The Bigfoot expedition field guide

At a glance

Nobody can promise you a Bigfoot. What we can promise is that a well-run trip gets you home safe, teaches you the woods at night, and brings back recordings, photos and notes that are actually useful, whatever they turn out to show.

Group size

2 to 4 peopleEnough for safety, few enough to stay quiet

Trip length

2 to 3 nightsNight one is always noisy and nervous

Cameras

2 to 6Spread out, left for weeks if allowed

Recorders

1 per camp + 1 remoteRunning all night

Prime time

Dusk to midnightPlus the hour before dawn

Where to go: picking your spot

People report Bigfoot in every US state except Hawaii and across Canada, but reports bunch up in particular kinds of country. Start with places that tick most of these boxes:

Using sighting data

Start broad, then narrow down. Pull every report you can find for your region: our encounter map (Bigfoot reports are being added as they come in), old newspaper archives, and local books and podcasts. Then:

• Put them all on one map. A free Google My Maps layer or a GPX file in your mapping app is fine. Clusters jump out fast.
• Weight the good ones. A report with a date, a specific road or creek and more than one witness counts for more than "somewhere near the lake in the '80s".
• Look for the shape of the land. When reports line up along one river or ridge system, that corridor is your study area, not the single dots.
• Check what changed. A 1990s cluster may be next to what's now a subdivision. Satellite views show new roads, clearcuts and burns.

Maps that help

• Land ownership: apps like onX, Gaia GPS or CalTopo show public and private land boundaries. Download maps for offline use before you lose signal.
• Motor Vehicle Use Maps from the Forest Service show which forest roads are legally open to vehicles, and when. They're free from each forest's website.
• Topographic maps (free from the USGS National Map) show the drainages, saddles and benches animals use to move between valleys.
• Satellite imagery shows water, clearings, old burns and orchards you won't find on a topo map.

Whose land is it?

This matters more than anything else on the page, because the rules change completely from one side of a fence to the other. Here's the general lay of the land; the details vary, so always check the rules for the exact place you're going.

When to go

• Late spring and early fall are comfortable, the bugs are bearable, and animals are on the move. Midsummer nights are short; winter is quiet and great for tracks in snow, but much more dangerous.
• Check hunting seasons first. Look up your state or provincial regulations. If any season is open where you're going, wear blaze orange and rethink anything that involves sneaking around in the dark, making animal-like calls or wearing camouflage.
• Weather: calm, dry nights are best for listening. Wind kills audio and sets off cameras. Check the point forecast for your exact spot on weather.gov (or Environment Canada) rather than the nearest town.
• The moon: a full moon lets you walk without a light and see shapes in the open; a new moon is better for spotting eyeshine and for thermal scanning without the glare. Plan for both.

Gear checklist

Pack for the night, not the day. You'll be sitting still in the dark for hours, which is colder than hiking in it.

Trail cameras

Cameras are your best chance of a clear image, simply because they're out there 24 hours a day and you aren't. The short version is below; the trail camera guide goes into choosing, settings and the rules.

• Place them where animals are funnelled: creek crossings, saddles between valleys, game trails along field and clearcut edges.
• Mount them high and angled down (about 6 to 8 feet) for a wider view and fewer thefts, or at chest height for the clearest faces. Try both.
• Face them roughly north so the rising and setting sun doesn't blow out the picture or trigger it.
• Use no-glow (940 nm) infrared if you can. Many people believe a low-glow red flash is noticed by wildlife; it's certainly noticed by people.
• Leave them for weeks, not a night, where the rules allow, and visit as little as possible. Every visit leaves your scent and your tracks.

Audio: recorders, wood knocks and calls

Most encounters people describe are heard, not seen. A decent recording made at the time beats any description you write the next morning.

Recorders

• Say the time out loud when you start and whenever something happens: "11:42, knock to the north-east." Your voice note becomes a log that can't get out of sync.
• Place remote recorders away from camp (at least a few hundred yards) so they hear the woods, not your snoring.
• Review with a spectrogram. Free tools like Audacity or Raven Lite show sound as a picture, so you can skim eight hours in minutes and spot the spikes. Compare anything odd against the Macaulay Library of animal sounds, and run birdy-sounding calls through the Merlin app.

Wood knocks

The idea is simple: knock a stout stick against a tree, once to three times, then go silent and listen. Some researchers believe knocks are a form of communication and get answered. If you try it:

• Use a dead, solid branch about the size of a baseball bat on a living tree. Hard knocks carry a remarkably long way on a still night.
• Knock, then wait at least 10 to 15 minutes in total silence before doing anything else.
• Log every knock you make with the time and direction. Otherwise you, or the person at the other camp, will later hear your own knock on the recording and wonder.
• Know the lookalikes: woodpeckers (in daylight), beavers slapping their tails on water, branches falling, deer antlers knocking, distant gunshots, other people doing exactly what you're doing.

Call blasting

Call blasting means playing a recording of a supposed Bigfoot vocalization, often the famous 1970s "Sierra Sounds" or the 1994 "Ohio howl", through a loud speaker and listening for a reply. People argue about it constantly. Here's the case both ways:

If you do it: check the land rules, keep volume reasonable, blast rarely (a few times a night, not every ten minutes), never during hunting season, and log the time, direction and file you played.

Night protocol

This is the part that really is a sequence. Run it the same way every night so your notes are comparable.

1. Arrive in daylight. Walk your listening spots and the path back to camp while you can see. Drop GPS waypoints at each spot and at camp.
2. Set the check-in. Agree who sits where, the radio channel, the check-in times (every 30 minutes works) and the time everyone comes back no matter what.
3. Start all recorders and sync clocks. Say the time aloud on each recorder at the start.
4. Go dark and go quiet. Red light only. Let your night vision settle for 20 to 30 minutes before you judge anything you see.
5. Sit and listen. Long sits of 30 to 60 minutes beat walking around. Write down every sound with the time and direction, boring ones included.
6. Knock or call, if you're doing it, then stay silent for at least 15 minutes. Log what you did.
7. If something happens, record first. Hit record on audio, then video, then note the time. Don't chase it.
8. Regroup at the agreed time. Write individual notes before you compare stories. Talking first blends everyone's memory into one version.

For what to do if something is watching you, how to read eyeshine, and the night sounds that fool everyone, see the night encounters guide.

What to look for and how to document it

The golden rule: photograph everything before you touch it, with something for scale in the frame, and log where it was. Evidence without a time, place and scale is just a picture.

Tracks

Big human-like tracks are the classic Bigfoot evidence. Reported prints usually run 14 to 18 inches long, often with five toes and sometimes a crease or flex partway along the foot. Look in mud along creeks, sandbars, soft road shoulders and fresh snow.

• Photograph first: an overall shot showing where the track is, then straight down from directly above with a ruler or tape in the frame, then a few with a torch held low to one side. Raking light makes faint toe marks and ridges pop.
• Follow the trackway. One print can be faked or misread. A line of prints tells you about the walker: step length, how far apart the feet land, and whether the depth makes sense for its size.
• Measure length, width at the ball and heel, and the distances in the diagram below. Note how deep the print is compared with your own boot print next to it.
• Cast the best one with dental stone. The casting guide walks you through it.

Hair

• Check snags along trails: barbed wire, splintered branches, rough bark at about shoulder height for a tall animal.
• Photograph it in place, then lift it with clean tweezers. Try to get the root end; that's where usable DNA lives.
• Store it in a paper envelope, not plastic (plastic traps moisture and it rots). Write the date, time, GPS position and your name on the envelope.
• Be realistic: most hair turns out to be deer, bear, dog or human, and lab analysis is expensive. That's still a useful answer.

Scat

• Photograph it with scale and note the size, shape and what's in it (berries, hair, bone).
• Wear gloves and don't sniff it closely. Raccoon droppings can carry a dangerous roundworm, and rodent droppings can carry hantavirus.
• A small sample in a sealed tube or a jar with alcohol is easier to send to a lab than the whole thing.

Tree structures

Arches of bent saplings, X-shaped crossed trunks, teepee stacks and big breaks high off the ground are often pointed to as signs. Most have mundane causes: snow load bends young trees into arches, wind and deadfall cross trunks, and people build forts and shelters. If one catches your eye, photograph it from several sides with a person for scale, record the GPS point, and go back in a few months. Things that change between visits are more interesting than things that don't.

Vocalizations and other sounds

Howls, whoops, "samurai chatter", rock clacks and thrown objects all show up in reports. Get them on audio if you possibly can, note the direction and roughly how far away, and compare them with known animal calls before anything else. The night sounds list covers the usual suspects.

Common misidentifications

Every experienced researcher has a story about the stump that stood up or the owl that screamed like a person. Rule these out first, and say in your report that you did.

Safety

The real dangers out there are falls, cold, getting lost, vehicles on forest roads and, occasionally, bears and cougars. Plan for those and you'll be fine.

Ethics: how to be the good kind of researcher

• Leave no trace. Pack out everything, camp on durable ground, keep fires small or skip them, and leave what you find. The seven Leave No Trace principles cover it well.
• No harassment. Don't chase, corner or repeatedly disturb any animal, whatever you think it is. If you've got wildlife reacting badly to your calls or lights, stop.
• No shooting. Ever. Beyond the obvious danger of firing at an unidentified shape in the dark (which is how people get killed), most places have no hunting season for an unrecognized animal. Skamania County, Washington passed an ordinance against killing a Sasquatch back in 1969 and later declared the whole county a Sasquatch refuge.
• Respect landowners and other visitors. Ask permission, close gates, and don't scare other campers for fun.
• Protect locations. Don't post exact spots on private land, or anywhere that a crowd would damage. Share the general area publicly and the exact point only with people you trust.
• Be honest about what you got. Never edit, stage or "enhance" evidence. If you later find a boring explanation, say so. That's how you build a reputation people trust.

How to report to Encounter Atlas

Write your notes before you sleep, while it's fresh and before you read anyone else's reports from the area. Then send it to us through the report page (the full form with uploads is opening soon). The things that make a report useful:

1. When: date, time and how long it lasted.
2. Where: as exact as you're comfortable with, plus the land type. Tell us if the spot should stay private.
3. What happened, in order, in plain words. What you saw, heard and smelled, and what you did.
4. Conditions: weather, moon, light, how far away it was, what you were using to see.
5. What you ruled out, and how.
6. Original files: photos, video and audio straight off the device, unedited.

The reporting guide has more on what makes a report credible, how to photograph evidence and how to protect your privacy.

Report an encounter