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Your right in theory. And I have used Ranger beads and taken nav courses. The problem in the PacNW is obstacles. If your crawling through vine maple its hard to keep a pace count. You start guessing.... And its ridiculously hard just to shoot an azimuth and follow it. Its not as easy as hitting an obstacle turn 90 degrees East walk 100 steps, turn north walk how may steps it is to clear the obstacle and then turn 90 degrees West and walk another 100 steps and wallah your back on your route of march. The shit is just thick and steep and you squeeze through where you can and hope for the best. Its hard to keep track. Supposedly lots of patrols got lost in the Nam for this very reason, and paid a hefty price when they tried to call in arty shields against the enemy. The best one to know in the PacNW is trianglation. If you know your declination and you know the local peaks. Climb to a overlook and shoot two azimuths to each known peak from your position. Draw the same degree lines on your map off of each peak and where the two lines intersect on the map is where you are standing. Caenus, I think you should start a thread just on land navigation. Maybe it will help save a Bigfoot researchers life someday.

Hiflier, I personally don't think your idea has merit at least in the area that I live. Generally speaking the terrain is rough with dense vegetation. And inow many areas we simply do not have the road network to surround a sighting. Also if sasquatch exist and they are as elusive as most people think they are, then even the smallest gap in your ring will give them an escape route

Never want to be down wind of a fire....or up hill. I can tell you that your plan for cordoning off a forest fire with researchers is unworkable. The USFS will shut down roads that access the area in which the fire is in. And they will man checkpoints. Your only getting in or out with a red card, nomex and a shake and bake. And even if you were granted access? The sheer man power involved would be greater than the fire crews. Fire crews dig fire lines from anchor points around the heel of the fire. They are not encircling the fire hand in hand. I think your best bet? Would be to get a press pass and interview fire crews back at base camp. You might be able to score hot leads that way. Or you could patrol outside of the fire no go zone on USFS roads with a thermal camera? But this will be a huge area in rough terrain. Might want to identify things like saddles and game trails and set up on them? Of course its dangerous too. Winds can shift direction, or increase in intensity, flying embers, spot fires, etc..... what is safe now becomes unsafe in a matter of hours. I would certainly go get red card training and buy nomex clothing and a shake and bake (fire shelter) if I was seriously considering something like this. Posted picture is to kinda show what your up against. Keep the wind in your face and run downhill to escape a fire. Or get to big water. With the Debbie Downer stuff outta the way? I do think that fire changes everything in animal behavior. You will see them do things that are not normal. Like bowling you over while your running a chainsaw in the open. They dont care. Fire is scary for all of us. A fast moving forest fire can crown over the top of you faster than you or they can run......40-50 mph. 1400 degrees F, 120 feet over your head in the crown of the forest. So animals are fleeing the fire and they are usually easy to observe because they could csre less about man.

The network exists and has for a long time. Look around. Think about which researchers are NOT here. It's not forum based, predates the internet. The real giants in the bigfoot world rely on a thing called a telephone. Most don't have time or interest in the bickering here. The forum guidelines say BFF is here for the discussion of bigfoot, not to help prove they exist. You have to think about the implications of that, ALL of the implications, especially the ones you don't like, to understand why BFF isn't relevant to solving the puzzle. If that's all you're after here, you're in the wrong place. MIB

I can quantify WSA’s question about delays in reporting encounters. I’ve added 393 BFRO reports to my database. For those 393 reports 106 (27%) were reported within one month, 51 (13%) were reported more than one month but within one year of the encounter, and 235 (60%) were reported over one year after the encounter. Since I essentially have a random sample of BFRO reports, I would expect the overall numbers to look similar. Hiflier, good questionnaire. I’ve noted in several different threads that there is no Uniform Bigfoot Encounter Report as there are Uniform Traffic Accident Reports or Uniform Criminal Investigation Reports. This is a problem as at least some groups post woefully inadequate factual information in their published reports. I would imagine that the SSR wrestles with the same problems of having missing or vague information on reports.

The problem is getting fresh reports to work with. Newspapers and TV media are pretty much the only way to get current reports not filtered through the BFRO apparatus. No one has really explained to me satisfactorily what their process is but it seems to take a very long time. I think it is a good idea to get Forum contacts in your local area, and if something comes up, grab the forum member and head out. I did that when I felt as if I had been chased out of one area and did not want to go back in alone. We worked out sharing finds and location secret protocols to our satisfaction before going into the field. That has evolved into a two way exchange of information even though we only were in the field together that one time. Honestly if you trust someone with research area locations, it avoids the likelihood of stumbling into each other in the field and not knowing what is going on or messing up some game camera traps they might have set. I have preferred solo field work but at times would certainly have preferred to have someone out there for mutual support. If you take a vehicle by yourself into some areas you are pretty much at the mercy of vehicle reliability once you are out of cell phone range. I have been in that situation for most of my field work. Probably not a prudent thing to do. There are clusters of us in certain areas and there is little reason I can come up with for being isolationist field researchers. I guess some people think they are going to catch the golden ring and don't want to share the prize. A better way to look at it is if there are two of you, and you have an encounter, it just becomes twice as believable.

Right. And failure to control via inadequate vetting likely comes with liability. When those issues have been addressed, the result looks just like every other bigfoot research group's web site and investigation "team". Rather than reinventing the wheel and starting with zero reports, it's more productive to join one of the groups and assist them. They've likely got mounds of reports needing investigating, mounds of raw data you may access as an investigator for deriving trends, and so on, plus having access to people with experience investigating and probably subject matter experts in various investigation / documentation techniques like track casting, finger printing, tracking, and so on. MIB

Right, it could most definitely bring something to the effort, or at least, as they say in Jersey: Couldn't hoit. BUUUUT... here's the obstacle: I haven't done any kind of review of the BFRO database to quantify this, but my experience is that usually you have many days (Weeks? Months? YEARS?!!) between the sighting and the report. That is just how it is with people who see something this astounding and unexpected. They typically need a long, long time to process it. OTOH, the guy who sees one and says, "Oh, look at that. A Sasquatch" probably already has all the tools he needs to do a competent follow-up and probably wouldn't avail himself of resources that might let his personal cat out of the bag either.