Slipped my leash yesterday and got out into the field. Talk about social distancing, I never saw another human. The objectives were to visit my old research area and show my companion as many of the contact locations as I could. Both to add context to my encounters and look for any signs of present activities. I pulled into the road leading to the NEON site, and a large sign indicated that the area was now off limits due to the COVID 19 thing. Worried about something getting the virus? I wonder. What was puzzling was that I passed a popular county park getting there and it was packed with vehicles and people hiking around. I nearly blew off the trip but being so familiar with the area, knew a way in, that would not take me near any warning signs. We parked and hiked in. The first location was where I had been subjected to chest beating because I had peed in front of a watching bigfoot. I have mentioned, that after reporting that encounter to the BFRO, I noticed two trees had been marked with blue paint about a month later. When I pointed that out to my hiking companion I noticed for the first time that the paint on both trees had a blue FU. Now I am wondering who did that and what FU means. We slipped around a locked gate and hiked into the area on an abandoned logging road. The next location was the collapsed lava tube and the spring that bubbles out of it. Near that was the log which I was hiking past that got me zapped. A tree had blown down and now rested on top of the rotting log. It is larger than I remember. It is about 4 feet in diameter and a BF could easily have hidden next to it and not been seen. The stick that I had found inside the log and left there was not in it but laying nearby. The log is definitely full of termites. I could see the side of the log full of termite borrows. No indication that it had been messed with further since I had last been there, other than the stick was no longer inserted into it.
From that point we went to the location where I got growled at. While there was some down threes when that happened, there were many more there now. When you clear cut, the trees at the edge of it are exposed to unrestricted wind and blow down at horrific rates. Some of the root balls were 20 feet in diameter. After traversing the clear cut, we went into a area where a creek runs downhill in a forested area and I have found many footprints crossing the human trail. Another human had been there recently, but no BF prints. The next location visited was where I had my first encounter. Standing in the same spot, I described the approaching whoops, pointing in their direction, and how I was standing in the trail with no nearby cover to hide behind. I just stood there, expecting to be run over by the producer of the heavy footfalls headed right at me. When I finished telling about the event and we took a different route back to the truck. My companion was surprised that I knew the area so well. On the abandoned logging road, I showed the location where I was hit on the back pack by a rock. The wonderful thing about the area was that is was so active yet was in just a few square miles. I was really lucky to have found it. But at the same time it hurts to have it go inactive. We managed to get back to the truck and be home before night fall.