Expedition Bigfoot :Travel Channel

[wiiawiwb]

I would never pay a penny to go on an expedition but can understand why someone would.  Maybe they are folks who haven't spent any time in the woods but have developed an interest in all things Bigfoot. How do you get started? What equipment do I need to spend an overnight in the woods and what equipment is specific for sasquatching?  One way is to pay someone to show you how it works, what equipment you might need,  what area you may produce results,  and what generally to expect. 

 

Many of us are probably very familiar with the woods. I've been hiking and backpacking for decades, am a member of a search and rescue team, and competed in orienteering. My interest in sasquatch hatched about 15 years ago and I was comfortable from day one going into the woods to look for sasquatch. What I lacked was the approach of how to look for one in the woods. I ended up going on expeditions with a group of guys who were very experienced sasquatching and it cost me nothing.

[NathanFooter]

3 minutes ago, BlackRockBigfoot said:

Sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree on this topic.  

 

Matt Moneymaker is quoted in the book 'Monster Trek' as saying that the cost is that high so that they can weed out the people who are 'not serious'.  So, are the fees so high for the huge expense or to weed out the undesirables?

 

I am not debating that there may not be some good people involved, but you are telling me that you walked away with no money after organizing two of these outings.  So, where did the money go to?  Equipment?   Are they paying the expenses of their investigators?  

 

People are free to spend their money how they wish.  If it doesn't break my leg or pick my pocket, they are free to do as they wish.  However, let's just call it what it is.  It's entertainment.  If those same people were encouraged to take that money and spend it on research and equipment, then go out and actually look themselves...then there might actually be some movement on the study of this phenomenon.  Grass roots and regional efforts are always going to be more effective than a for-profit group.

 

The BFRO is an entertainment endeavor.  If people want to spend money on it in order to feel like they are a part of something greater, so be it.  People do that all the time with televangelists and mega-churches.  

 

 

 

  It is not as simple as entertainment, this would imply that it is simply for amusement or " fun ".    We put out wide range of material in the form of presentations, area history, noted behaviors, lessons on forest ecology, methods for identifying habitat, DNA collection, wildlife/man tracking,  and exercises in critical thinking.  We also get people hands on with new equipment, technology and introduce folks to ways of collecting information and data to get results.  For instance, on my Olympics exped I gave a short lecture on spectrograms as a tool for finding and identifying  species presence within a selected habitat, I also gave visual demos on how to use them and what to look for when going through collected data.           . . .  Does that sound like good ole' Joel Olsteen practice to you ? LOL

 

  The expeds can be as much or as little as the organizer makes them to be, the western chapter puts a great deal of their time and money into making the expeditions engaging and worth attending. I am aware of several organizers in OR and CA who feed the participants several nights also.   I suppose if you just suck as a person you could do almost nothing and walk a couple groups down a few forest roads during the night to keep most of the organizers portion of the funds.

 

 We have had years ( the Finding Bigfoot era ) that we had loads of people want to attend, many these people wanted to treat it like an Alaskan cruise or fishing trip where anything goes.  This did not serve the purpose of what the BFRO was looking to do, we are more angled to a form of education and awareness on the subject. You are correct that Matt gives the price hike as to dissuade the nuts, weirdos and less than serious.   This is half true, you have to understand that the BFRO is trying to add technical/knowledgeable academics to the group, you have to attend a BFRO expedition before you are eligible to become a member. Smart people with a genuine interest and flexibility are what we are looking for to make ground on the topic, in my personal opinion there has been a slide back in this but I think that is about to change. 

 

 Organizers come up with their own price points, are at 500$ and some are at 300$ per adult. We also set how many participants we are willing to have and if we wish to have additional investigators involved.  We pay for all of our ( we being the investigators/organizers ) emergency gear, backup equipment, batteries, external hardware, presentation displays, audio equipment, media storage, gas and bathroom facilities.   I probably made ( net ) around 750$  after all of my expenses related to the expeds, this does not account for my invested time. The BFRO pays for ZERO of what happens on the ground, the organization provides us with access to reports, some thermal imaging equipment and social media presence/platform.   

 

 If you have more particular questions that are related I would be glad to respond over PM or by email nathanbronis@gmail.com ,  I am not looking to hijack the thread further. 

[BlackRockBigfoot]

4 minutes ago, NathanFooter said:

 

  It is not as simple as entertainment, this would imply that it is simply for amusement or " fun ".    We put out wide range of material in the form of presentations, area history, noted behaviors, lessons on forest ecology, methods for identifying habitat, DNA collection, wildlife/man tracking,  and exercises in critical thinking.  We also get people hands on with new equipment, technology and introduce folks to ways of collecting information and data to get results.  For instance, on my Olympics exped I gave a short lecture on spectrograms as a tool for finding and identifying  species presence within a selected habitat, I also gave visual demos on how to use them and what to look for when going through collected data.           . . .  Does that sound like good ole' Joel Olsteen practice to you ? LOL

 

  The expeds can be as much or as little as the organizer makes them to be, the western chapter puts a great deal of their time and money into making the expeditions engaging and worth attending. I am aware of several organizers in OR and CA who feed the participants several nights also.   I suppose if you just suck as a person you could do almost nothing and walk a couple groups down a few forest roads during the night to keep most of the organizers portion of the funds.

 

 We have had years ( the Finding Bigfoot era ) that we had loads of people want to attend, many these people wanted to treat it like an Alaskan cruise or fishing trip where anything goes.  This did not serve the purpose of what the BFRO was looking to do, we are more angled to a form of education and awareness on the subject. You are correct that Matt gives the price hike as to dissuade the nuts, weirdos and less than serious.   This is half true, you have to understand that the BFRO is trying to add technical/knowledgeable academics to the group, you have to attend a BFRO expedition before you are eligible to become a member. Smart people with a genuine interest and flexibility are what we are looking for to make ground on the topic, in my personal opinion there has been a slide back in this but I think that is about to change. 

 

 Organizers come up with their own price points, are at 500$ and some are at 300$ per adult. We also set how many participants we are willing to have and if we wish to have additional investigators involved.  We pay for all of our ( we being the investigators/organizers ) emergency gear, backup equipment, batteries, external hardware, presentation displays, audio equipment, media storage, gas and bathroom facilities.   I probably made ( net ) around 750$  after all of my expenses related to the expeds, this does not account for my invested time. The BFRO pays for ZERO of what happens on the ground, the organization provides us with access to reports, some thermal imaging equipment and social media presence/platform.   

 

 If you have more particular questions that are related I would be glad to respond over PM or by email nathanbronis@gmail.com ,  I am not looking to hijack the thread further. 

Thank you, but I don't have any questions.  

 

Like I said before, we agree to disagree.  The only reason that the BFRO even came up in this thread is because of the negative responses two of the main members made online about the show that we are discussing.    To me, that and other elements of the organization are indefensible...even if there are perhaps better parts of it that do not reflect the negativity of the whole.  This field is not the private domain of the BFRO, and their online comments are distasteful.

 

I would like to thank you for taking the time to respond to me, especially in such a polite manner.  I appreciate it, and am glad that you are able to share some of your knowledge and passion for the subject with others just starting out... regardless of the vehicle of delivery. 

 

Let's steer this thread back to EB now.

 

[Explorer]

Sources: 

http://westernwildlife.org/grizzly-bear-outreach-project/history/

 

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2014/grizzly-bear-06-18-2014.html

 

[Bigfoot Gumbo]

I watched the first episode and really enjoyed it. I really like the technology they're using to find evidence 👍🏻

[BlackRockBigfoot]

4 minutes ago, Bigfoot Gumbo said:

I watched the first episode and really enjoyed it. I really like the technology they're using to find evidence 👍🏻

Getting ready to rewatch it myself.

 

Just realized that the guy who replaced RPG wrote the book that I just downloaded.  Monsterland.

[NatFoot]

2 hours ago, Explorer said:

Sources: 

http://westernwildlife.org/grizzly-bear-outreach-project/history/

 

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2014/grizzly-bear-06-18-2014.html

 

 

Call me whatever you want, but I do not believe there were grizzlies in the plains of OK, NE and KS in 1850.

[Huntster]

13 hours ago, hiflier said:

 

 

Some day in the future there will be a map of sasquatch range, and I bet it will be very similar to that map.

[BlackRockBigfoot]

2 minutes ago, Huntster said:

 

Some day in the future there will be a map of sasquatch range, and I bet it will be very similar to that map.

Extend that green down through the Smokeys into South Carolina and I will agree with that.

[hiflier]

Very prophetic, Hunste, and I would tend to agree if it wasn't for the nagging thought that insatiable greed within certain elements of our species most likely won't allow it

[Huntster]

12 hours ago, bipedalist said:

......... I can see where the scarcity of food could move grizzly into new areas but probably not like a mountain lion wandering........

 

There has been quite a bit of study recently on brown bear immigration and emigration   from various game management units here due to wrangling with the feds. We have heard the argument, "Those are our bears/wolves", even when they aren't on federal lands. So ADFG has to put the science together to show otherwise.

 

At any rate, the #1 driver motivating bear emigration is not food, but big boars driving the younger boars out of their territory. So once a national park, or other such protected, no-hunting area gets biologically saturated with bears (according to their rules, not ours), the younger boars will be driven out into adjoining lands.

 

True, this is not so pronounced on the wilderness coastal lands awash in millions upon millions of salmon, but in the interior where bears have exponentially larger ranges, it is now established science.

 

 

[Huntster]

1 hour ago, NatFoot said:

 

Call me whatever you want, but I do not believe there were grizzlies in the plains of OK, NE and KS in 1850.

 

Remember that the mad dash westward with wagon trains of folks started in 1849 with the California Gold Rush.The really big changes came after that. 

 

The Lewis and Clark journals, filled with amazing stuff, were most amazing to me regarding grizzly bears, which they didn't even know existed in 1805. Moreover, when the Mandan Sioux told them about the bears, they wrote things in their journals belittling the Sioux about their fanciful tales. But well before arriving at the continental divide, Lewis wrote that he'd rather face 20 Indian warriors than one of those damned bears again. In fact, Lewis got shot in the ass by one of his men during a dust up with a bear on an island in the Missouri River that they stayed on one night particularly because they thought it would keep them from the bears.

[Incorrigible1]

Bison were natural prey for the grizzlies.

 

Also remember, elk were plains-dwellers until driven into the mountains.

[hiflier]

8 hours ago, Huntster said:

The Lewis and Clark journals, filled with amazing stuff, were most amazing to me regarding grizzly bears, which they didn't even know existed in 1805. Moreover, when the Mandan Sioux told them about the bears, they wrote things in their journals belittling the Sioux about their fanciful tales. But well before arriving at the continental divide, Lewis wrote that he'd rather face 20 Indian warriors than one of those damned bears again. In fact, Lewis got shot in the ass by one of his men during a dust up with a bear on an island in the Missouri River that they stayed on one night particularly because they thought it would keep them from the bears.

 

I keep telling you we are on the same wavelength, Huntster. I took delivery this week on a book that came out in 2006 called "Cryptid". It's by a Seattle man named Eric Penz. The book opens up with Lewis and Clark. The premise is that Meriwether Lewis has gaps in his handwritten journals because President Thomas Jefferson removed some of them after William Clark delivered them to him.

 

The story explains that the reason the few journals were removed from the rest was because they spoke of a large "primate" in the Olympic Peninsula and the thinking was that if the public knew they would be too afraid to go there and begin the process of taking the resources from the land. I highly recommend the book of which used copies can be found on Amazon. I have emailed the author and am looking forward to some interesting talks. And By the way the creature in the book is Gigantopithicus which doesn't surprise me since that giant ape was considered by Dr. Grover Krantz and others to BE Sasquatch in North America. Or at least Sasquatch's evolutionary ancestor.   

[Huntster]

3 minutes ago, hiflier said:

.........I took delivery this week on a book that came out in 2006 called "Cryptid". It's by a Seattle man named Eric Penz. The book opens up with Lewis and Clark. The premise is that Meriwether Lewis has gaps in his handwritten journals because President Thomas Jefferson removed some of them after William Clark delivered them to him.

 

The story explains that the reason the few journals were removed from the rest was because they spoke of a large "primate" in the Olympic Peninsula and the thinking was that if the public knew they would be too afraid to go there and begin the process of taking the resources from the land.........

 

That's a new one on me. Of course, there were other mysteries regarding Lewis, primarily his death, but that was after the expedition. There were also other journals written by Clark and the other men, but those of Lewis were the most extensive and detailed, because he was the expedition leader by appointment of Jefferson, and was explicitly told to record it well.

 

But it stands to reason that they would at least have heard something of the creatures from the natives while spending the winter at Fort Clatsop or possibly come across tracks on their journey. But, again, being completely ignorant of the existence of grizzly bears upon the beginning of their expedition, they might have attributed sasquatch tracks to an enormous grizzly.

 

One of the things about their ignorance of grizzlies that amazed me was the fact that brown bears are so well known throughout Europe at the time. Moreover, the Spanish had been dealing with them on the west coast for literally hundreds of years at that point, proving that communication between European powers were poor either by intent or inefficiency.