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I'm in West Virginia, total washout, so we went to check out Seneca Caverns.

Beautiful places, Norseman. Good to see you so active and on the road. The techies that be decided my flip phone was ancient history and last winter "they" thought an Android would be better. The thing about that is I would never remember that it takes fairly good pictures. Welp, this last trip I finally remembered to use the danged thing.

Not the one from the controversial Bigfoot video, but the one in Idaho. It's pretty deep into the woods, and I'm not going for BF research. My grandfather died about 15 years ago while I was living out of state and I couldn't attend his memorial service. I heard that he was cremated and ashes spread, but never knew the details. That side of my family is dysfunctional and bitter. Grandma's ashes were stolen by my aunt and no one knows what happened to them. I was talking to my dad a couple of weeks ago and said I was interested in camping out in the Marble Creek and Marble Mountain area and he casually mentioned that was where my grandfather's ashes were spread. Turns out, Grandpa liked to go elk hunting in a specific area and would go and sit on a specific large rock and invariably shoot an elk. His best friend created a brass plaque to honor my grandpa and attached it to the rock, and his ashes were spread there. I had no idea. I asked my dad where this rock was and he said he doesn't remember and that the friend that spread the ashes is likely dead. I did a Google search and discovered the friend was listed as last living about 15 miles away, so I called him up. Turns out he is indeed alive and in pretty good shape for an 85yr old retired professor. He wouldn't tell me the location of the memorial unless I agreed to take him up there. I agreed and we are meeting Tuesday to drive about 2 hours East into the wilderness to just West of Marble Mountain. He said the rock is about a mile off the nearest logging road in pretty tough terrain. I said I had a UTV and he replied that it was too thick to get a motorized vehicle into. I sad I had horses, and he said he hasn't ridden in 30 years and isn't about to start. So on foot it is. An overweight out of shape 50yr old and an 85yr old grumpy old man, a mile overland, in the dense Idaho wilderness, deep into wolf and Grizzly country, in search of a large boulder with a brass plaque. I'll definitely take lots of photos and be looking for sign. I'll also bring up the subject of Bigfoot and see if an 85 year old man who has been hunting all his life around here has any stories.

I'm in Davis, WV but roam down to Elkins and sorrounding area. You should come down one of these days.

I live in western Montana. I love the woods. I have had inexplicable situations on many occasions, mainly in the way of sudden, dead silence. I am mostly interested in what others have to report as well as what sorts of things have been noticed in the Bitterroot/Lolo/Flathead region.

Just south of Avery! Be safe! And enjoy spending time in your grandpas hunting grounds!

I have been itching for a nice expedition. My financial situation or lack thereof has been the biggest hinderance, especially during these times of crisis called 2020. I lost the last few specks of respect I had of Moneymaker when I checked into a BFRO expidition and saw his name fit him well. charging people $400+ to walk in the woods... And here I thought nature was free. EDIT: As much as I like Bobo and Barackman, the sheer fact that they are associated with Moneymaker has completely turned me off of them.

I had proposed doing one, but neck surgery and a heart attack got in the way. I’m still game. I would support free of charge expeditions. But I would want them totally transparent. That way people could follow along that could not attend. Or crunch the numbers for us and place a pin on a map. Repeatable results anyone could verify.

Have any of the committees or administrators here on BFF considered during an annual conference, meeting, or get together for BFF members? I think it would a lot of fun. Also, what about a mechanism by which BFF members could do an expedition in different areas of the country but keeping the exact locations secret.

I use my cameras in 3 shot burst mode. Even with IR flash, a set of batteries and a 32G SD card last about a year in the field unless I do some idiot move like pointing the camera in the direction of a tree that moves a lot. Might be different with video, but doing it as I do it there's no gain to disabling IR. The reason for the 3 shot bursts is with a single picture, sometimes it is hard to figure out why the camera tripped, but with 3 shots you can usually find what was moving to trip the sensor. One day I had a puzzle. I had a camera out in 2nd growth fir forest that had burned away the underbrush but not killed the big trees. It was pretty open. The first picture had the apparent tail of something very large in frame but blurry. It took several looks, and looking at the subsequent pictures, to identify what was happening. The whole forest was moving, not just one thing. There was a very heavy wind, probably a down-burst out of clear sky, bending trees up to 18" in diameter. The "tail" was the end of a piece of fern I'd used to cover the camera waving in front of the lens. That's stage 2 of my approach, more or less: I have 3 PlotWatcher Pro cameras which are daytime only, they don't have a flash nor do they use detection sensors, strictly timed. I set them up to take 1 pic every 5 seconds. It assembles each day's pictures into a daily video. With 8 lithium batteries and a 132G SD card I can go 12-14 weeks. Using Day6's software I can "race" through each file in a matter of minutes. Lot of eye strain looking for brief glimpses of something that wasn't there a frame before, but I can do it. MIB

I always wondered why bother going out at night with the obvious visual problems if your aim is to garner evidence. It seems counter productive, if you get more chance of evidence or improve your chances of an encounter at night that is negated by the lack of clarity or lack of quality of images you would be able to obtain, footprints you wouldn't see and so on. If we assume the animals are real then Patty was filmed in broad daylight and again, if we assume the animals are real then there are lots of daylight sightings, photos and videos some of which must then be real. You may have a lower chance of an encounter perhaps but the chances of documenting that encounter would increase several fold.

Lincoln National Forest. It appears so. The gates are open and there are diy fire rings everywhere. The fire danger board says low.

Up around Cloudcroft NM. Saw lots of Mule deer and Elk! About 1/2 hour from my daughters house in the desert. Kinda crazy! Some of the most beautiful park like country I have seen. IMG_3528.MOV IMG_3529.MOV

personally I think the creatures will be more nocturnal in areas that have more human activity, but in areas with little human activity they would be out more during the day. It is difficult to forage for edible plant at night. Many animals bed down at night so unless you know where there bedding home is that wold be lost opportunity. Most of the videos that are produced are from the day also.

However harsh, I tend to agree. It's a business, not a research organization. But... the problem with the BFRO, which does have honest and talented members is... it begins and ends with Monkeymaker at the reigns, and as long as he is, it's a business and lines his pockets until proven otherwise.