On Saturday, September 19, 2015 I received a call from Will Robinson. He excitedly informed me that he had seen a sasquatch the night before.
Will and a friend were hunting and camping just southeast of Mt. Hood in the general vicinity of White River. Being an experienced bigfooter with an excellent bigfoot call, Will wanted to elicit sasquatch vocalizations for his skeptical friend. They stopped randomly at an intersection of roads and got out their vehicle to do some calls.
Will did a call and miraculously received an excellent return vocalization from the west followed by a series of owl vocalizations. The call was not an owl nor a coyote, and sounded like the yells that Will and I got at Will Call Hill that were featured on an episode of Finding Bigfoot.
Will was thrilled, and his skeptical friend shaken, so the two stayed around and discussed what they were hearing. After approximately ten minutes, the two started hearing periodic brush popping off the road to their left. An animal was moving through the brush doing its best to remain quiet, but the two had heard it. Will guessed it was a bear or maybe an elk at that point.
Will’s friend was pretty unnerved, so when Will suggested that they go find out what was making the noise, his friend refused. Will borrowed his friends tactical flashlight, turned it on, and approached the dense cover where the “bear” was heard lurking.
Will shone the light across the wall of trees and brush scanning for a glimpse of whatever was moving. The light fell on what was clearly a face in the brush. It was peering through a break in the bushes at about four feet above the level of the road. After just a split second, the face ducked out of view and was gone leaving behind a black void in the trees where it had been. Will’s friend said he also saw a flash of an animal’s movement in the brush at the same moment, thus eliminating some sort of misperception. Neither of the two heard nor saw anything else from this creature after their brief glimpse.
The view was brief, and many details were not noticed. However, Will remembers that the face was huge. It would have taken up most of a man’s torso, easily 12 or 14 inches wide. The head tall and long, maybe 18 inches from top to bottom. The head seemed to be balding since hair was not noticed. The skin on its head was mottled and rough in texture, much like a old chimpanzee. It was described as “Caucasian-colored.” There were very prominent brow ridges with a sloping forehead angling back to a slight point at the cap of the skull. Will vaguely described a nose, but all other facial features went unnoticed. He said he got the feeling it was an older, mature individual.
Will was very puzzled why he didn’t see the eyes. After lengthy discussions, our two best guesses are that it had its eyes closed, or that it was looking downwards. Either of these is very likely because of the high-powered tactical flashlight with which Will was scanning the brush. Anything would have averted its gaze rather than look directly into the military-powered flashlight beam. Will feels that it most likely was looking down when he saw it. This assumption comes from the shape of the head, the prominence of the brow ridges, and the visibility of the slightly-pointed head.
When Will was struggling to accurately describe the head shape and other details, I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture of an elderly female lowland gorilla. He said what he saw looked very much like it except for the skin color and the lower face. The creature Will observed had a less prognathic face (less of an extended muzzle) and was more human-like than the gorilla, but other than that it was a close match. He was particularly struck by the gorilla’s head shape and skin texture being very similar.
There is no other likely candidate for what Will observed except a sasquatch. No other North American animal fits that description in the slightest way except for a human, but the brow ridges, the skin, and the sheer size eliminate those possibilities.
There is no question to me that Will is telling the truth. He has been one of my best friends for years, and he is as good as, or better than, anyone in the woods that I know. He was also obviously excited and moved by his experience. I could hear the emotion in his voice. It would be like if a family member told you something similar. You’d believe it. Some people are just not to be doubted by me, and Will is one of them.
I got the news on Saturday, but the soonest I could get out there was the night of Sunday, September 20, 2015. There could be impressions at the location, or even tracks nearby. Even better, the creature could still be in the area. After running errands in the morning, I met Will at his house and headed to the location with him and Xochitl for a night of bigfooting.
Will led me to the location of his sighting which was at an intersection of roads both paved and graveled. Fresh logging was evident less than a mile down futher the road. To the south was a patch of regrowth from a clear cut a few years back. Below the location on one side was a steep incline dotted with talus slopes, and on the other a gently-sloping mixed forest of hemlock and cedar.
After restating what happened, we found where he saw the face, and then where the creature must have been standing. The forest floor was about three feet lower than the road, which put the face at about seven feet above the ground when Will saw it.
No definitive sasquatch footprints were found, but there was a tremendous amount of deer, elk sign, as well as dozens of ambiguous impressions in the pine needles and forest duff. I looked for pathways and telltale broken branches to betray where the creature had walked through the trees, but found nothing I could positively attribute to the sasquatch.
Will and I spent the next couple hours exploring the numerous logging roads in the area. We found numerous features we thought were great for bigfoots and/or bigfooting. Most of the roads were bermed up so as to make them impossible to drive, but easy for wildlife of all sorts to use for easy travel. There was a swampy pond that was promising for supplying a bounty of food items. Much of the area had sparse tree cover giving rise to a thick undergrowth of manzanita and brambles through which travel would be very difficult for people, but not animals. We found steep precipitous valleys through which echoes bounce around for tens of seconds. This place has it all.