Wildlife, sport and activities, sometimes all at once

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Subscribe here.)

"I am a forty-one year old vice president of a bank. I have been harboring an encounter I had ...out of fear of ridicule or shame. I must tell my story."

So begins one of the eight reported Mono County Bigfoot sightings and experiences displayed at bfro.net.

The author, identified as "J.C.," recounted a September backpacking trip he took as a child. On the Duck Pass Trail somewhere below Barney Lake, he saw something that "haunts me and will all my life," he wrote.

Hiking ahead of his father and a friend, J.C. wrote that he noticed "a large animal" bent over in a meadow about twelve feet away from the trail. It was a strange creature with reddish hair and a bare bottom. Then the animal stood up.

"It must have been eight feet tall or more and for a ten year old boy this was unreal. Its back was to me when it stood so I could see it was built similar to a human but with a lot of hair. I knew this was no bear."

J.C. said he dove behind a large boulder, terrified. When his father and friend approached, he screamed to warn them about the creature, but it was gone.

Forty years after the so-called Patterson film grainily caught a humungous apelike creature sauntering across a Northern California stream, the search for an unidentified biped living in the American wilderness continues online and on the ground, thanks to the efforts of the Big Foot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO).

Founded in 1995, BFRO "essentially seeks to resolve the mystery surrounding the Bigfoot phenomenon, that is, to derive conclusive documentation of the species' existence," according to its Web site.

You don't have to have a Sasquatch's aim to hit a skeptic in the woods. When asked if she'd ever seen a Bigfoot during her many miles on Mammoth-area trails, one local runner replied, "Yes, about fifteen years ago, but I was on mushrooms."

A backpacker, answering the same question on an online hikers' forum joked that he hadn't seen a Sasquatch, but that his mother-in-law had recently been hiking near Mammoth and he "could understand the confusion."

Even a local businessman comfortable with the notion of ghostly inhabitants at Bodie and alien landings at Mono Lake scoffed at an undiscovered primate. "Where's the proof?" he asked.

BFRO leaders have heard it all. They've posted answers to every skeptic's questions on their Web site.

"There's a lot of fake stuff out there," conceded Matt Moneymaker, the group's founder. "But what's real is very real."

One Mammoth resident is convinced that what he saw last June in Laurel Canyon was the real thing.
It was a sunny afternoon about four o'clock The forty-four-year-old medical professional (who asked that his name not be used) had just finished a hike to still snow-covered Laurel Lakes. He was driving downhill near a large-aspen-bordered meadow when something tall, dark and hairy crossed the road about two hundred and fifty yards in front of him.

"I instantly thought it was some guy in a suit" the witness, a former Marine and Army National Guard marksman, said in a recent interview.

The animal crossed back over the road and scrambled up a steep, scree-covered hillside. The witness then realized "it was a walking, moving creature," which he described as about seven feet tall, very lean and muscular, with short, blue-black fur covering its body.

"Did I just see what I think I saw?" the witness recalled thinking. An approaching truck, with a man and woman inside the cab, passed by and waved. A group of campers in the meadow continued their Frisbee game unfazed.

The creature, he surmised, must have seen the truck and attempted to cross into tree cover. It then re-crossed the road when it saw the group in the meadow. Its manner during the second viewing was that of an intelligent animal eluding a chase response. "I had a good vantage point to see how it interacted" the witness explained.

No man in a monkey suit could have mimicked the movement and the musculature, the witness concluded, based on his knowledge of anatomy and the human gait.

"Whatever's out there, it's not a hoax. It wouldn't make sense," he said, adding that his concern over potential career damage kept him from relating his story to anyone in Mammoth. "I have more to lose than I do to gain" by coming forward with his Bigfoot encounter, he said.

Instead, he went online and found the BFRO. He submitted a report through the site, and was contacted by BFRO investigator Brandon Kiel, who called the witness "very credible."

Bigfoot believers -- both eyewitnesses and cryptozoologists -- may remain on the fringes, but they've got one noteworthy advocate. Dr. Jane Goodall, who famously proved the existence of mountain gorillas, gave Bigfoot a boost during a 2002 interview with NPR's Ira Flatow. "You'll be amazed when I tell you that.

"I'm sure that they exist," she said of undiscovered primates such as Sasquatch.

When Flatow pressed her for details -- did she know of other evidence, and was her belief long held -- Goodall admitted, "I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist."

She might want to know about the Duck Pass Trail near Barney Lake, or maybe she might want to go trail running.

Without mushrooms.

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