Bigfoot Encounters


August 2007 Lake Tahoe, Placer County, California  
Tracks Found 18 long x 9 wide
 

I was camping last August with my nephew north of Lake Tahoe. We had been in a moderately developed campground, Crystal Peak Overlook, about 20 miles northwest of Reno NV where we live.

There my nephew made friends with another little boy and I started talking with the other boy's grandmother. She told me how her husband and son had found these Bigfoot prints that May along a creek above another near-by campground, Dog Valley Creek.

They reported that in one print they could even make out separate toe tracks. They'd told a ranger who gave them some plastic tape to mark the spot. That got me curious, so we moved camp the next day to Dog Valley, a primitive campground. This is on the dry side of the Sierras at the timberline, which is about 6,000 feet.

Generally, the granite soil of the Sierras doesn't sustain much vegetation, but in this area several small streams converge to make a marshy pasture with a lot of biodiversity. We hiked up the creek that flows through the campground; it was a moderately steep climb. About a hundred yards up I spotted the bits of tape tied to sticks stuck in the ground in a particularly thick patch of trees. The forest floor was covered with pine needles but you could still see the depressed area of the prints sunk in the soil beneath leaves.

In August, when we were there, even I at over 200 lbs didn't leave a footprint, but perhaps in the May in the deep shade the ground had been muddy enough to take tracks. There were 3 prints marked out but only one was still the outline of a full foot, however I could no longer make out any separate toe impressions. It was about 18 inches long and nearly 9 wide.

All the pictures I took came out pretty useless, only the one where I put my barefoot in the track gives you any idea of size.  The area is about 20 miles from human habitation but gets maybe a dozen people a week off-roading during June through October. The roads to the area aren't cleared in the winter so there's hardly anyone there until May.

The area is in the rain shadow of the high Sierra peaks so even in winter there's probably less than a couple feet of snow and it has lots of springs. I'd guess this area would have edible vegetation, if not all winter at least very early in the spring. 

This area is not to far south of the Cascade Range, where there are more sasquatch reports and might be the sort of area a species might migrate south to for the winter.

My nephew asked if the footprint could have been made by a really tall person, like a basketball player, so when I got home I did some net research. 18 inches would be a shoe size 26 many, many E's. The nearest I found was a guy 8 foot 4 who wears a 25. There are less than a dozen people in the USA that tall, and most use canes or crutches and wouldn't be up to a barefoot hike in the mountains.

I don't have a scanner but I'll see if I can find a friend to scan the one half way decent photo to you.   Yes, I did have a camera but it was a little 35mm disposable and the footprint I found is hard to make out and the markings on the measuring tape I had in one picture can't be made out at all. There may have been 3 prints but only one was clear enough to be a definite footprint.                     

Gina Bagne
Date: Fri, 1 February 2008 06:33:54 -0800

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