Discussion: Sasquatch in Hendy Woods

Who I'm gonna call? Not Ghostbusters.

I arrived at Hendy Woods before the crack of dawn, and patiently waited for the ranger to show up, so I could pay my fee and enter without breaking the 8am rule. And inside the building which functions as the park entry kiosk, she called my attention to the life size sasquatch figure made of things like coconut strands by the wall.

Later on, walking down from the Water Tank on the aptly named Water Tank Trail at Hendy Woods, maybe 100m from the tank down the hill, I heard a noise...

A deep, gutteral, grunt-like clearing of the throat. My hearing radar sensed it was coming from the northwest, perhaps 100 meters into the forest, but it was loud, it had force.

I'm like, that's not a bear. Not a deer. Not a mountain lion. What is that.

And for the first time in my life, I believe in the sasquatch.

What kind of animal could make that noise? I so wish I was recording. I only heard it once. I didn't have the presence of mind to go into the woods in the direction of the sound to investigate. I just kept walking down the trail, thinking what could that be?

What could it be?

None of this is embellished. All the details are true. I was not on any drugs or medication.

So, you heard a noise, and you're extrapolating that to a (mythical?) large animal that has always escaped definitive detection, which you happened to have just been reminded of?

If this were in Australia, I definitely would have suggested it was a drop bear!

Could a virile koala perhaps have escaped from a nearby zoo? I heard one while out running tonight; basically they sound like a cross between a bush pig and a motorbike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVQGFtihvr0

I didn't see or hear the mythical jjcote today but I still believe he was at Oringen!

Not intending to be a sensationalist.

I sincerely wonder what the sound was, it was something like I've never heard before. Is there some critter I don't know about that's not a sasquatch that makes that utterance?

And just trippy that the ranger would point out a model of a sasquatch to me in the morning, like she's in the know about local sasquatch activity or something?

When I was a kid I had a heavy smoking grandfather who made a sound like that every morning.

Elk make some pretty impressive grunts and snorts. Deer also have a pretty surprising variety of calls.

Not sure what is native here, but I'm also betting on a hoofed mammal.
I've heard some very surprising sounds out of them, both in NE US and Norway.
Recent legal changes have eliminated the liklihood of human lookouts for forest farmers in this part of CA, right?

Hmmm I wonder what the elk range in California is. Tule Elk exist further up the coast, but I didn't think they were as far south as the Anderson Valley. They also exist in Point Reyes, and the Anderson Valley is in between.

A couple years ago I was backpacking in the Marble Mountain Wilderness. I was cowboy camping without a tent, and happened to be a little too close to a large buck deer's favorite watering hole. It was unhappy to see me, and the snorting sounds it made were pretty intimidating.

I recall that the elk around Red Bluff also made some pretty impressive sounds when I was scouting terrain there during the winter rutting season.

I think a couple decades ago, you would have been right about the elk population around Anderson Valley, but it looks like there's a growing population in the area now.
https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Mammals/Elk/T...

A combination of relief and disappointment...

I heard a mountain lion grumble and thrash through the woods with quite sasquatch-like sounds at a BAOC event 2 years ago. Never saw it to confirm myself - but when I passed Fyodor on a trail about 2 minutes later, he asked "did you see the Mountain Lion?" which apparently had run away from my approach, right past him...

Bear ?

Feral hog?

Obviously 30-50 feral hogs

It was probably just a bunch of cats stuck together.