Bigfoot Howls!

'Take me hoooome, Country Roaaads!'

Greenwater, Washington is a 'blinkandmissit' town on Hwy 410 that has a long history of Bigfoot encounters going back to the 1960s. According to the BFRO, which is the only solid collection of Bigfoot data that includes some vetting, at 78 reports Pierce County holds the honor of having the highest number of BF or possible BF witness accounts in the entire world. 

That red dot, Bigfoot central, dude.

And within Pierce County, which includes Fort Lewis and Mt.Rainier, the area known at Greenwater, between Enumclaw, Wa. and Chinook Pass has hosted at least 20 class A,B and C reports describing full -on hairy creatures in broad daylight, huge dark figures that cross the highway in wee hours and an assortment of knocks, growls and howls that defy conventional categorization.

Greenwater General Store - There's a logbook inside for BF enthusiasts to sign

I have listed this fact here on this site a few times because it makes sense that, for anyone seeking the truth regarding any unusual phenomenon, you ultimately must go to where it happens, and especially where it happens the most.
It’s puzzling to me why more emphasis on learning the true nature of the Sasquatch mystery does not seem to be focused here, but for myself I have taken on the task and to date have hiked and camped in this area numerous times. What have I learned? What have I found? 

Yours Truly, sweating like an overweight horse

My wife and I saw a large bear cross the FS road one afternoon. It disappeared over the road edge within 4 seconds, too quickly to snap a photo. We also saw a couple of mountain goats lounging on high rocks in the sun at Noble Knob, which I did manage to record with my cellphone.




Beyond this, nothing unequivocally in the manner of a giant hairy biped. And anyone else who has been there should tell you the same thing. This is the essence of the Sasquatch mystery.

No captured creature, no captured images, no bones, not even any good hair or scat samples. So why are we still so certain that there is giant proto-human hiding in the forests there?

'I hate the moon!'

The answer is, honesty. As researchers, we are pressed into the need to be detectives, and part of the detective process includes some understanding of psychology. People lie and eyewitness testimony is frequently unreliable, even to the point of being inadmissible in court, so the task for BF investigators means we have to suss out the things that have ‘the ring of truth’ and separate those things from obvious flaws and outright fabrications.



In the BFRO database is this report:   http://www.bfro.net/gdb/show_report.asp?id=32536
Here is an excerpt from that report, made in 2012, from an encounter two people had while camping in Greenwater.
LOCATION DETAILS: It is mostly deserted in the fall because of cold and is an isolated location on secluded hillside with non friendly vehicle road.very dark at night and lots of animals and fish in lake!
NEAREST TOWN: greenwater Wa.
NEAREST ROAD: Off of fs70off of hwy410 (precise location edited to protect the site)
OBSERVED: I am from Cle Elum Wa. and I am reporting an encounter with an unknown creature that I was sure was not a bear or animal such as that nature. This incidence took place over a two day period in the forested area of Wa. near green water area off of FS road 70 at a lake in the Greenwater Wa. area off of hwy 410.

My husband and I camped at this lake every Thanksgiving weekend from 2002-2005 and on our last holiday 4 day weekend that we were there we experienced something of an encounter with what I believe to be a bigfoot. It was a Saturday morning when this started and it started with huge ear shattering deep growling howl like screams....more like warnings from something that did not want us there. We were the only human occupants in that area since it is very cold and
The witnesses have camped in this area many times.
We were cooking breakfast when this screaming at us started and it was such an unusual sound that it made my hair stand up and made me afraid to go into the woods to use the bathroom. There were many of these gutteral warning screams and they were watching us and I know this for fact since I was being brave and going to go down towards the lake and it scream growled at me and the force was so intense that the vibration from the sound literally knocked me back a step!I did not go down to the lake since I knew this noise was a warning! It was warning us to stay away from certain parts of the area that we were camping at. that night as we lay sleeping in our tent trailer there was a wind storm and I was waken by the sounds of our cooking gear being clanged like it was being kicked and thrown about. I was scared out of my wits when I heard what sounded like a load of logs being dumped beside the tent trailer. I woke my husband and was yelling at him to get up and lets just leave and come back in the morning and pack up and go. He said no and we stayed the night and when I got up the next morning and went outside all of our cooking stuff was all back where it had been except for some items that had been misplaced but not by the wind. I can not explain why I heard the metal pans clanging in the night like they were bing banged together and I was thinking from the wind storm our stuff would be everywhere but it wasn't. The screaming growls started again that Sunday morning as we were moving about camp and fixin breakfast.

This report made in 2012 was investigated by BFRO researcher Scott Taylor.  I have met Scott a number of times at conferences and have exchanged information with him in person and via email and I will vouch for his character. As a hunter, aerospace engineer and as an intelligent, diligent, detail-oriented investigator, I think his investigative work is beyond reproach.
Scott has told me of a few details of some investigations he has done that he keeps private in order to use as points of veracity to tell if a witness is lying or not. In this report, he concludes;
I interviewed this witness over the phone. A site investigation is not possible at this time due to winter snow pack.
Most of the time when they go to this site, they have the feeling that they are being watched. They usually hear wood knocking and whistles. This particular time they both experienced repeated very loud screaming anytime they ventured very far from camp. On one occasion, she attempted to walk down to the lake, and she was screamed at with every step. She said that it was so loud that she could feel it. She turned around and went back.
‘There is a combination of occurrences here which taken together, lead me to the conclusion that this is a credible report.’

In regard to the credibility of the witness, with nothing to gain by contacting the BFRO, I too suggest that this person is telling the truth.

Right about where the 'G' in Greenwater is...

I list this single story, out the 20 or so from the same area because my wife and I had a similar experience near this location last fall, 2018. Here it is;

We were hiking the Greenwater Lakes trail (Tuesday, 9-9-2018) with a friend and had gone about 2 ½ miles in when we encountered two ladies on horseback. The trail is popular with hikers and horse people since there are ‘fords' cut out of the trail to allow horses to bypass the log bridges along the trail.

That's my boy, Yogi, he's cool.

We continued on to about mile 3 when we heard a scream and after returning about 50 yards or so to a boardwalk on the trail, we saw that one of the horsewomen had fallen with her horse off of the wooden footpath and into a muddy bog, just a foot lower than the bridge.

Traumatic scene, the horse was stuck

 She was pinned under the horse and it was a frightening thing to witness as she struggled to extract her leg from under the thrashing 800 lb.animal. There was nothing anyone could do but stand back and with some effort, (and her girlfriend managing to get to the reigns of the fallen horse)the woman freed herself and sat exhausted in the mud. The horse continued to thrash for a few moments until it too fell back and slowed it’s struggle. I approached and saw that the horses hind legs had slipped underneath the boardwalk and it could not get any traction in the mud. At this point, another group of hikers arrived and when nobodies cellphone worked, the woman in the mud said, “Oh, this is awful, and I didn’t even bring my gun.”

What could we do? 

I’m sure every one there who heard this felt the same as I did, when my heart nearly fell out of my chest. But at the same time, a small, logical part of my brain remembered that when horses break their legs, it is considered inhumane to let them suffer in pain, the likelihood of them surviving and walking again being nearly non-existant.

About this time, before someone else showed up and offered this distraught woman a pistol, I told my wife we needed to go for help. As we moved past the scene, the lady in the mud said it might be possible to contact a local Horse Rescue Team she called WASART (Washington State Animal Response Team) and that they had equipment and expertise that could help. Our friend who was with us, Nagela, said she would run back to the trailhead to get to a phone and she took off like a greyhound. Originally from Brazil, this was Nagela’s first hike in this country and we were both mortified that she had to see this and also amazed at how fast she ran down the trail.
My wife and I tried to follow, thinking we could possibly help transport equipment back up to the scene and the rest of the hikers stayed with the ladies and the horses. 

With Nagela far ahead and out of sight, we got to about the halfway point at mile 2 where we stopped to drink water. It was a clearing on the trail, a high rock cliff to the south of us.

Stubbed his bigtoe on a stump?

It was at this point that we heard a scream.

A very loud, echoing howl that was so strange that my wife and I could only look at each other, mouths open, eyes wide. I kept my head and after the scream died down, I played it back in my head and counted the seconds. Seven or eight full seconds it went on, beginning with mid-range growl increasingly rapidly in pitch and volume, then descending in loudness as it bounced off the forested walls of the drainage we were in, and before I could ask my wife what she thought, she said ‘THAT was a Bigfoot scream!’
It was a mixture of mild shock and mild elation to hear something like this for me, and I can say now that it sounded very much like other suspected Sasquatch scream recordings that are found online, clearly made by something with big lungs.  My wife agreed with me about the duration, and disagreed when I suggested that maybe it was the horse, back up the trail, saying “No…too far away, that wasn’t a horse sound.” And she added “it sounded metallic.”

One creepy lookin' dude

We were still buzzed with the shock of the horse accident and now we were dealing with this strange sound to process as we began moving down the trail again. It is worth noting that ANOTHER strange thing happened in the next five minutes on this trail.

As we neared an incline, I heard a noise and looked uphill to see a flash of white and blue on the trail through the trees and turned to my wife, who said ‘Oh, maybe its the fire department.’ She later said she saw ‘someone' coming down the hill, but after a short jag to the right and then back toward the incline we saw and heard nothing more. Gone..
I stopped at about the place where we saw and heard the ‘person' and I looked into the surrounding forest thinking maybe this person or persons had gone off trail quickly for some reason. Nothing. 

How weird. The entire afternoon had gotten very surreal since the horse had fallen, and as we continued down the hill we compared notes on both the scream and the vanishing hiker. 

He MIGHT have a bitchin UFO, you don't know.

Someone more inclined toward magical thinking might think things like portals exist here, but I try very hard to stick to prosaic explanations for seemingly strange events. The common hueristic, Occams Razor usually helps make sense of things, but with so little to go on aside from some visual, aural trauma we had experienced with the horse, not much else made sense.

Now, to round this story up I can summarize it all this way:
Nagela reached the trail head and met a Forest Service Ranger who called Greenwater RD.
We met members of a Horse Rescue Team at the trail head who established radio contact with Fire personnel who reached the accident site.
After a few more minutes they radioed back to say that the horse had struggled to its feet and the group was on it’s way back. We were there when the group of rescuers and horse people came out of the woods, seemingly the horse and rider escaped with only bruises.

click on pics to enlarge

I don’t necessarily believe the scream had anything to do with the horse accident. But if we accept the idea that large hairy Cryptids might exist in the area, then the commotion of the twenty or so individuals deep in its territory making noise under duress might explain the unusual daylight utterance. (Most BF screams seem to happen after dark.) Also, it is entirely possible that a Bigfoot research group on a higher, adjacent spur road could have been ‘call-blasting', which is a practice that some researchers do. I did a number of web searches looking for information about that possibility and found nothing from the locals (Barb,Gabby and Samantha, and WASRT (Washington State Sasquatch Research Team) about call blasting or any recent activity. 

Horse and rider unscathed. Amazing.

Another set of aspects that stick out now in retrospect are that, upon their arrival back at the trail head, the woman who was thrown and pinned by her horse told my wife “the emergency people were just arriving at the wooden bridge and Cochise just bolted up out of the mud like nothing was wrong!”

Wife, doing the mind meld on a horse

 And perhaps a stranger point is the ‘metallic’ sound my wife and I heard in the quality of the howl.
I looked online for the term ‘metallic’ and ‘scream' and found nothing, but I recall from my fairly extensive UFO/Abductee book library at least a couple of accounts that mention the metallic sound in conjunction with encounters with non-human entities. The more likely explanation remains, however, that there was a human somewhere above us with a recording and an amplified speaker, blasting a call to either evoke a response or just as a prank. 

'You like to golf, huh? We'll see about THAT!'

I spent a night camping in Ashford with a researcher friend who did call-blasting this way and while the efficacy of the practice seems dubious, its not hard to do. Here’s an example of a Bigfoot howl that matches very nearly the sound we heard that afternoon in Sept. 2018;

https://soundcloud.com/srobinson125/bigfoot-howl

The listener will note that I offer this soundcloud file as the closest example of what we heard, not the actual sound. If it was not humans call-blasting up mountain somewhere, then this was a wonderful, if quizzical thing to experience.