Suburban Squatching

I found myself with a few free hours before dark, so I packed up some of my essential bigfooting gear (http://www.northamericanbigfoot.com/MyResearchPages/articles/essentialgear.html) and drove east to Dodge Park at the confluence of the Sandy River and the Bull Run River. I spent the last few hours walking animal trails that parallel the Bull Run River and looking for footprints in the fresh sand bars made by the recent rains. No sign of passing sasquatches was discovered, but some thoughts came to me that I felt could be beneficial to share.

Depending on where you live, one can go bigfooting in as little as a few hours. There is no need to do two-week expeditions to the middle of nowhere to find possible bigfoot habitat, and thus possible signs of the animal. Bigfoots are literally right outside of town, if one knows where to look.

I'm lucky to live in Portland, OR, where the above statement about the proximity of sasquatches is obviously true. I have investigated sightings literally 13 miles as the crow flies from my doorstep. I would like to suggest that perhaps there are sasquatches a little closer to where you might live than you think. Even when I lived in Long Beach, CA, there were sighting reports less than 2 hours from my house in the Angeles National Forest.

To find where sasquatches might be in your neck of the woods, look for greenbelts and rivers that provide a corridor of travel from one wooded area to another. Go for walks in the public land that might lie outside of town. Use Google Earth combined with Mangani's Bigfoot maps (http://penn.freeservers.com/bigfootmaps/). When using Mangani's stuff, it's not important to know the exact location of sightings. You are looking for approximate locations and the greenbelts and river systems that connect the areas that serve as choke points.

Something to look for to see if you are in a potentially good area is evidence of other animals. If I find no sign of deer or elk, I don't spend a lot of time in the area. Coyotes and bear are other excellent indicators of good bigfoot habitat. Animal trails, bedding areas, and sand bars give a lot of information on the passage of animals, and how recently they have been by. Today's trip found ungulate scat less than a week old, but no fresh footprints on the pristine sandbars.

Today I chose to walk up the Bull Run River because it's largely off-limits to human visitors. Of course, I would never ever suggest that anyone break the law for any reason whatsoever, but lands adjacent to these off-limit areas produce a lot of sighting reports. Should one find oneself accidentally inside of one of these off-limit areas, don't waste the opportunity to look around and do a little squatching... It would be a good idea to look for such areas near where you live. These areas include private land, government land, watersheds, and game preserves. Please do remember that trespassing is illegal, and sometimes comes with stiff monetary consequences.

I have spoken to several rural residents who don't believe in sasquatches because somebody saw one close to their home. It is just unfathomable that they could be so close in. People tend to think that if bigfoots are real, then they must only live way out in places that nobody ever goes. This is partially true in that the most isolated habitats certainly hold their share of bigfoots, but don't underestimate the squatch... These elusive animals live just on the outskirts of town, but are very wary of being seen. They do in fact go where people go, but they go there under the cover of darkness, and are very careful to remain unseen. I would propose that the closer to town a bigfoot lives, the warier it should be expected to be.

When I was on a bigfoot expedition in Eastern Ohio a few years back, a local resident saw one of our group wearing a BFRO shirt. She asked the member of our party if we really thought bigfoots lived around there. We had heard one the night before, so he just smiled and said, "Oh yeah, they're here." The woman looked at us with wonder, picked our brain a little on the concept, and drove back to her farm with an added sense of wonder about her home. This was mostly cleared farmland with greenbelts a few hundred feet across separating the properties. There was a large state park and river system nearby through which the bigfoots move, but the possible sasquatch that was heard the night before was in the greenbelt outside of one of these farms.

I guess the whole point of this blog entry is to encourage you folks at home to get out to the local wild areas and look around. You cannot find new evidence by sitting behind a computer screen, and since bigfoots range continent-wide, there is likely some decent habitat near you no matter where you live. It's good for your health to take walks, and good for your soul to be in the woods. You can get away from that which irks you, and spend quality time with loved ones. You might get lucky and come across something of interest to bigfooters, too. Bigfooting is easy, fun, and just a few miles away from most people's doorstep. Get out there!