Cryptomundo
for Bigfoot, Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents and More

My son-in-law, who had taken a class from Dr. Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State University, had made arrangements for us to pick up two plaster cast Bigfoot prints at Dr. Meldrum’s office and bring them with us to Spring Creek. One of the plaster casts was for my son-in-law and the other was for my niece’s son, who lives in Las Vegas and is a true Bigfoot believer.

For those who are unaware, Dr. Meldrum is one of the foremost experts on what we do and don’t know about Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, as some call the creature. As a researcher, he has experienced a lot of ridicule, mostly from people who don’t know his field as well as he does or from self-professed outdoor experts who claim that if they haven’t seen a Bigfoot, they don’t exist.

I have never seen a Bigfoot and I don’t mean to lend credence to those who believe in Bigfoot, nor am I unable to accept the possibility that there may be creatures in the mountains that I have never seen. However, let me relate an experience that I was involved with.

Several years ago, just before deer and elk season started, my wife asked to see the part of a certain area we could drive into with our four-wheel drive pickup. She had heard my son and I talk about about this remote area that a friend of ours, who is a hunting guide, recommended we hunt in.

We drove into the area as far as we could and parked the truck and started to hike up a very steep trail. It had rained a couple of days earlier, and the normally solid trail had become soft and muddy.

About a half mile up the trail, we ran into a couple of footprints going across the trail in the soft mud. The footprints had the familiar look of human prints, except they were pretty wide across the ball of the foot. By using my foot for comparison, we estimated that they were about 14 inches long.

Admittedly, I didn’t know for sure what made the tracks, but I did know what didn’t make them. They were not the prints of a bear, mountain lion, elk, moose, deer or anything else that I knew to inhabit that mountain area.

The weather and temperatures at the time would have made it dangerous for a human to travel barefoot and would have probably caused hypothermia in a short period of time.

In addition to the size of the footprint, from what we could tell, the bottom of the footprints had a lot of lines running several directions, indicating that whatever caused them was accustomed to traveling barefoot.

I didn’t have a camera with me, so we marked the spot so I could find it again. As soon as we got home, I pulled Dr. Meldrum’s website up on my computer and looked at pictures of the plaster casts he has made over the years. We saw one pair of plaster casts that looked very similar to the tracks we had seen.

My wife called Dr. Meldrum and spoke with him about the tracks. He seemed interested, told us that there had been a couple of alleged sightings of tracks in that area, and asked if we had taken pictures of the tracks? We said no, but I would go back with a camera and take pictures of them. By the time I got back, it rained really hard and the tracks looked so much different. The only reason I knew I was in the right place was from the marker I had left.

When I recounted our experience to the hunting guide, who had recommended the area to us, he said that the last time he had been in that area he too had seen tracks.

He said that as he was about to turn in for the night, he heard a cry close by that he had never heard in the mountains before. The cry spooked him so bad that he broke camp and drove home.

“So you recommended the area to my son and I,” I asked?

“Well, yeah, there really are a lot of deer and elk in that area,” he said.

“But the cry you heard wasn’t a deer or elk,” I said.

He thought a few seconds and said, “you’re right, it wasn’t.”

I still don’t know what to think of the idea that a Bigfoot creature lives in the mountains, but I’m curious enough that I would like to know what made those footprints.