June 9, 2013
Cryptomundian NMRNG asked the following question:
Since there’s no message board or forum on this site, I’ve been unable to post this inquiry in general, but I would appreciate it if someone who is attending this expedition could pose the following question to Dr. Meldrum (and feel to jump in below with your own opinions) and then follow up here with his answer:
Why are there virtually no sasquatch prints found in winter and for that matter, why has no one ever been able to track a sasquatch in the winter time, in the snow, and capture it on film, or capture it physically?
A decade ago, Loren Coleman opined that there are 2000 sasquatch in North America and more recent publications would suggest the figure is larger than that, potentially much larger. Figuring that most sasquatches live in a portion of the country where there is some significant snowfall in the winter (say at least 1500 of them live where there is snow on the ground 30 days a year), we have the following, figuring a 50″ stride length and a daily range of 8 miles per sasquatch (reasonable guesses): 1,267 footprints per mile x 8 miles/sasquatch day x 30 days of snow on the ground per year x 1500 sasquatches living in a location receiving snow = 456 million sasquatch prints in the snow every winter. Nearly half a billion sasquatch prints should be out there every winter. Even taking into consideration the short shelf life of a footprint in the snow from a variety of climatic factors, surely some of the millions of hunters out in the snow every November to January should have seen lots of footprints? Or any of the lesser numbers of snowshoe trekkers and backwoods skiers or snowmobilers? But very few people are reporting seeing these millions of footprints in the snow – why is that?
The easiest explanation I can think of is that hoaxsters are lazy and don’t get out of their comfy warm homes in the winter. And additionally, the most likely source of misidentification – bears – are laid up for the winter out of sight in their dens. But it really seems that the quantify of evidence proving the existence of sasquatch is too great to be explained adequately by the combination of hoaxes and misidentification, so there really should be large numbers of tracks found in the winter. When there’s no snow on the ground, a great number of tracks through rocky terrain, leaves, dry hard soil, etc… will never be seen and recognized, but that won’t be the case when there’s snow cover, where nearly all footprints will be visible.
No primate enters into anything close to a state of hibernation – unless most sasquatches have stockpiled a four-month supply of food in a hidden cave, they must be out and about every day to forage and hunt. Of course, no other primate has as nocturnal of habits as bigfoot is reputed to have, either. To me, this issue of lack of evidence of sasquatch in the wintertime is as much an argument against the existence of this cryptid as the lack of a body or skeleton.
So I would really appreciate it if someone who is going on this expedition or is otherwise in touch with Dr. Meldrum would pose this inquiry to him and post his response back here. I think his Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science was highly convincing and is the seminal book in this field, and I’d greatly like to learn his opinions on this quandary.
About Craig Woolheater
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Filed under Bigfoot, Bigfoot Report, Cryptomundo Exclusive, Cryptozoology, Evidence, Footprint Evidence, Pop Culture, Sasquatch, Skeptical Discussions