Stop, I uttered in a harsh, barely above whisper voice. I froze and quickly raised the video camera up to my eye. Alan off to my left had frozen in place, uttering only one word that in hind sight seemed rather funny, “what?” Of course we both knew what.
I raised the camera up and found myself fumbling as I was lost staring at a labyrinth of trees and branches. I had no clue where I was aiming. I tried to calm done, and made a half-hearted effort to try to slow my breathing, but being summer and in the middle of a hike up a hill-side, I found it nearly impossible. I decide to take a knee, and I find my place and zoom in as far as the camera will let me. As I look through the lens, a million thoughts and emotions run through my head. Keep steady, don’t be the “blurry video of Bigfoot” guy, is this really happening, what the hell do I do if it charges, and is it a bluff charge, I think I gotta pee. The weird thing is, these emotions and the thoughts run through in what feels like hours as it all slows down around me.
Alan looks for evidence in one of their many forays into the Fathom Frontiers
Finally Alan speaks up and asks where is it, I point in the general direction and we both start moving towards the location. When we arrived at the spot about two hundred yards or so away, we noticed a deep ravine not too far behind the bunch of trees, maybe twenty or so yards back. That ravine would offer a quick getaway. We scoured the area for evidence, but found none in the immediate vicinity. We moved forward through the area, and veered off slightly to our left moving carefully through some serious thorny undergrowth. When we got to the other side, it opened up into a low grass area, with just a few small trees roughly in the shape of a circle and moving gently uphill. Still in amazement of the surprise of this location, we noticed something very odd.
We smelled a very obvious, pungent smell that was, or resembled a dirty wet dog smell. It was not faint, it was if something, some animal had very recently been there. The odor seemed to be hanging in this opening between the thorny undergrowth and the rest of the woods which were down the other side of the hill. This spot would have offered cover and concealment, and a decent observation and sleeping location. You would be noticed and heard trying to get into it.
The video we have is inconclusive, and we have yet to upload it as it would just be lost in a vast the sea of highly questionable squatch videos.
These stories of frustration, lost moments, and other missed opportunities is nothing new in the world of cryptozoology. As we see in this video below of “In Search of” Season Three with Leonard Nimoy, in Episode 57, “Monster Hunters,” which first aired on November 9, 1978, the efforts do not always go unrewarded, but the hours that are put in are grueling.
The focus is on the Bay Area Group which spent a lot of time exploring in Northern California.
I was going to leave this post as it is, but in doing some research, I came across a timely yet unfortunate article relating to the Bay Area Group featured in this episode. Warren Thompson, one of the founding members passed away on March 20th, 2013. I have included a link to a very nice article written by Loren Coleman.