Fires

[norseman]

This picture was sent to me by a friend. It’s Inchelium Washington. It on the Colville Indian Reservation. This is the Modrite fire. Stay safe folks!

 

🙏🏻😥

[BC witness]

Here in BC, most of the Fraser Canyon and the Cariboo Plateau is blazing right now, with at least 4 towns evacuated, and several more under threat. One of the fires is now over 90,000 hectares!

[MIB]

For the moment, my little chunk o' heaven is calm.   The East Evans Creek Fire (15,800 acres?) seems under control.   The state fire marshal team tasked with structure protection left a week ago.   The local IMT under state forestry has completed their 2 week rotation and has been replaced by a joint team from California and Australia.   

 

North-central and Eastern Oregon are a different situation.    Something over 1.5 million acres have burned / are burning, several fires well beyond 100K acres, and today they're under a "PDS" red flag warning, not a red flag warning.   I'd never heard the term.  PDS is particularly dangerous situation.   Low humidity, winds to 50 mph over active fires, and not enough resources to address new starts.    

 

Despite all of the conspiracy nonsense, these are lightning fires other than East Evans Creek which was the result of a car hitting a power pole and dropping live lines into dry brush.

[RedHawk454]

In theory Sasquatch's should be moving around A LOT and there should be an increase in sightings maybe.

[Backdoc]

Any fire like this is horrible.  I imagine a terrible fire would drive many animals toward safety and Bigfoot would be no exception.

 

It's still a numbers game. 10,000 Deer on the move are easier to notice than 4 Sasquatch.  

[MIB]

They don't necessarily evacuate the area.   I have 2(past) local reports of fire crews on night shift being "shadowed" by BFs as they go to / from the firelines on foot.    I wasn't able to follow up on either report.   A friend did with one.   I didn't see anything that raised any red flags however.

[VAfooter]

26 minutes ago, MIB said:

They don't necessarily evacuate the area.

 

Caves, rivers, and lakes (if available) would be a source of refuge I would think.

[Backdoc]

1 hour ago, MIB said:

They don't necessarily evacuate the area.   

 

 

This brings up an interesting point I haven't considered:

 

How far does a Bigfoot travel in a given day?  What is the expected maximum range in a given day?   Fire or not, maybe Bigfoot is only traveling 3 miles on foot.  Maybe 20.   That number- whatever it is- detemrines everything.  If there is a big-time fire, can a walking animal essentially escape its effects in a short distance?  Would 2 or 3 miles away be enough?  Would it take 10?   Once bigfoot moves to a safer area it would probably put the fire behind him and move on like business as usual.  Then if the fire approached again would alter its behavior set on new circumstances. 

 

How far can Bigfoot travel in a day?

 

 

-------------------------

This from the movie The Fugitive regarding a man on foot:

 

 

“Our fugitive has been on the run for ninety minutes. Average foot speed over uneven ground, barring injuries, is 4 miles per hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles. Your fugitive’s name is Dr. Richard Kimble. Go get him.” 

--------------------------

 

 

Deer, Horses, Fox, and so on have 4 legs and can likely cover a heck of a lot of territory in a day (and night travel is possible).  

I'm guessing Bigfoot has a much more limited in range.  

 

 

 

[MIB]

Hey Backdoc ... good questions.   The answer is nobody really knows.  I'll risk speculating though.   

 

Back in August of 2011 when my then-new buddy Bill and I did our first backpacking trip we had some activity.   From laying on my back, my sense was the big guy coming toward / into camp was traveling at least 10-12 mph and was doing it walking, not running.     I say that based on the slow cadence of the steps and the immense amount of ground he was covering.    So .. guessing .. if they were pushed, I would think they could cover upwards of 100 miles in a day.    That's not a long term sustainable speed because it doesn't leave time to gather calories but in a burst, at need, I think it is possible.    Depending on what they are eating and how long they have to slow down to gather it,  they might well maintain our walking speed while traveling and foraging.     I don't think they move that fast most of the time, not on average.   In that same area where we had the camp visits, activity often starts between August 15th and 20th and persists into early September, then tapers off.   I've had sparse "action" 'til around the 20th-25th of September some years.    The next canyon over, maybe 6 miles away, I've had at least hints of potential bigfoot activity past the middle of October.   

 

I don't think they maintain a set speed.   I think they go faster when they're not finding concentrations of resources and they slow down when the grub is good and the hiding is better.   Unfortunately that doesn't give the simple and constant numerical values for speed / distance your question seems to ask.     

 

From mid October into Christmas or beyond they sorta disappear.    If it is the same "guys" they pop up in two places.    One is about 40 miles across fairly open country (with a huge lake in the middle) so I assume they skirt it on one side or the other.   Reports there go into spring then stop.   The other stays along the foot of the mountains .. a smattering of reports through winter .. and seem to pass back over the crest in a lower area and return to this closer side, then swing north a little.    In neither case are they making big miles, probably averaging less than one mile per day, though I doubt that's at a steady pace, again, could well be driven by ease of gathering calories.

 

Bill followed up on one report seemingly from a member of the group that goes through that saddle and comes back to this side of the mountains.   That was right around Christmas and was in the saddle.    That saddle is, for whatever it is worth, probably 5-6 miles only from where one of those fire crews saw the bigfoots following them to and from the fire line in the dark.    That is near enough valley bottom that perhaps they are not part of that group / gathering either.   I could be over-connecting dots that don't belong together.   Itsa risk! 

 

MIB

[norseman]

Talked to my son tonight and we may be deployed to Tonasket.

 

Thats the Sinlahekin fire.

[Trogluddite]

^^^

Be safe if you go.

[Trogluddite]

6 hours ago, Backdoc said:

 

 

This brings up an interesting point I haven't considered:

 

How far does a Bigfoot travel in a given day?  

 

How far can Bigfoot travel in a day?

 

Deer, Horses, Fox, and so on have 4 legs and can likely cover a heck of a lot of territory in a day (and night travel is possible).  

I'm guessing Bigfoot has a much more limited in range.  

 

 

 

 

Good questions.  How far does (the usual) Bigfoot travel in a day?

 

A long time ago I looked up a bunch of biology information for comparison.  Orangutans have a average home territory of 6 - 12 square miles; presumably they don't go any further than they have to in a given day.  Black bears average 15 - 60 square miles for their home territory.  Some website said that grizzlies had home territories of 50-300 square miles for females and up to 1,500 square miles for males.   So it would seem that the expected maximum range any animal travels in a given day would be "not much more than that needed to meet it's basic needs."  So a grazing deer may walk 2-3 miles in a day, but go around in a circuit grazing and a larger carnivore/omnivore would go a good bit further because it needs more calories.  Maybe 8 miles per day, but never going further than 4-5 miles from its starting point. 

 

How far can a Bigfoot on a mission go in a single day?

 

Probably impossible to guess.  Is it following a fairly passable game (or human) trail or is it bushwhacking cross-country?  Does the route it take have a lot of elevation gain and are there resources (food, water) along the way?  Finally, what is driving the movement?  Staying ahead of a fire and not burning to death is a pretty good motivator, but there are still limits on animals' and humans' endurance and stamina, particularly if factoring in stress, dehydration, hunger, etc, as MIB noted.  

 

I read somewhere that wagon trains only made an average of 20 miles/day crossing flat prairies.  That seems to be to be a good maximum distance for a two-legged primate traveling in rugged terrain, but I certainly wouldn't argue very strenuously against someone who thought that 100 miles/day was possible.

 

Bigfoot n' Beyond recently re-released an interview with Sara, who was camping in the Marble Mountains and heard a Bigfoot traveling for quite some distance.  It's Episode 374.  If I recall correctly, she also believed that whatever she was hearing was covering a lot of rough terrain very, very quickly.

 

[VAfooter]

My totally uneducated guess. Back during the "War", troops routinely marched 10-15 miles in a day in decent weather. And they were carrying a fair amount of baggage. Stonewall's boys could do 15-20 if they needed to, maybe a little more. Taking a guess that BF could easily do three times the speed of a man without breaking a sweat (based on eyewitness accounts), maybe 30-40 miles/day on cruise control, and perhaps somewhere around 50-60 if they decided to push it. But my guess would be that they would only go as far as they thought they needed to. They would need to find "refueling" areas along the way. Plus it might also matter which side of the fire they were on. Was the fire between them and known areas or could they make to places they had been before so they knew the routes to take? 

 

Definitely a lot of variables in play in this scenario.

[norseman]

Just watched that Geronimo did 95 miles in 24 hours at 55 years old.

 

 

[Huntster]

I walked 33 miles in 9 hours on a paved highway one night at age 21. I walked 5 miles on a muddy trail and across Coal Creek in a couple hours in the dark several years ago in my mid-60's. I didn't run or even trot either time. I just walked without stopping. But I didn't do it day after day, either.  I have done multiple 20-50 mile hikes through the wilderness, though. I did Crow Creek Pass in less than 24 hours, but that wasn't intentional. A bear essentially chased me out.

 

https://dnr.alaska.gov/parks/maps/crowpasstrailguide.pdf

Edited 55 minutes ago by Huntster