YEAR: 1998

SEASON: Summer

MONTH: July

DATE: 25

STATE: Colorado

COUNTY: San Juan County

LOCATION DETAILS: My husband myself and my son and nephew were backpacking in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado the days of July 25th and 26th of this year 1998. We were in the area of the Twin Sisters mountain tops, south of Silverton about four miles in on a pack trail following the Lime Creek.

OBSERVED: We had already unpacked our backpacks and were just going up to the top of the mountain to see were my husband could go elk hunting. As we were looking around, we seen this big black bear looking creature. We knew it wasn't a bear, because both my husband and myself are black bear hunters. This creature was about 200 yards away on a open spot on the mountain. It was running away from us at a pretty good pace we figured around 20mph. From were we were standing the creature seemed to be just gliding along at a fast pace. My 13 year old nephew looked at my husband and myself and said " Boy I never seen a bear running on it's hind legs before, and running that fast." My husband is not a firm believer in the unknown but I swear to what I saw was no kind of black bear or animal that I ever saw before. We figured it was around 8 feet tall.

OTHER WITNESSES: The four of us had just packed in on a four mile pack trail and had just finished setting up our camp. We decided to go up to the top of the mountain so my husband could scout out the area for his upcoming elk hunt.

ENVIRONMENT: We were about 12,000 feet with the creek being about 300 yards down the mountain side from were we were standing. The creature was about 200 to 300 yards above us. The mountain was mostly pine trees with open gorges, with a quite a few rock ledges..

Follow-up investigation report:

I visited the exact location of the siting the following Saturday of August 1st. I arrived at the location at about 7:30 pm. I camped in the exact location of where the bigfoot was described as running. It was steep terrain, and while I was there the ground was fairly dry. I wasn't leaving a single footprint and I weigh 200 lbs. I only observed some deer tracks that had dug into the ground. I played my harmonica at sundown for about a half hour, trying to attract the curiosity of anything out wandering the woods. At 11:30 pm I was woken by the sounds of something moving about 20 feet from the end of my tent. My tent was in the middle of a clearing, the only other obstruction in this clearing was a patch of three pine trees. From behind these 3 trees I heard a loud exhaling noise, slow and constant. No sounds of movement what so ever. I watched with a nightvision scope but could not see directly behind from where the noise came. After about a minute of listening, I started to talk back, hoping to calm whatever was making the noise. After about another minute, I was pretty scared that whatever it was, it wasn't going away. So I played the harmonica loudly to make a lot of noise. I had put down the night vision scope, to pick up the harmonica. After about 15 seconds of playing the harmonica, the noise had stopped. I observed the trees again for the next hour with the night vision scope and never saw a thing. In speaking with a bear hunter, I learned that bear frequently will exhale loudly to clear their lungs of scent and focus on what they're smelling. So my guess is it was a bear, although I've never heard of a bear hiding behind a tree in perfect stillness...I'm sure its possible. The next morning I found no tracks.