AttorneyTom
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My brain is definitely going on dumb now. Yet.. I have no pass !
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My brain is definitely going on dumb now. Yet.. I have no pass !
AlaskaBushPilot
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I don't have a point of view other than out my apartment window on the 34th floor, overlooking the interstate. What would surveyors be doing out in the woods?
I see. I happen to have grown up in Pennsylvania outside Wellsboro, near what they call Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon. But I never went outside so most of the deer and turkeys I shot there were in the living room.
But in books I read about the Seneca trail in prehistoric times and the settling of the Pennsylvania section of the Great Appalachian Valley two and a half centuries ago. There's hundreds of thousands of people living in that swath now, but I am given to understand that most of them are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in Los Angeles.
Maybe you could be a little more specific about the most remote place in your mind along this area so we can look carefully at it with google earth and some maps to find the largest contiguous wooded section without roads, farms, towns, and such. Like maybe a park you know about.
Jodie
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I don't think having information is a requirement to be here considering the topic, I haven't seen any earth shattering information coming from anyone over the last couple of years lurking here, or from anywhere else for that matter. Y'all seem to find plenty of nothing to talk about.
There is no URL to post on the status of the bigfoot population today as you well know. I believe bigfoot was a living breed at one time, I have no idea if that is still true today. That is as honest as I can be about it. The more stories I hear the more dubious I become about their current existence. I can't speak for everyone else but I won't believe it until someone produces a body to confirm that they are still living.
My point in discussing any of this, and I'll say it again for about the third time, was that I don't see the logic in some of the reasons some of you have given for why the creatures could never have existed. Now if no one wanted to discuss that, they could have saved themselves a lot of time and effort by not responding.
AttorneyTom
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Jodie
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Parn, I know without a doubt that I never claimed to have any answers. I can certainly say the same for you based on what I've read of your posts for the past two years but go right on and beat the dead horse.
Jodie
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I live in the Carolinas, can't speak for Pennsylvania. But when you lived there did you ever get off the couch and haul your ass up over a ridge to see what was on the other side? Did you ever walk the entire area that you hunted in or did you stick to square footage of your living room or the trails?
I think you know the answers to your own questions but it's more fun, friendly, and intellectually stimulating to ignore facts that you refuse to recognize. It's late, I'll get you a list of isolated areas later if your open to considering that not everywhere has seen everyone.
jhunter1163
beer-swilling semiliterate
Folks, things are getting a little personal here. Please don't bicker with one another. Don't make me put on my Mod Hat.
LTC8K6
Penultimate Amazing
So, if I had a time machine, how far back would I have to go to see plenty of bigfoot wandering the wilds of the PNW?
I don't have to go too far back to see plenty of currently scarce large predators, right?
I don't have to go too far back to see plenty of currently scarce large predators, right?
AlaskaBushPilot
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Jodie, it's pretty obvious to me that you cannot imagine there are people with a lifetime of experience like mine. I've spent most of my 53 year life in the woods. I live in the woods in a log cabin of interior Alaska. We go to town maybe once a month.
This is yesterday from the trail to our mining claim, looking across at Mt. McKinley:
Some sheep a little further up the valley:
A herd of caribou near the trailhead to our claim:
This isn't like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. This is yesterday. We're in the woods every day. I think we felled and cut up eleven trees today. A bizarre thing happened today that hasn't happened for years. We saw someone! My closest neighbor. Heh. He took advantage of a trail we busted in to some good timber.
More than anything else though, 25 years in supercubs and other highly modified bushplanes - unless you have seen what we do with your own eyes it is hard to believe. Telling me there are places humans can't go is like telling a rabbit he can't do down a hole. There isn't anything you can show me that isn't going to be a great big *yawner* to me relative to the stuff I do every day.
By all means. Please do. And I'll be glad to demonstrate how it isn't even close to a remote setting. Like where I live and work daily.
Oh dear.
Could you please expand on what you mean by "untouched" or "unexplored" in regard to North America?
Because:
Hunters, anglers, hikers, birders, campers, mountaineers, mountain bikers, loggers, geologists, surveyors, archeologists, paleontologists, miners, etc., all these hobbies and occupations put individuals into areas you might term wilderness areas. I've been in such places myself, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement or road. There's another guy around here somewhere that lives in such a place.
Anyway, what do you imagine wilderness means in the context of where bigfoot is alleged to occur?
Drewbot
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Don't forget this one:
They never have deformed or mentally retarded babies.
ABP- In Alaska they do animal surveys from Piper Cubs correct? Have any of these surveys EVER reported a GIANT HAIRY BIPEDAL PRIMATE? Just curious.
I am interested in that creek in the caribou picture, what is the fishing like in there? Should I bring my fly-rod or my spinning gear?
The Shrike
Philosopher
ABP - Awesome re: Wellsboro. I had a number of survey sites for my doctoral work in that area. BTW, I once found a wadded-up pair of pantyhose way off on one of the seemingly wilderness trails in the PA Grand Canyon area.
Jodie, the issue is not where people live and it's not even really where they go. It's what they do when they get there. If you want to really understand why people like me are convinced that there is not now and never has been a "bigfoot" in North America, you need to look at things like historical and current ranges for our charismatic megafauna (and some mesofauna). Consider over how much land area our forbears extirpated bison, moose, elk, deer, wolf, black bear, grizzly bear, mountain lion, beaver, fisher, otter, turkey, trumpeter swan, whooping crane, heath hen, passenger pigeon, etc.
Before there were McDonald's dotted across the landscape, before there were laws establishing rules for hunting . . . people derived their sustenance from the wild animals that lived in the places they could access on horseback or on foot. They shot everything, largely because they had to. Once we had some game laws established by the early 1900s (in response to the hunting to extinction of several species in the 1800s), those laws included bounties for anything that might be remotely tempted to steal a free-range chicken. That meant that people went out to the very last wildernesses for the expressed purpose of finding and killing the last mountain lion, wolf, or goshawk.
Imagine this:
"Pennsylvania, more populated than the states ahead of it in the per-capita rankings, led with the highest number of deer collisions. State Farm estimated a total of 101,299 deer-vs.-car incidents in Pennsylvania in the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011, the time period examined in the most recent iteration of State Farm's annual study. No other state reached six digits."
Now consider that by the early 1900s, Pennsylvania was actually importing deer from other states (mostly from Michigan if memory serves) to augment the severely decreased population in the Keystone State. Can you imagine a Pennsylvania so logged and defaunated that its forest cover statewide was only about 25%, and white-tailed deer was functionally extinct?
This is our history of settlement of North America since the Colonial Era. There are similar stories of wildlife exploitation from all over the US and temperate Canada. The reason Yellowstone NP is special (and even it has dealt with species loss) is because it retains the species that everywhere else we hunted out.
So just because there isn't a Starbucks on the corner, or the cell phone reception is a bit spotty, or the roads are basically impassable for a good part of the year does NOT mean that such "wilderness" areas are unaffected by the comings and goings of modern humans. That's the first and most obvious fallacy with the "most of the world is land area where humans never go, so bigfoots could live there" meme.
The second fallacy related to that meme is that - by their own distribution built from those hundreds of anecdotal accounts that prove the existence of bigfoot to so many 'footers - the distribution of bigfoots is by no means restricted to areas of wilderness where people seldom go. Using the BFRO sightings database, it's quite obvious that such creatures are reported from a gradient of development ranging from wilderness to suburban. I'd classify the vast majority of that distribution as "rural".
Jodie, the issue is not where people live and it's not even really where they go. It's what they do when they get there. If you want to really understand why people like me are convinced that there is not now and never has been a "bigfoot" in North America, you need to look at things like historical and current ranges for our charismatic megafauna (and some mesofauna). Consider over how much land area our forbears extirpated bison, moose, elk, deer, wolf, black bear, grizzly bear, mountain lion, beaver, fisher, otter, turkey, trumpeter swan, whooping crane, heath hen, passenger pigeon, etc.
Before there were McDonald's dotted across the landscape, before there were laws establishing rules for hunting . . . people derived their sustenance from the wild animals that lived in the places they could access on horseback or on foot. They shot everything, largely because they had to. Once we had some game laws established by the early 1900s (in response to the hunting to extinction of several species in the 1800s), those laws included bounties for anything that might be remotely tempted to steal a free-range chicken. That meant that people went out to the very last wildernesses for the expressed purpose of finding and killing the last mountain lion, wolf, or goshawk.
Imagine this:
"Pennsylvania, more populated than the states ahead of it in the per-capita rankings, led with the highest number of deer collisions. State Farm estimated a total of 101,299 deer-vs.-car incidents in Pennsylvania in the second half of 2010 and the first half of 2011, the time period examined in the most recent iteration of State Farm's annual study. No other state reached six digits."
Now consider that by the early 1900s, Pennsylvania was actually importing deer from other states (mostly from Michigan if memory serves) to augment the severely decreased population in the Keystone State. Can you imagine a Pennsylvania so logged and defaunated that its forest cover statewide was only about 25%, and white-tailed deer was functionally extinct?
This is our history of settlement of North America since the Colonial Era. There are similar stories of wildlife exploitation from all over the US and temperate Canada. The reason Yellowstone NP is special (and even it has dealt with species loss) is because it retains the species that everywhere else we hunted out.
So just because there isn't a Starbucks on the corner, or the cell phone reception is a bit spotty, or the roads are basically impassable for a good part of the year does NOT mean that such "wilderness" areas are unaffected by the comings and goings of modern humans. That's the first and most obvious fallacy with the "most of the world is land area where humans never go, so bigfoots could live there" meme.
The second fallacy related to that meme is that - by their own distribution built from those hundreds of anecdotal accounts that prove the existence of bigfoot to so many 'footers - the distribution of bigfoots is by no means restricted to areas of wilderness where people seldom go. Using the BFRO sightings database, it's quite obvious that such creatures are reported from a gradient of development ranging from wilderness to suburban. I'd classify the vast majority of that distribution as "rural".
dafydd
Banned
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Why do they always look fuzzy in photographs?
dafydd
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Nice photos. As if Bigfoot would live in a place like that! No wonder you have never seen one, they are all sunning themselves in the Everglades.
Drewbot
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The plight of large animals in Michigan followed a similar pattern to Pennsylvania.
Armies of loggers plundered the landscape. They ate practically every animal. and guess what? When they ran out of deer and bears to kill in their area, they organized hunting parties and went to places that you wouldn't think a person would want to go, and killed the deer and bears there.
Armies of loggers plundered the landscape. They ate practically every animal. and guess what? When they ran out of deer and bears to kill in their area, they organized hunting parties and went to places that you wouldn't think a person would want to go, and killed the deer and bears there.
I reread your posts and I find this statement to be false.
Perhaps the poster isn't aware of the degree to which this country was clearcut logged. Perhaps the poster is just repeating memes that she has seen on other forums. Perhaps as an exercise the poster can review the history of logging in various states, and could also demonstrate the minute extent of virgin timber in the United States, and how even that virgin timber has been fought over. Not to mention the struggles to exploit and/or save other natural resources. I think a sense of the history of this country might be useful to the poster.
That might be a more useful endeavor for the poster than attempted veiled ad homs against members here.
awesome is tired and overused. But this is awesome.
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