Childhood encounter in BC, by S. Miller

Childhood encounter in BC, by S. Miller:

Approximately 1973, July. I must have been 12 years old. My grandfather lived in a cabin between Salmo, BC, and Erie. So there was a full moon, because as a kid I was always outside to watch the stars. I used to howl at the moon, play wolf a lot. I always walked by myself down logging roads to get to my friends who lived on the main road. Little nervous about bears. They spoke about the boogeyman, we all laughed…

We’d go fishing down the creek. Roaring water so loud you couldn’t hear anything. A group of us went on a hike to go fish, it was 1/2 mile from the cabin, we were maybe 3 miles from any main roads. Five of us, we found teepee poles. I was so excited, about the possibility that an Indian once lived here. Poles were about twenty feet long. Pine needles all about and I found stacked rocks too. The boys tried to pull the logs down, no way they could even move them. The kids moved down the trail. I was there a few minutes, touching the poles, marveling at their height… I think the boys knocked a pile rocks over, I put them back up.

We went fishing… I sat by myself, fishing with worms, a bamboo pole in one hand… I saw a couple rocks bounce by me, nobody was around. I could see the rest of my friends fishing down stream. I looked about, but just passed it off.

It started getting dark, so we all headed back the same way, past the teepee poles… Very quiet, no birds… We were laughing a lot… I always walked down to the main road, it was a one mile long logging road… No homes anywhere until I got to the main lane’s few scattered homes mini subdivision.

At dusk, I’d leave and walk back up to the cabin. Very steep drop to the creek, lots of thick trees, brush, steep wall of earth and stone on the left, as the road curves uphill to the cabin. A twenty minute walk. As dusk was comming on, I got nervous about meeting black bears… So I would sing the whole way, making enough noise so I wouldn’t startle bear.

Half way home I could smell this rank smell, I thought ”dead skunk??” I couldn’t breath, so I jogged up the road to get up some wind… I stopped… started walking again, when a quarter (pound?) size rock came bounce past me… I turned around but saw nothing…

I kept going and another rock came bouncing by me. I turned around and yelled: ”Hey! Stop that!”… thinking the boys were now following me, teasing me… I walked over the embankment, it was too dark in the trees to see anything, the light was fading. OK, I started up the road again and a third rock landed by my feet. I picked it up, threw it back into the trees, I yelled: ”Stop throwing rocks at me!!”

Then the smell hit me again. It was so bad, I held my breath, ran up the road until I had breath… It was better, but I kept getting whiffs now and then. It was getting darker… I thought ”the boys are really mean”, so I ran the rest of the way up the road. I saw the cabin, hurried in, told my mom how the boys were throwing rocks at me. ”Would you call Mrs T?”, I tell her!

A few minutes later, mom said: ”the boys are downstairs in the basement watching TV”… Nobody believed me about the rocks, my mom said it was just a skunk… It’s been almost 50 years until I just realized, after watching the TV program ”Finding Bigfoot”… I was in the presence of my own bigfoot…

PS: My little brother was 7 years old and was exploring around the old barns and up the road out of sight behind the cabin… He froze up, said he felt like he was being watched. He got so scared he ran back and refused to walk anywhere, he made my mom drive him… I thought he was just being a spoiled brat then… We watched that program together and we both realized what we had experienced was Bigfoot. Doing research in the area, I really do believe it.

SunBôw’s reply:

Greetings S. Miller, thanks for sharing your experience with our readers.

I spent time in Salmo and put up a teepee there that was visible from the main road and stood up for some years. Your discovery of teepee poles in the woods could indeed have been remnants of an old camp, possibly Native.

However, the Sasquatch are known to build tree structures, sometimes resembling teepee shapes, as well as rock piles, as territorial markers and communication devices. I found several such structures myself, namely in the nearby Kootenays. Yet, it is difficult to know for sure what those poles were meant for without having observed them or received a detailed description of the structure. But there is a possibility that it was a Sasquatch construction.

What makes me think so is the rest of your story and how a Sasquatch threw rocks at you to send you away from that site that the boys had disturbed. Since you put the rock pile back up, this might have been the reason why the Sasquatch decided to choose you as you were likely the best suited of the group to communicate with them. They surely noticed that as a child, you were brave enough to walk alone in the woods at night. As you noticed, when they throw rocks, they do not harm anyone, it is just a warning to stay clear from some areas.

The repulsive smell you noticed is another way they have to repel someone from a particular site they are protecting. The stench is not experienced during peaceful encounters and they even at times exude pleasant scents. They can also exert a psychological pressure and induce a hypnotic fear in cases when they face threats or intruders they want to push back out.

Unfortunately, most people in such cases react with fear, understandably let’s say, for lack of knowledge and understanding about those guardians of the forest. The message they sent is rather a lesson of respect and teachings about their role as forest protectors. They never contact anyone by coincidence and once they know you, it is for life. So you can expect that they know who and where you are and if you can overcome the fear of the unknown, they could indeed make good friends and teachers, if you wish so.

Best blessings on your quest…