WA State and the other in California.

G i can't quote through this proxy i'm using (i'm in Asia) for some reason but i'm trying to quote you from a few above. We don't know nothing about them, right. We know they're doing very well, wrong. We don't know that, this is a poll that asks a question and one has to give an answer and a reason based on a personal opinion. My opinion and vote for that focuses on habitat and the mass availability of it in lots of places across North America. I'm 100% sure that both you and Norseman's opinions and probable vote would be completely different had you seen one and yet of course, had you seen one, it wouldn't make any difference to the poll and the answers we've been asked to give whatsoever.

Bigfoot is making a living and doing fine.....adapt, improvise and overcome. The business of Bigfootery is doing a land office busine$$.

I want to contribute to this conversation but Norse is doing a better job expressing my concerns and thoughts better than I can. I believe it is out there but that's about the best I got regarding the subject.

Also sightings reports and cluster maps..... I do not want to come off as kicking the SSR in the hoo hoo..... But obviously when dealing with witness reports we have to take things with a grain of salt. But I understand when and where to apply that salt is a slippery slope. But we must remember we are not dealing with hard data like real biology. Such as a radio collared cougar, or scat or hair samples. Undeniable data facts that a creature stood there... No matter how implausible such as a cougar in New Jersey. A viable breeding population of 800 lbs ape men in Illinois should be putting a visible dent in the fauna and flora of that state. And without any other large predators around we should not be confusing predation remnants with any other species. So where is the hard evidence? BTW should be getting boxes of whitetail bones from researchers there....

Norse i'm struggling to understand where you're coming from right now. Are you getting at saying that you don't think they have ever existed in places were these major cities are today because if they did, we would have found one or the remains of one ? Or are you even coming close to saying that they might not exist after all because no one can answer these questions of yours ? I can't answer these questions, i don't know why these things can't be found, where the bones are, why you can't get anywhere near them, i don't know and i'm pretty sure there's no one out there who can tell you either right now. Why that is something i don't know either. There must be a reason that the Government Agencies won't declare these things or acknowledge their existence to the masses, maybe your answers lie deep somewhere in there. And without being pedantic, there was no option for "they're EVERYWHERE and doing great.", ..;) Clusters baby, they live in clusters all across your continent.

OK....they bury their dead.....for tens of thousands of years. Humans come along and excavate the pacnw for I5, the Ballard locks, the kingdome, downtown Seattle and Portland and Vancouver BC....millions of homes, apartments, golf courses, airports, gas and sewer lines. Do they dig deeper than a Cat 330 excavator? Or did they ever reside there? There is a fundamental flaw in the explanation that they are everywhere and doing great....it's not logical.

When I decided to go out looking for them, we took a wrong turn, got a late start, and ended up going down a paved road that skirts the wilderness instead of the dirt road that penetrates it. We ended up at a campground with a parking lot instead of dispersed camping in thick bush. Found them anyway, first try. I thought we were incredibly lucky. Then I started encountering them 5 minutes up a canyon from the suburbs. Then I moved to Chicago, found out they're here too. I wasn't lucky - they're doing great. BobbyO's argument on avoidance is spot on. It's all spelled out in the sighting reports, and it's easy enough to experience first hand as well. I believe a lot of it is simply stubbornness on their part - why should they retreat from these areas they've lived in for decades or hundreds of years when they can simply avoid us and get on just fine? I also think the deer population bouncing back as well as opportunistic foraging from human food sources has helped them a lot.

We know human capabilities though don't we, Native Americans, we know what they did and didn't do and where they did or didn't do it. I'm not so sure that the Natives were running rings around the Europeans, surely history and where you sit today would be a different place anyway if that was the case overall. Humans are creatures of habit, very, very easy to predict and i do so regularly with work in a concrete jungle, very easy. The Natives wouldn't have been different in that aspect, just in a different jungle, but equally predictable in time and as per usual its the animal with the superior brain that prevails. But these things ? We don't know abut these things, anything. We don't know if they bury their dead, and we don't know if they do, where they do it. Is burying their dead far fetched ? It might be for some, but it's certainly not out of the realms of primate, higher primate, capability and especially ones that we have difficulty locating bones of. We don't know where they sleep, where they feed, what they eat, where they breed, how they breed (don't think about that actually), how they protect the little ones, where they protect the little ones etc etc etc. I don't know why we can't get near them but you know what, even if you popped one tomorrow we STILL wouldn't know anything about them, the world would just know that they were there, but we wouldn't in fact know any more about them then than we do today.

So did native Americans! Europeans wore brightly colored uniforms and stood shoulder to shoulder in combat until we met native Americans using camo and hiding behind rocks and trees....... Bushcraft does not explain why we have not discovered this species. Because we dig up NA bones and villages all the time. Despite these people running circles around us in the woods. Bushcraft does not come into play when your corpse is rotting into the forest floor. So what other factors are there? I say population size and density must play a crucial role in keeping them hidden. I also say they are NOT everywhere...

I don't know Norse, if we're going down the road of saying "where are the bones" then there's enough out there content/reason wise without me going over it all again. We're not dealing with an animal that is comparable in North America as it's a wild Primate and i'm hazarding a guess, a very, very smart one in which we know absolutely nothing of its capabilities, its habits, its movement, how it averts danger, zip, zilch, nada because we can't get near it. Bottom line, we can't get near it. And i know it's not because it's not there so whether we've been terribly unlucky at not finding the bones or just again, aren't doing it well enough or aren't looking hard enough or there aren't that many of them, i don't know I personally have no issue and am content with the obvious fact that this thing runs rings around the average man, and even above average man, in its own forested environment, no issue at all and in fact, full acceptance of that.

I certainly wouldn't advise anyone else to do this, but--------. Seven years ago, some of my Bigfooting Buds talked me into sharing what little I know about the subject animals on an Arkansas Hunting forum, "Arkansas Hunting.Net". The State does have a very good population of the things, and I just wanted to share a bit of info about them and their habits and traits. The thread I started on January 7, 2010 has now been viewed 800,708 times, with 17,900 replies. Of course many of the replies during the first couple of years were from skeptics. During the last five years I have been inundated with Personal Mail and phone calls from a LOT of folks that KNEW, but kept their encounters to themselves and family members. During the the past two months some Buds have had some real fun with BF in the Ozarks, and down south in Ouachita Count. I shared those with the members, now a lot of them are eager to hit the woods with us, It's fun for us all.

Bottom one for me, zero reason to think they are having issues and i don't believe habitat is a major issue overall with Canada/Alaska being what it is. In other areas of the States especially, maybe so, but overall no real issues. Just because there are no Sasquatches in area y does't mean they're not thriving in area z, which doesn't mean they didn't have to leave area x, which doesn't mean that area w isn't now becoming prime habitat for them.

If we get back to the original question of has hoaxing made us TOO cynical, and if we refer to the text book definition of "cynical". "believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity." I would say that it has made us just cynical enough. Not so jaded that we discard every thing that is put forward, but cynical enough to demand extraordinary proof of the findings. What we are searching for is pretty fantastic in the pure nature of it, and we will need some fantastically good proof to prove it exists. I hate to say it, but we may very well need a proof specimen for that proof.

I didn't vote. My opinion: Bigfoot has viable populations in some areas but continues to come under increasing pressure from human activity and development. There is population fragmentation in other areas, where they have probably fallen below the minimum viable population and are endangered. In all areas, conservation efforts are advised.