Bigfoot range and population speculation thread.

[Trogluddite]

The Appalachian Trail likely does play a role, particularly since it provides space - but the corridor I'm looking for runs almost straight East/West.

[Trogluddite]

Seeing as there few takers, Hiflier, you can post your guess.

[hiflier]

Well, the East/West thing has kinda thrown me Trog, I was thinking on the North/South side of things and the obvious route was the Connectcut Valley watershed areas with the Green Mountains to the West and the New Hampshire Whites and Maine Whites to the East. But since it's East/West my best guess is the old Mohawk/Iroquois Trail. I was also looking for something that looked good between Rutland/Middlebury VT (middle of the Green Mountains) and Baxter State Forest in Maine which is more in the latitude ranges you gave but didn't pursue it much.

 

The geographic significance of the Mohawk/Iroquois Trail is that was. is, and will be probably always be, the main migration route for most large vertebrates which would be critical for where people and Sasquatch traveled and set up where to dwell. As far a Upstate NY goes  that whole area of forest to the west of Lake Champlain would be the western range to Niagara and up into the St. Lawrence headwaters. Basically everything would go around the souther regions of Lake Champlain in order to reach East or West and the Mohawk/Iroquois was that route.

 

Happy New Year everyone!!

Edited January 1, 2018 by hiflier

[Trogluddite]

Here's the thing I was looking at, and which has come up several times when I haven't been expecting it.

 

If you look at Whitehall (NY), Castleton (VT), and Rutland (VT), you'll see that all three are in an area of higher land.  This higher land forms a "bridge" between the Adirondacks to the west and the Taconic and Greens to the east.  If I ever find the time (retirement is several years away yet) to breakdown this entire region geographically, I'm fairly confident that this rather small bridge of land accounts for a disproportionate number of encounters.  

 

This would seem to suggest that range, whether of individual Bigfoots or of clans moving to a new foraging area, may be even greater than thought.  The Bigfoot seen in Vermont today heading west may be in Ohio three weeks hence. 

[MIB]

Interesting.   I don't know the area so it is conceptual rather than concrete to me but it is thought provoking.   

 

For what (little) it is worth, we have several areas of reported activity in my region which are ALMOST linked by continuous strands of reports.   I'm very curious what happens in those gaps .. do they turn back, or is there some as-yet unnoticed connection?   If there is some connection that hasn't been noticed or hasn't been reported, such a place would be a bottleneck that would concentrate activity that would make a good focus for boots-on-the-ground research.

 

Stranger yet .. logically coincidental, but .. ? .. a couple of those apparent corridors have been subject to recent large scale fires that would seemingly force a change of route for anything previously using them and wanting to stay unnoticed.   If there were purpose behind what is allowed to burn vs what is suppressed, it could be intended either to block passage to keep them out of some location or it could be used to redirect passage to allow study.  

 

Certainly I intend to leverage those burns from the past 5 years in apparently high traffic areas that present new opportunities.

 

MIB

[hiflier]

6 hours ago, hiflier said:

As far a Upstate NY goes  that whole area of forest to the west of Lake Champlain would be the western range to Niagara and up into the St. Lawrence headwaters.

 

 Yep, got close but missed the actual geography of that region. You know what that means? No biscuit for highflier  

 

@MIB- Excellent thinking.

[Trogluddite]

2 hours ago, MIB said:

Interesting.   I don't know the area so it is conceptual rather than concrete to me but it is thought provoking.   

You can see it fairly clearly on Google Earth, or any number of maps found on the internet.  I first found out about it when I found a map by high peaks enthusiasts showing the dividing summit for the northeast. 

 

For what (little) it is worth, we have several areas of reported activity in my region which are ALMOST linked by continuous strands of reports.   I'm very curious what happens in those gaps .. do they turn back, or is there some as-yet unnoticed connection?   If there is some connection that hasn't been noticed or hasn't been reported, such a place would be a bottleneck that would concentrate activity that would make a good focus for boots-on-the-ground research.

I'm not familiar w/California topography or environmental considerations (i.e., water & food availability) but it makes sense that there would be "spokes" of travel areas to get between hubs of food and water resources. 

 

2 hours ago, MIB said:

 

Stranger yet .. logically coincidental, but .. ? .. a couple of those apparent corridors have been subject to recent large scale fires that would seemingly force a change of route for anything previously using them and wanting to stay unnoticed.   If there were purpose behind what is allowed to burn vs what is suppressed, it could be intended either to block passage to keep them out of some location or it could be used to redirect passage to allow study.  

While I'm more likely to think its mismanagement at the state/Federal level, but I do think that you can benefit by looking for evidence or by taking advantage of the lack of cover/concealment on established travel routes that will likely require some time to adapt to/change. 

Certainly I intend to leverage those burns from the past 5 years in apparently high traffic areas that present new opportunities.

 

MIB

 

[wiiawiwb]

9 hours ago, Trogluddite said:

Here's the thing I was looking at, and which has come up several times when I haven't been expecting it.

 

If you look at Whitehall (NY), Castleton (VT), and Rutland (VT), you'll see that all three are in an area of higher land.  This higher land forms a "bridge" between the Adirondacks to the west and the Taconic and Greens to the east.  If I ever find the time (retirement is several years away yet) to breakdown this entire region geographically, I'm fairly confident that this rather small bridge of land accounts for a disproportionate number of encounters.  

 

This would seem to suggest that range, whether of individual Bigfoots or of clans moving to a new foraging area, may be even greater than thought.  The Bigfoot seen in Vermont today heading west may be in Ohio three weeks hence. 

 

Maybe its me but I don't see that corridor, or band, of higher terrain between the three cities.  A sasquatch could leave Rutland sightly to the north and access some mountains to the west, however, that direction of travel stops at Lake Bomoseen.  A sasquatch could also choose to go slightly south from Rutland as it proceeds west and find some higher terrain. That direction of travel would bring it to a population mass in Poultney before it ever got to Whitehall.  I don't see either as workable lines of travel.

 

Could you walk me through it from Rutland to Whitehall?

 

I see several corridors of travel in that region that provide higher terrain and ample escape routes but they run north and south.

 

Just curious...have you physically gone there and spent time in that area?

 

 

Edited January 2, 2018 by wiiawiwb

[Trogluddite]

Sure,

 

It sounds like you're in the correct area - If you go on Google earth and find Queensbury (NY), draw a straight line SE to Bear, Equinox, and Stratton Mountains - that's what I would define as the southern boundary.

 

The northern boundary, I'd define roughly by a line from Hague (NY) east to Pittsford (VT).  

 

I'm not talking Rocky Mountain level high ground here, but that stubby remnant (which as you noted, has a lot of north/south cuts through it) is what connects the mountain (hill) ranges I noted above.  See my tract on Bigfoot in the NE in the Vermont thread, page 6.  The divide line connecting 5,000 foot peaks runs through this area. 

 

This tiny two county corridor (Washington County in NY and Rutland County in VT) has 65 encounters between them, all of them in this patch of high (higher? higherish? slightly elevated?) ground.

 

Unfortunately, I have not spent time up there.  I'm planning on this being one of the hobbies to keep me active in retirement, so hopefully then. 

[Trogluddite]

 

This is what I mean - the red box measures 50 miles east/west and 20 miles north/south.  (Rutland is the red dot right under the yellow 99-Sep-V pin; the name got buried under all the pins.  Whitehall is in the lower left hand corner.)  

 

I've easily gotten over 1,000 encounters mapped now.  I'd be hard pressed to put down a 50x20 mile box anywhere else in the Northeast and get anywhere near this number of encounters within that defined area. 

[Explorer]

See link below for an interesting paper published back in 2009 in the Journal of Biogeography titled "Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modeling". 

Just ran into it recently, and while the paper was supposedly done tongue in cheek (because BF does not exist in Biology and because the database was not scientifically collected), the analytics were done as if the BFRO database was suitable.

The authors state that the point of the paper was to show how a very sensible-looking well-performing Ecological Niche Model can be constructed from questionable observational data.

 

Given all those caveats, some of the interesting conclusions from that Ecological Niche model (ENM) of BF were:

1. BF should be broadly distributed in western North America, with a range comprising western NA mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Cascades, the Blue Mountains, the southern Selkirk Mountains, and the Coastal Range of the Pacific Northwest.
2. Precipitation of the coldest quarter was the bio-climatic variable that contributed most to the ENM, followed by temperature annual range, mean temperature of the wettest quarter, and means temperature of the driest quarter.
3. The predicted distribution of Sasquatch appears similar to that which might be expected for other large mammals of western North American, including the American black bear.......The two species do not demonstrate significant niche differentiation with respect to the selected bio-climatic variables.  Although it is possible that Sasquatch and U. americanus share such remarkable similar bio-climatic requirements, we nonetheless suspect that many Bigfoot sightings are, in fact, of black bear.

I do not find it surprising that scientists looking at the available BFRO database find that sighting locations coincide with black bear habitat and then suggest that many of these BF reports are misidentification of black bear.

It is the easy and non-controversial answer when crunching numbers from a database that is de-linked from the human stories and details that would have rejected the black bear.

I agree with the authors that garbage in equals garbage out, and that ensuring the quality of the database is key before doing any analytics.

Is the BFRO database 100% garbage?  Probably not, but it does not meet the scientific standards required for these ecoological niche models.

Nonetheless, we can use available databases with care and apply quality filters and then ask questions and looks for patterns.

 

A link to the paper and access to the PDF file is below.

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2009.02152.x/full

 

[scottv]

Here's a site that links grizzly habitat quality to grizzly bear density. Might give some people here ideas on where to focus their searches or speculations (as the thread title says).

 

https://www.allgrizzly.org/bear-density

[Twist]

^^ Interesting link Scott, essentially what I take from that is low humans = higher grizzly population.   Stay away from the alpha predator and you can live.   

[Trogluddite]

Kudos to ScottV and Explorer both f/finding this stuff.  If I'm reading the grizzly bear chart correctly, Montana and Wyoming have a density of 21 to 40 grizzlies per 385 sq. mi. (or 1000 sq. km).  I'm stunned that such a large carnivore could support itself in such a (relatively) small area.  

[Twist]

You must be from a very large area Trog, lol.   For me a 385 sq miles is a very large area to only have up to 40 Grizzly.  That's a little shy of 250,000 acres of land, thats a pretty decent amount of space to me.