By Jerry Aaronson
It was the fall of 1976. I was 16 years old living in
Medford, Oregon. I grew up in a family that hunted a lot and spent a lot of
time in the woods. This was my first hunting trip where my cousin and I could
go out on our own. We drove his old gold Willies Jeep out to an area
approximately 12 miles east on Hwy 140 and at least 8 miles north to north east
up the mountain on Salt Creek Road. Even though I have hunted there a lot in
recent years I don’t remember the exact location in the Salt Creek area but I
know we were still on the south side of the mountain.
We found an area that we decide to walk through which was
mostly Manzanita and
some areas were really hard to get through. We spread out
about 50 yards from
each other and walked down hill parallel to one another. We
had been walking for
about 4 minutes at the most when I heard my cousin shoot his
rifle and then start
screaming “run! run! get out of here!” He sounded absolutely
terrified. I could hear
him running back in the opposite direction so I ran back up
the hill and came out on
the dirt road ahead of him and closest to the Jeep. I still
didn’t know what was going
on and expected a bear to come out behind him, but when he
came out on the road he was white as a sheet and barely able to talk and was crying. I just turned and ran because I
wasn’t sure what was going on. He then started panicking more. ( I later found
out because he thought I would get to the jeep before him and leave.) I was the
faster runner and I got to the jeep a little ahead of him and he came to the
jeep and tossed his rifle inside and could barley squeeze out “get in leave!
leave!” seeing him this scared, scared me really bad. I fumbled for the keys
and was able to get the jeep started and we headed out of the area I kept
asking him what happened and he would just say to leave. He was shaking and his
eyes were as wide as they would go. It wasn’t till we got down to the lower
part of salt creek that he was able to talk enough to tell me what happened.
He said as we were going through the brush that he heard something
make a noise in front of him in some Manzanita. so he took the barrel of his
gun and pushed the brush off to the side a bit and that is when he saw three
large sets of feet sticking up and three sets of eyes in the dark brush. When I asked him what kind of feet (thinking it was some kind of known animal that
scared him) he just said huge feet all in a row. He said he remembers seeing
reddish brown hair and hearing a low growling type sound that he said
originally he felt on his body. It scared him so bad that he took a step back
and fired a shot into the ground and took off running. He didn’t really want to
talk about it much and over the years when asked he would say he doesn’t want
to talk about it and eventually would say he doesn’t remember. Even though I wasn’t far away I don’t remember
hearing any growl myself but was moving through the brush at the same time so may not have heard it over my
own movement. He passed away from cancer in May of 2016 so I can no longer ask
him about it.
In 1993 I had resigned from being a policeman to move back
to Oregon and I started taking my boys hunting in Salt Creek. Eight years of
law-enforcement left my memory crowded with other traumatic things so the
incident with my cousin wasn’t even on the grid. On several different hunts on
the north side of the mountain I had rocks being thrown at me and thought ‘who
is throwing rocks?’ Rock throwing is done by hunters sometimes to try and spook
game out of brush and is usually done in an area where you are looking down
from a good view point (a smart buck won’t easily spook out with this method).
But there were no higher places adjacent to where I was. I started looking
around to see where the rocks were coming from and hid in the brush for some
time waiting and watching the game trail and old skid road not seeing or
hearing any hunters. There weren’t too many ways into where I was and I could
watch most of them but never saw anybody else during any of those incidents.
Not able to make since of where the rocks would be coming from I even speculated
that maybe the crows that were flying around where dropping the rocks, but non
of them were really close enough to me or where the rocks sounded like they
were landing nor do I know if crows do such a thing, I just know they are very
intelligent.
I walked away with no real answers. Several of these rocks
sounded like they hit within feet of me but I never saw them. On other hunts in
there l also experienced the intense feeling of being watched, but that just
made me more observant and was still not even thinking about a bigfoot, because
that was the furthest from my mind at the time. They say large cats will make
you feel that way, and we have plenty of cougar in that area, so I was on the
look out for cats when I had the experiences of being watched.
It wasn’t until I watched a show on Sasquatch that I had a
renewed interest in the whole bigfoot topic and found the BFRO site and started
reading a lot of the reports, some were recounting instances where people had
rocks thrown at them so it was then that I thought that both my rock throwing
experiences possibly could have been encounters with Bigfoot.
I later found a BFRO report from the same area (Report #674)
where two bow hunters found prints and had a sighting at one of the numerous
stock ponds in the Salt Creek area . It was then that I remembered the incident
with my cousin and thought that possibly his encounter was with a bigfoot
family. I just wish he would have talked about it so I could have asked him
more detailed questions. We hunted Salt Creek from the Salt Creek Ridge to
Wasson Canyon and from the Hwy 140 side south to the Butte falls highway north
and it does have a lot of game and ponds. Indigenous game would be, Elk, black
tail deer, cougar, bear, bobcat, coyote wild turkey, grouse, quail, and they
have a lot of open range cattle. There is a lot of blackberries. Other Indigenous
plants and trees would be Scrub Oak, Cedar, Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir, Vining Willow, and Manzanita to name a few. Sadly as with most areas now all the old
growth timber is gone and it has been logged pretty heavily in recent years.
Last time I was in there the double day area still had some old growth.
I do remember a report of somebody spotting a family of
three Bigfoot in the Green Springs area above Ashland, Oregon on the south end
of the rogue valley area and that would have been in the early 70's. I believe
those were reported to have reddish colored hair and that is only about 20
miles as a crow flies from where we were in 1976 when my cousin had his
encounter.
The BFRO report that I mentioned (#674) was one of the few that actually had
the reporting parties name on it, so I looked in the Medford phone book and
made a phone call. I was able to get ahold of the man who’s name was *(removed)*,
and asked if he could remember which stock pond he was at when he saw Bigfoot, (wondering
if it could be the one up by Salt Creek Ridge), or maybe one of several up
closer to Wasson Canyon. He couldn’t
remember but was very nice and seemed like a level-headed man. He said that they had found the tracks at the
pond and eventually went and got plaster to cast the print. It was during the casting that something
moved on the hillside above them, and he witnessed two hairy legs running into
the brush. He said he never hunted in
there again after that. I asked if he still had the print but
unfortunately he had loaned it to his nephew and never saw it again.
Blogpost by Dan Lindholm
