In 2014 he drove with his girlfriend and a friend to spend a weekend working on a remote property in the hills near Hoopa, in Humboldt County. It sat nineteen miles out an old logging road and, by his reckoning, only about a dozen miles as the crow flies from Bluff Creek, where the Patterson-Gimlin film was shot.
Half joking, he told the others that if you knock on a tree, Bigfoot knocks back. Neither of them wanted to hear it: his girlfriend, a city person, was uneasy in the woods to begin with, and his friend had spent the whole summer out there alone and admitted he'd heard calls at night he couldn't place. He picked up a branch and rapped on a trunk a few times anyway. About thirty seconds later, knocks came back from somewhere far off in the trees. His first thought was a neighbour having fun with them, until his friend pointed out that the nearest other place was nine miles away, in the opposite direction.
They worked late, and because his friend snored, the couple pitched a tent by a small creek below the work area. It was a pleasant spot, full of frogs and crickets, and they fell asleep easily.
Somewhere around four in the morning he woke to total silence. No frogs, no insects. Then something moved in the brush along the creek, and small rocks began to come up out of the creek bed and patter against the tent. He describes being frozen with fear, unable to move even if he had wanted to. His girlfriend slept on, and he chose not to wake her, sure she would panic.
For what felt like a couple of hours it went on in rounds. The stones would stop, and he'd hope it had gone, and then he'd hear it pacing along the brush line before the rocks started again. Through the open top of the tent he finally saw the sky beginning to lighten, and the throwing stopped. After a long quiet he heard what he describes as a huge sigh or exhale from the direction of the creek, and then nothing more.
After a long quiet he heard what he describes as a huge exhale from the direction of the creek, and then something crashing away into the woods. Slowly the frogs and crickets started up again, and the fear that had pinned him in place lifted.
At first light he crawled out and marched up the hill to the cabin, half convinced his friend had been playing a prank. He could hear him snoring through the door. When he hammered on it and told him what had happened, his friend only said he'd told them there was something strange about the place, and asked if he believed him now.
He did. For the rest of their visits all three slept in the cabin, and nobody pitched a tent again. Nothing else happened while he was there. He's been hooked on the subject ever since, and says he has only heard possible calls a couple of times since then, while hiking and taking photos in Redwood National Park.