Speaking again of: Where are the Sasquatch Snow Tracks?

I checked out the three videos posted above. The first two were essentially worthless because of lack of resolution and clarity – the first looked to me to be a guy-in-a-gorilla-suit hoax and the second likely showed a person goofing around in the snow on top of the hill. Most of the bigfoot in the snow videos have to be hoaxes because there’s no follow-up. Every genuine bigfoot captured on video would be followed up by the videographer walking up to the site of the video capture and getting close-ups of the footprints. None of those videos do that. The third video, that of the bigfoot trackway in the deep snow of northern Minnesota was much more convincing. The “I can’t walk without dragging my feet through this deep snow” commentary and demonstration could have been exaggerated and it’s possible the tracks were by someone wearing smaller snowshoes, but the stride length did appear to be longer than what a person could typically produce in deep snow, without drag marks through the snow from one footprint to the next.

Speaking of what was shown in that video, PhotoExpert, did you happen to watch that bigfoot trackway video? What did you see in the background? Two things: woods, and snowmobiles. The people in the video saw the tracks while out snowmobiling through the woods. I don’t have the specific figures for what portion of snowmobile trails are in the open versus through the woods, but I would hazard a conservative guess that at least 30% of snowmobile trails are in the woods or immediately alongside wooded areas and it could easily be double that figure based on the hundreds of miles of snowmobile trails I’ve seen from roads or highways in Wisconsin and in Minnesota or that I’ve hiked in the summer and fall that are marked with snowmobile signs for the winter. There are over 25,000 miles of snowmobile trails in my state of Wisconsin alone, so you’ve got to figure that with the other northern states and pretty much all of Canada combined, there has to be more than a HUNDRED THOUSAND miles of snowmobile trails through the woods of North America. So yes, snowmobilers are out in bigfoot habitat.

Also, while I’ve never been to Yosemite in the winter, I have been to Yellowstone in late December and there were hundreds of tourists there, skiing, snowmobiling, taking snow cat tours, etc… and I imagine it would be the same at many other large parks. So PE, your ignorance is starting to show, rather badly. Looking back, I see it was you who made the ridiculous comments about the ski hills as well. I couldn’t tell from a comment above, but are you from Australia or someplace like Florida, where there isn’t much if any snow? That at least would partially excuse your ignorance. You’re an odd duck – you’re quick to point out the obvious when there’s a too frequent implausible account here of some alleged cryptic sighting, but when I raise a questions about a genuine issue, you immediately reject it as the work of a troll, citing spurious and erroneous reasons for jumping to that conclusion.

As for your statement that one finds sasquatch only in wooded, remote habitat, well, there is plenty of that in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, particularly in the mountainous regions that cover most of those three states, yet there are more sasquatch sightings reported in flat, relatively featureless farm-and-ranchland prevalent Nebraska than in those three states, double the number of sightings in Iowa compared to those three states combined, and nearly triple the number of sightings in Oklahoma as one finds in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine combined. (source: BFRO.net). Why? Clearly trees and remote hills alone do not provide the answer.

Are there photos and videos of alleged tracks in the snow posted online? Sure. And like the bulk of them taken during the other three seasons of the year, they are generally at best inconclusive and much more typically, hoaxes. Other than the Bossburg prints and the example from the 1980s someone cited above, where else has any bigfoot author mentioned any bigfoot tracks in the snow in more recent times, let alone over the last two decades? Has there even been a single mention in the written literature of bigfoot tracks in the snow since 2000? I’m not aware of any, but I haven’t read that many books. OK, so let’s put together a list of all of the television episodes of people studying bigfoot who thought to cover tracks in the snow – I’ll list all of the episodes of Finding Bigfoot, Monsterquest, Animal X, Destination Truth (maybe – I stopped watching it after the second season because it was so awful), Nat Geo specials, etc.. that cover Bigfoot in the winter:

That’s right, zero. There was one episode of Finding Bigfoot where they fly in a helicopter to the top of a snow-covered mountain where someone shot a distant photo of a skier who hiked to the top of the next peak over and they misidentified this figure as a bigfoot, but they did not mention tracks or address the topic of sasquatch in the winter. None of the shows about this cryptid have ever covered sasquatch in the wintertime (to the best of my knowledge – please correct me if I’m wrong). I would say that between the written and televised media (i.e. the most credible portion of the recordings of the study of sasquatch), that’s a significant gap in coverage, one worthy of my original inquiry.

PhotoExpert, you flippantly dismissed my inquiry with a speculative response about migration (and someone else suggested it in a non-flippant fashion). Let’s suppose sasquatches do migrate south in the winter. Where do they go? Are they hiking hundreds or thousands of miles to the southern third of our country? How about the ones spotted in Alaska and further north in Canada? Are they going 2,000 miles or more south? Do they really need to? Virtually all reports of sasquatch close enough to see the beast’s coat report it is thick and at least medium length, tending more toward several inches in length, not the sort of thin coat that would be inadequate for colder weather. Sasquatches allegedly live in many of the same part of North America as the gray wolf. Wolves tend not to migrate during the winter – they may follow caribou herds when that is their primary local pray, but the wolves living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan don’t flee the snow every winter and their usual prey essentially stays put when the snow falls.

If sasquatch migrates, wouldn’t the incidents of sightings of roadway crossings be greatly increased in November and late March to Early April? Is there any such statistic that would prove this? I haven’t heard of it and that seems like it would be something I would investigate if I dedicated a significant portion of my life to studying this legendary beast. But no one else seems to be asking these sorts of questions. Wildlife biologists who study caribou and wildebeests and other such migratory mammals surely study patterns of movement, but I’ve never heard of any of the handful of more serious bigfoot investigators out there considering this migratory theory.

And let’s say that sasquatch does move south – the Minnesota ones head down to the Ozarks, for instance and the Michigan ones head to Kentucky or Tennessee. One would have to assume that the number of sightings in these states would be higher in the winter than in other times of the year (when not only the population has increased from the migrations south, but there’s less leaf cover behind which an 8′ tall mammal can hide), but that’s not the case, per the state sightings reports on BFRO.net. And since there are sightings year-round in these states, that would suggest a resident population. What predatory mammalian species, man included, has ever welcomed competitors into its territory in the history of our planet? Sorry, but I don’t buy southern sasquatches welcoming their northern kin “Hey! There’s Uncle Aaaarghnnahaahooo and Auntie Neeenugnog! We’ve been expecting you for days! Make yourselves at home – we’ve got plenty of food.” As far as I know, no one’s ever reported any sasquatch fights and territorial conflicts, but there would have to be some if northern sasquatches migrated south – ALL predatory mammals defend their hunting territories. To me, the migration theory is not impossible, but it’s not very plausible, either.

PhotoExpert, you asked if I’ve read Loren Coleman. Yes, I have. It may be almost sacrilegious to say this here on a site where he was a founder (I have no knowledge of his exact role in starting and leaving this site), but I thought his Bigfoot: The True Story of Apes In America had a decent portion on the Native American traditions and legends, it had some OK original research material he conducted, but was otherwise rather poorly written, very poorly edited, and it was biased and amateurish, clearly the product of a bigfoot believer, not an objective study of the creature. For specifics, see my review on Amazon – it’s the lengthy 2/5 star review, the only one that gives specific examples and page numbers for each of the many problems with the book. Coleman’s prominence in the field over multiple decades should not give his ideas and theories any more credibility than they are worth based on their objective merits without regard to who came up with that theory.

There are some long-time regulars who posted above back in June who casually dismissed my inquiries, but they did not do much more than put casual thought into rejecting the points I made and questions I asked. Asking “What does it do and where does it go?” are not dumb questions to ask about any living species. And so far, my suspicions appear to be correct, that other than discussion of a few decades-old reports, there is virtually no mention in the most reliable portion of the sasquatch media (i.e. in books and television shows on sasquatch**) of what bigfoot does in the winter and why there aren’t more tracks. And no one has answered that rather pertinent question: when 90+% of its tracks are going to be visible on snow-covered ground (as opposed to what, 1 to maybe 10% of its tracks in non-winter months), why has no one tracked down a sasquatch in the snow? These are valid questions, ones that are intended to shed genuine light on this subject. I’m asking questions that should be addressed in books and shows about sasquatch, if those who were investigating this cryptid were doing a thorough, comprehensive, and objective job. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be doing that.

People should be asking hard questions and addressing problems with the bigfoot theories, not sweeping them under the rug. I understand that Jeff Meldrum is himself loath to admit that he’s been conned by hoaxers in the past and he does not adequately acknowledge the role of hoaxers in tainting the quantity of sasquatch evidence out there; at least he didn’t in Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science (and I thought very highly of that book, but not so much so that I could not assess it objectively). People should be asking about seeming inconsistencies in what is reported about sasquatch. Washington and California (the mountainous northern portion of the state) lead the country in sasquatch sightings. But why is it that there are more sightings in Ohio, Illinois, and Florida, than there are in the state that sits between California and Washington – Oregon? (source: BFRO.net).

The bottom line is that I’m not trying to be some sort of obnoxious miscreant who delights in making conflict on an internet site. I’m merely asking hard questions about issues that the small handful of professional and semi-professional sasquatch researchers out there should be asking and addressing, but seem to be avoiding. That does not make me a troll.

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