Hello, Nice to meet you. I'm Jessica. I'm a mother of 6 and the wife of my highschool sweetheart for 15 years.
When I was 12, just before my 13th birthday, my family moved to North Idaho (from near Boise). I have seen and heard various possible and probable bigfoot related things once in a while since then. Many of them I had mentally filed away in the "pretend it didn't happen" drawer as too weird to actually deal with at the time, but I've been able to think about them more rationally now as an adult in my mid-thirties and I realize that many of these memories fit together if I leave my mind open to the possibility that there is some sort of large undocumented ape species out there. I still feel very uncomfortable with sharing my stories but I *want* to be able to share them, if that makes sense. Anyway, nice to meet you. Thanks for letting me join.
My family moved to a mountain overlooking the Dworshak Reservoir on the Orofino side. In retrospect, I think, odd as it sounds, a family group lived on the mountain peak across the dirt road from us. I saw them once, meandering up their mountain like they were out for a Sunday walk. Almost every experience I had connects to that mountain top and to the two main draws coming down from that mountain top. My experiences there happened between 1996 and 2003 and range from simply feeling watched/uneasy to the aforementioned sighting. I'm not a Bigfoot expert in the least so I'd rather just tell my experiences exactly as they happened and leave it up to the reader to decide if they think it was really Bigfoot related or not, rather than act like I know for sure. Should I tell my experiences here in this post or is there a better way?
Okay first strange incident was in Spring of 2006. I was 13, my sister was 9 or 10 and my brother was 7. We hadn't really explored much yet because we moved in the week before Thanksgiving and those who were in the Orofino area that winter knew it snowed 3 feet Thanksgiving week and then there were bad mud slides and flooding- rough winter. So coming from Boise area and not being used to so much snow yet, us kids pretty much kept to the yard and driveway until spring. When things were pretty much thawed out and it was just rainy, that's when we finally got to explore a bit. We weren't afraid of the woods because we'd had several acres at our previous house with trees and water and had spent our days watching foxes and beavers and herons and digging caves and fishing... we were wild at heart so we looked forward to exploring the woods.
Imagine for simplicity's sake, the road is curved like an s with an extra bump, so maybe like a very rounded M. Imagine my family's 5 acres was in the right bump of the M and across the road uphill from us (from the center of the M upward) was the top of the mountain we were on. We called that mountain top something like "Mr. N's Knob/hill" because it was owned by our next door neighbor to the right who owned several hundred acres around us. That hill was strange, like an optical illusion, because it was so much bigger and more rounded than it appeared, so no matter how far up it you climbed, you always felt like you still had the same amount of hill left to climb before you would reach the top. It looked so small and easy to climb from our house but it was just that it was so nicely rounded that you couldn't actually see all the way up it, making it look smaller. The hill itself was mostly bald on the side that faced us, and we would come to find out eventually that the treeline on the far side was, by contrast, almost all the way at the top. There were 2 main draws that drained off that mountain, and you could imagine the draws crossing the road approximately at the peaks of the bumps of the M. At the bottom of the draw on the right of our imaginary M, (which went along the East edge of our property,) it flattened out where it ran into an old logging road that connected our back pasture to the pasture behind Mr. N's house. My parents used that short cut to visit him, and he us, several times.
Halfway between the logging road and the main road, my siblings and I were playing. The first day we were playing there it was raining but the tree canopy overhead was thick enough to keep us mostly dry. I don't remember noticing much for sounds, aside from the rain. We were noticing trilium coming up all around there and admiring them. After the first day, we noticed something was making a sound just out of sight like tapping rocks together 5 or 6 times in a row. It would come from one way, then a little farther off and in a different direction, always from heavy timber with lots of underbrush. I don't know how many days we played there, but each day we would get a little further up the draw toward where it crossed the road. I remember going out one day that week and feeling uneasy because we kept hearing loud stick breaking sounds from the heavy brush near the fence. As we meandered up the draw toward the last place we'd played, there was a tree that had been as big around as a human arm that was freshly broken and bent into an arch or doorway shape. Next to it was a trilium we'd admired the day before stomped flat into the pine needles. Just past the "doorway" was a fallen rotten long we'd sat on, and that morning it had rocks sitting on it. My memory is rather fuzzy so I don't recall for sure how many rocks but I believe there were 3, and I also don't recall whether the tree was twisted or just snapped, only that it was broken somehow in 2 places but the bark still held it together enough that it was shaped like a doorway. I remember accusing my siblings of coming up here without me and putting rocks on the log and stomping the flower, but they denied it. I had a distinct feeling that the "doorway" and rocks were some sort of message. In the back of my mind I imagined I was a explorer and saw this, and that it was a symbol that this area was a "door" to another tribe's territory. Then I couldn't get that feeling out of my head that we weren't supposed to go past this "door" and the rock markers, so I made us play below that from then on, for at least a year, and don't remember hearing the stick cracking sounds when we played there anymore, just the occasional rock taps
So that was the first thing that happened, about 5 +/- months after moving there, which was unexplained by known causes. I did ask my dad about the rock taps and he said maybe a woodpecker or squirrel, but I never felt quite satisfied with that explanation because the rock taps were always so uniform and sounded like rocks being banged together, not like a woodpecker or squirrel cracking a nut. I asked him about the rocks on the log and the broken tree too, and he said he hadn't been up there recently but it was probably just wind damage and sibling pranks. I felt like that wasn't quite plausible since the broken tree was right next to a big tree in the well sheltered understory and it was the only visible damage. It has nagged at me as strange ever since. I have lots more similarly odd stories, but this is the only one with rocks on top of things and trees broken into doorway shapes.
My mom, who passed away in 2011, actually SAW them with me, and she was with me when I saw what I think was their house too, but she was really strange about it. It was like she couldn't actually look at them for some reason. Like her mind wouldn't accept it, so she looked away as soon as she laid eyes on them and made up an excuse to explain it away and refused to look again or allow me to talk about it.
My dad is still living there, and he's always been pretty open minded about cryptids. He met a fellow whom he said sounded quite intelligent and sound minded who had run into one face to face once and had no doubt what he'd seen was a Bigfoot, so my dad always felt like, while he wouldn't say that they exist, he wouldn't say they didn't either. Unfortunately I think the Bigfoots were drawn to my siblings and I as children playing, and didn't care much about Dad out mending fences and whatnot. It seemed to me that they weren't interested in bothering Dad, and he didn't pay much attention to rock and wood sounds so unless they threw something right at him or chased him, I doubt he'd have ever realized they were there. I was one of those head in the clouds romantic fool teen girls always dreaming up some epic adventure in my head, but I was also a severe introvert and empath so I could sense moods and presences that nobody else I knew could, when I wasn't distracted by my own daydreaming. Nobody could sneak up on me ever as a kid because I could just sense them coming. Nobody could lie to me about their emotions either because I could always tell. It's possible that these traits that were so annoying to my family were part of why I noticed and remembered weird things that others didn't. Even my sister has basically the same stories as mine but she doesn't remember most of the weird things as being weird. She didn't think it was weird that the tree was broken or the log had rocks on it. Same with my dad. He still lives there but it would take a lot for him to say something was "weird." He could think he saw a Bigfoot walking through the trees but unless he had a picture to prove it to himself he'd likely chalk it up to tired eyes or hunger and head in for a snack and a nap and never think of it again.
Also unfortunate is that there have been at least half a dozen new homes built right around that area since my last encounter, so I'd be surprised if the Bigfoots (if that's really what they were) are still living there. I suppose it's possible, but if I were a Bigfoot I'd have vacated long ago and went somewhere a little less people-y.
HOWEVER, my dad, when I pressed him about it, did remember one time either shortly before my mom died or shortly after, when he went out to do farm chores after dark. The black lab went with him as usual, but instead of her usual random barking and sniffing, she stopped stock still with her hackles up, staring into the night-black woods. She stayed frozen like that for a bit and then suddenly bolted for the house like Satan was after her. My dad said he looked and looked but all he could see was darkness. He said the way the dog behaved made him wish he'd brought a gun out with him. That was the only time he can recall anything strange or creepy happening that stuck with him. The animals pens he was out feeding are at the base of the hill that about 30 feet up that hill was that broken tree and log with rocks on it from my first story. The trees are thick enough behind the animal shelters that you can't see a thing through them when it's dark out.
I'm surprised that my father in law, who worked as a logger most of his life until the mill shut down, then worked for the county road department, and has been an avid hunter and camper all his life, claims to have never seen anything. I would think if anyone would have seen something strange, even if it wasn't a Bigfoot-sort-of-strange, in all his years in the woods and on dark mountain roads, it would be him. But he claims to have never had any odd experiences at all.
