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Went for a hike today up at McCroskey State Park on the border of Idaho and Washington. I took my new dog with me, Arlo. I adopted him from my daughter last month as he grew too big for the house and drove the cat nuts. They got him during Covid, so he has never been in the woods, never been around people, and never been in public. Today was his first time in the woods and he loved it! I was going to go to a spot I found hunting for mushrooms last year that had what looked like a bed made from pine boughs, but, the road was snowed shut a couple of miles before that spot. Backtracked to an interesting trail that went up a mountain and hiked it a couple of miles until it hit the deep snow and was impassable on foot... Bunches of elk and deer sign in this area, along with lots of wolf sign. Biggest wolf scat I have run across... No BF sign, however. No weird tree structures or bedding, no tracks, no wood knocks, and no vocalizations. I did find a couple of tracks that were interesting. Pretty sure this is a bear hind footprint... But no idea what this is. If it's a wolf, it's massive and heavy. Wasn't defined enough to tell, but it was deep and big. No BF sign, but still a great hike.

The geography of Washington State is chaotic. People go missing and some are found and some are not found. Some want to disappear and some want to commit suicide. Humans get too close to natural features and usually die. They are not wearing the proper footwear. IIRC, there was a report on a deceased person, and the comments specifically pointed out wrong footwear. The victim slipped and fell. I think that coroners have a separate category for 'death by selfie' ( over the cliff / falls ). People fall: off of boats, cliffs, over waterfalls, off of bridges, into rivers, streams, creeks, lakes, ponds, into ice covered bodies of water, crevasses. Get washed out to sea while surf fishing. Cold water kills and the number of persons in Washington incidents that do not use / have flotation devices is criminal. Years ago, a skeleton of a Salal picker was found. Never reported missing. The victim was later identified. No foul play. Depending on the scenario, a 'double investigation' is started. One looks at the event and the second looks at background information as in debt / liabilities and if knee breakers were in the hunt. Years ago, a guy allegedly did a sport jump out of a helicopter with a 'squirrel suit'. Dark colored fabric, no cell phone, no strobe, no locater beacon. Gone. In Washington State, I don't get too excited about missing tourists. The internet keyboard warriors go crazy but the investigation takes time to produce the facts. I wear rubber boots that have an excellent grip.

Found myself in Ucluelet for work this past weekend. Even though I spent most of my life on Vancouver Island, I've never travelled to the Tofino/Ucluelet area. I kept an eye open for the sighting location from 2007, as depicted in MonsterQuest's "Mysterious Ape Island". It is on Highway 4, as it runs along the Kennedy River between Port Alberni and Ucluelet. Turns out is was very easy to spot, and looks remarkably similar for a riverbank location, 16 years later. In the episode they refer to a Maureen Creek bridge, which in fact appears to actually be Marion Creek, at least according to Backroads Map Book.

So then the samurai chatter makes them a brother. It's been shown to be organized, rather than just nervous jibbering, and to hold to some consistency. Language is as language does.... And, or course, until humans become relatively fluent in even one other species language, even the aforementioned turtles, we'll never know the level of abstraction, perhaps a greater indicator of higher intelligence and a creative mind, a species might command. In regards to the creation of fire as an indicator of humanity, should a sasquatch watch a human use a lighter, and then later obtain one and figure it out(providing its not one of those sasquatch-proof lighters) and then use it to light a contained fire, would that count towards its humanity? And lastly, while, in a sense, its a necessary evil, I see you guys putting a lot of faith in taxonomy, as a near monolithic truth. But really, all it takes is one grad student (ok maybe more than one, but you get the idea) looking for a really killer dissertation topic to screw the whole current set up. Subspecies become species, genus gets divided up and renamed, what was once a separate species turns out to just be a juvenile form, a tooth from a Chinese apocathary(sp?) turns out to be just a big orangutan. But I guess the point is Taxonomy is a dynamic system in constant, if not rather slow-paced, flux, and changes in proximities and "associations" are ongoing as further evidence come to light. What is Homo today, or was sapiens yesterday, can find itself reclassified in short order (though I'd hate to be the fellow trying to defend the renaming of Homo sapiens to a panel of physical anthropologists!)

Horribly. They had to cut my boot off. My lower leg and foot were black. I was on my back for a few weeks, and on crutches for a few months. If I remember correctly, the entire healing process took over a year. But I've had lots of joint injuries that took a year to three years for complete healing. Indeed, my left elbow right now is still healing from an injury that occurred in my sleep!