Bigfoot Nests W/terrible Smells

[Foxfire]

I was irked over something else elsewhere, mistook your meaning, and reacted too strongly.  Bad timing, bad self restraint on my part.  I most certainly do not want you leaving on account of me chewing on my foot.  I hope you will accept my apology.

 

What I've been "chasing" on the mountain above town the last 10 years is nothing at all like urine.    It seems fecal only ... sharper.  There is something going on there I don't understand.  The smell is only present seasonally, only at a certain time of day, it comes from VERY close because I can take a step or two across the direction of the wind and be out of it, a step or two back and be in it, yet the wind comes from different directions.  

 

MIB

Thank you very much, MIB, and of course I accept your apology. This happens all the time, and I've done the same thing myself. I totally understand. I only responded the way I did because of your "deal with it" challenge.  LOL

VERY interesting about the mystery you've been trying to solve.  If you don't mind, I'm gonna visit your profile page and see if I can read any posts you've made about it... better than asking you a bunch of questions that you've already answered.

 

--Foxfire

[SWWASAS]

The smell aspect of BF is not consistent.    I have been within 20 yards of a BF moving towards me and never smelled anything but the light wind was at my back and the if anything the BF was smelling me.    Now and then I have gotten a whiff along the side of a logging road.     Either the smell is sex dependent or emitted only in certain circumstances to repel a human.     Maybe some are just more into personal hygiene and like a bath now and then so they don't smell so bad.     But I would not go so far to say that smelling anything is necessary for it to be a BF.    Unfortunately with BF nothing is simple or straightforward.    

[MIB]

georgerm -

 

I'm not identifying the location 'cause it's my casual but prime research spot.   In general, though, it's in the north eastern part of the Siskiyous north of the OR/CA state line and just under 6000 feet elevation.   The lower elevations of the mountain dry out a lot in summer.    This is occurring along a 100-150 yard long stretch of a now-blocked jeep trail where it crosses from one ridge, goes fairly steeply uphill and around a small canyon, and back onto the next ridge.   The ridges are fairly heavily timbered with a good bit of underbrush.   The canyons are long "gashes" down the steep mountainside which only have coarse sedges and some willows, no big trees.  I'm not sure if they are just too wet for firs to grow in or if they are avalanche chutes in winter.  This particular one has very rocky soil and ground water running down it but not really a concentrated stream.

 

I've been running into this smell there for probably somewhere between 10 and 15 years.   The first time I became aware of the repetitive nature of it I had a real deja vu moment as I leaned against the end of a log with a stick in one hand thinking, based on the smell, that I was going to be scraping dog crap off my shoe, saw none on either shoe, and realized I'd done that a couple times before in the same place when I was passing by there to go deer hunting (another reason I'm not sharing the location specifics) in previous years.    I don't get there every year, maybe 7 out of 10, but the years I get there I generally make multiple trips.

 

The smell is present only from about mid September to mid October with one exception when I smelled it there one day in July or August when we were in the midst of a few days of bad summer lightning.   Every time, in that location, it is after 3:00 in the afternoon.  I've hunted there and hiked there morning, noon, and afternoon.  It's never there 'til after 3:00 and gets both more likely and stronger towards dusk.   It doesn't matter which way the wind is blowing, so the source is **moving**.   I can usually take a step or two across the wind and be out of it, go back and be in it, so the source is so close the air has not mixed despite swirling through timber.

 

The first time it occurred was at the lower end of that short section of road.   The times where it was stronger, where I was in and out of the air that smelled in a couple steps was at the upper end.  The past about 5 years, it's always in one spot about 25 yards above the lower end and generally requires standing in about a 4 foot circle on the mountain-ward edge of the road.  

 

A good friend, investigator, knew I was familiar with the general area and asked for my input on a (still unpublished) report he was following up on.  It was not merely close, it was EXACTLY the same spot.  It involved a hunter having rocks bounced off a tree by his head.   We went up to look at it one day and saw ... something.  I can't be sure it was not a bear.   We were on our way back out, below that section of road.   The shoulder of the road is brushed a bit and had grass 2 feet tall or more.   Just a split second flash, but whatever it was seemed to be laying with its upper part in the grass on the road, back half over he edge.  When it bolted, it seemed to push itself backwards over the edge of the road.   We ran down to where it'd been and looked over the side.   there was something hairy protruding around the side of a tree or snag a little above our head height about 60-75 yards downhill.   It moved clear behind the tree and disappeared.   Could have been a bear.  I didn't see enough to be sure one way or the other.   Despite having a bear tag and a .44 magnum, and him packing a 1911, neither of us had no real urge to go look closer.  That's unusual / out of place ... something I look out for.

 

I encountered a family hunting there one year.   3 generations: grandma/grandpa (not much older than me), mid 20s son, and his step-son.   The son smelled what I smelled.   It had seemingly followed him around the mountain above the road.    His mom was jamming every flower she could find up her nose smelling for a rational explanation.  (fall flowers ... not many but some)   He was trying to herd the family back to the truck to get the HECK out of there.  He said it was bigfoot, no uncertain terms.   (Heh heh.  "reeeeally* ?? )

 

I have torn that place apart looking for a normal answer.   No luck so far.

 

Years ago I was up on Marys Peak out of Corvallis in the snow, got some dog crap on my shoe, and cooked it with the car heater when I was warming my feet on the drive home.  It was not just "dog poo" smell, it was INTENSE dog poo smell.   That's the closest similarity I can think of.   It has an additional slightly chemical, acrid component, though, that lacked.

 

I'll be a little less vague about the others.   Other than that, until about 4 years ago I'd never smelled anything similar.    3-4 summers back we were having a heat wave, 105+ during the day, so I went for a night hike on the PCT above the head of the Applegate River not too far from Dutchman Peak.    Full moon so no flashlight.   About 3:30 am I ran into that same smell.  Unlike the very wet, near boggy conditions of the first location, this was out on a bone dry, near barren, rocky ridge.   I couldn't see any explanation.

 

This last summer I ran into it two more places.   One was along a ridge separating the North and upper South Umpqua river in an area burned by forest fire somewhere in the 2008-2009 range..  One was not too far from Pelican Butte near Klamath Falls back in a high elevation fir forest.    I think there was another but I can't remember where it was.

 

I don't have a solution.   The fact that I was that close to the source without being able to see it causes one eyebrow to lift.

 

I guess the only relevance to this thread is the smell ... it is clearly, each time, a fecal smell, not a urine smell.

 

MIB

[Foxfire]

Speaking of taking a bath-- a couple of days ago, I finally told my sister about the 2005 event of seeing the large red eyes looking in my bedroom window, the eyes being about 7 feet off the ground. She REMINDED me of the time she and her (then) husband were nightfishing at a lake just on the border of the Smoky Mountains, when he suddenly said, "Don't look, just get in the car." She said, "What?" He repeated, "Don't look, just get in the car!"

Of course she looked around.

She saw *something IN THE WATER, but above the surface were 2 red, glowy eyes, is how she put it.

She got in the car as fast as she could, and they took off.

--Foxfire

[the parkie]

Great post MIB, plussed. Any more details on your window encounter above Foxfire?

This is a good thread. Good to hear more on your midden theory JDL, I didn't realise you had actually found some evidence to back up your hypothesis.

[MIB]

It's not impossible or unthinkable that eventually I will find some "normal" explanation for the smell.   At the same time, I may slam head on into major "woo".  I've talked to a couple people who report a stench when the big guys do their disappear / dematerialize act.    I'm not drinking kool aid blindly but if that's where the investigation leads, that's where I go.  

 

One thing I'm sure of, fall-blooming flowers and decaying whatever do not account for the rock throwing reported by another person nor the chunk of wood thrown out of the brush that I witnessed.  

 

MIB

[JDL]

I ran across a couple of them in the early nineties in Northeastern Alabama and Northwestern Georgia.  That was back when I was hunting Civil War artifacts with a metal detector.  Both times I was hunting up a draw with a stream running down it.  The kind of place a dozen men and horses could conceal themselves if they were behind enemy lines on a cavalry raid or scouting (we were following the 72nd Indiana Regiment, which was part of Wilder's Mounted Infantry Brigade.  They were easy to track because they were equipped with Spencer repeating rifles, which used cased ammunition, and they would open up a couple of rounds to use the gunpowder to start fires).

 

in both cases I found a large level area with packed earth on a side of the draw.  They were below the rim of the draw, but well above the stream.  It would have been easy to place lookouts to watch both up and down the draw, and to watch over the rims on each side of the draw.  Each level area was at least ten yards square, and in both cases there was a tangle of logs and branches that had been thrown down the slope below.  The tangles weren't from any thicket within immediate sight.  They had been brought there from somewhere else, and not by flooding.  I figured someone had used the material to build a shelter on the flat area and simply torn it apart and thrown the logs down the slope toward the stream when they were done.  The area in both locations was hard packed earth without ground cover, as if several people had used it for an extended period of time, but there was no evidence of any fire pits, which I would have expected, even in the summer months for cooking, if someone were to stay there for any length of time.

 

At the back of where each shelter had been there was a hole dug into the slope where it came down to meet the flat area.  The holes were actually not obvious because the decaying leaves and other material filled it right up to the opening of the hole.  At first glance it simply appeared to be a collection of dead leaves that had accumulated in a small impression.  If I hadn't have been actively searching with the metal detector I wouldn't have noticed them.  There was no metal in either hole, which turned out to be between two and three feet deep.  They were, however, apparently trash pits of some sort, so I dug them out.  Both contained dead rotting leaves, rotting leafy branches from bushes and small trees, and the remains of several small animals.

 

So, I was looking for concealed locations with water where Civil War units that wanted to remain hidden might have used, and ended up finding two campsites that had been used within the last several months.  Judging from the packed earth, each had been used for an extended time, and possibly on a semi-regular basis.  There were the remains of small animals in the midden along with decaying vegetable matter, and I got the impression that the hole had also been used for defecation from the odor, though there were no recognizable feces remaining.  One thing that bothered me was that the animal remains showed no sign of cooking and, as I mentioned, there was no evident fire pit.  I spent some time trying to figure out why multiple people would have camped there eating uncooked animals and decided that, whoever they were, I didn't particularly want to meet them.  Even though I'd had encounters in Nevada, California, and Washington, it didn't occur to me at the time that there might be bigfoot in that area of the country.

[NathanFooter]

I ran across a couple of them in the early nineties in Northeastern Alabama and Northwestern Georgia.  That was back when I was hunting Civil War artifacts with a metal detector.  Both times I was hunting up a draw with a stream running down it.  The kind of place a dozen men and horses could conceal themselves if they were behind enemy lines on a cavalry raid or scouting (we were following the 72nd Indiana Regiment, which was part of Wilder's Mounted Infantry Brigade.  They were easy to track because they were equipped with Spencer repeating rifles, which used cased ammunition, and they would open up a couple of rounds to use the gunpowder to start fires).

 

in both cases I found a large level area with packed earth on a side of the draw.  They were below the rim of the draw, but well above the stream.  It would have been easy to place lookouts to watch both up and down the draw, and to watch over the rims on each side of the draw.  Each level area was at least ten yards square, and in both cases there was a tangle of logs and branches that had been thrown down the slope below.  The tangles weren't from any thicket within immediate sight.  They had been brought there from somewhere else, and not by flooding.  I figured someone had used the material to build a shelter on the flat area and simply torn it apart and thrown the logs down the slope toward the stream when they were done.  The area in both locations was hard packed earth without ground cover, as if several people had used it for an extended period of time, but there was no evidence of any fire pits, which I would have expected, even in the summer months for cooking, if someone were to stay there for any length of time.

 

At the back of where each shelter had been there was a hole dug into the slope where it came down to meet the flat area.  The holes were actually not obvious because the decaying leaves and other material filled it right up to the opening of the hole.  At first glance it simply appeared to be a collection of dead leaves that had accumulated in a small impression.  If I hadn't have been actively searching with the metal detector I wouldn't have noticed them.  There was no metal in either hole, which turned out to be between two and three feet deep.  They were, however, apparently trash pits of some sort, so I dug them out.  Both contained dead rotting leaves, rotting leafy branches from bushes and small trees, and the remains of several small animals.

 

So, I was looking for concealed locations with water where Civil War units that wanted to remain hidden might have used, and ended up finding two campsites that had been used within the last several months.  Judging from the packed earth, each had been used for an extended time, and possibly on a semi-regular basis.  There were the remains of small animals in the midden along with decaying vegetable matter, and I got the impression that the hole had also been used for defecation from the odor, though there were no recognizable feces remaining.  One thing that bothered me was that the animal remains showed no sign of cooking and, as I mentioned, there was no evident fire pit.  I spent some time trying to figure out why multiple people would have camped there eating uncooked animals and decided that, whoever they were, I didn't particularly want to meet them.  Even though I'd had encounters in Nevada, California, and Washington, it didn't occur to me at the time that there might be bigfoot in that area of the country.

 

  That is truly interesting, thanks for sharing.     I will have eyes open for this type of thing.

[Foxfire]

Great post MIB, plussed. Any more details on your window encounter above Foxfire?

This is a good thread. Good to hear more on your midden theory JDL, I didn't realise you had actually found some evidence to back up your hypothesis.

No... no more details on the red eyes at the window. I had just moved here, and the only 2 thoughts that occurred to me were 1) BOOGER, as in fallen-angel-booger, which is why I think I went into denial/pretend it's not there mode, and 2) It must be the teenager down the road having fun trying to scare me. Even last year, when I had the extreme house-banging experience, Bigfoot was nowhere in my conscious thinking. When I told about it on here, @ 2-3 months ago I believe, I described it as a baseball bat against the house right beside where I was laying, because that's the hardest striking sound I could imagine. Since then, sledge hammer has come to mind as well. NOW, if the least little strange thing happens, I'm gonna be looking for something huge, redeyed, and hairy. I still want to get security cams up eventually.

 

--Foxfire

[Guest]

JDL thanks for sharing what you have one here, from your posts you strike me as a very interesting person.

[Guest keninsc]

It's not impossible or unthinkable that eventually I will find some "normal" explanation for the smell.   At the same time, I may slam head on into major "woo".  I've talked to a couple people who report a stench when the big guys do their disappear / dematerialize act.    I'm not drinking kool aid blindly but if that's where the investigation leads, that's where I go.  

 

One thing I'm sure of, fall-blooming flowers and decaying whatever do not account for the rock throwing reported by another person nor the chunk of wood thrown out of the brush that I witnessed.  

 

MIB

 

I have noticed that some reports talk about a nasty smell while others don't mention a smell or when asked they report not smelling anything. In my own case I encountered a smell while hunting one day near my home when I live right outside Rome, GA. I often use the analogy of it smelling like a dozen Frenchmen who hadn't bathed in a week and had just come in from playing soccer.

 

A couple weeks later when I was talking to a friend of mine I mentioned it and I could see all the color go out of his face. That was when he told me of seeing a Bigfoot and it was the reason he'd given up hunting. **** critter freaked him all the way out, but he was down wind of it and he said he could smell it too. And agreed that it didn't smell like any living thing he'd ever smelled before, however the experience made him give up hunting. I don't like to use the word fear in reference to him, I knew this guy, he was Nam Veteran Ranger and wasn't scared of much of anything, but this definitely had freaked him out.

[Guest keninsc]

I would add that the smell people often talk about could be from any number of things from a mating scent to an aggressive reflex response. Or it could be something tied to particular subspecies within the family of Bigfoots.

[Cotter]

I thought this thread was a good time to share a couple photos.

 

When coming across a nest with odor, please be mindful there are other animals that do this.

 

Here is are 2 pics of a 'bigfoot' nest, complete with 'bigfoot' snoozing!
 

 

[Drew]

Do the middens look anything like these?

http://natureofaman.blogspot.com/2012/02/living-in-sticks.html

[Cotter]

^I tell ya, the first time I came across those in the woods, it was quite the 'unexplained' experience.  Well, until I googled.