We Tracked Bigfoot Deep Into the Forest in Wyoming Before Everything Went Wrong
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“The Hunt on Pine Ridge: A True Encounter with the Dogman”
I’m not the kind of guy who believes in monsters. Hell, I’ve been hunting the backcountry of northern Wyoming for almost 15 years. And the biggest thing I ever worried about was a mountain lion or maybe getting lost in a sudden blizzard. But what happened to me and my buddies in late October changed everything. I’m telling this story because people need to know what’s really out there in the deep wilderness. The official report says it was a cougar attack, but that’s a lie. Cats don’t plan. Cats don’t hunt humans like we’re prey. And they sure as hell don’t seal you in a cave to die.
It was Ryan who pitched the idea. Late-season elk hunt deep into Pineridge Wilderness, a stretch of northern Wyoming so remote that most hunters won’t touch it. The terrain’s brutal, all steep ridges and half-collapsed fire roads from the 80s. There’s an old ranger outpost about 8 miles in, abandoned since before I was born. Ryan had pulled some coordinates off an old forestry map he found at a garage sale. He claimed there was a valley past the outpost where elk congregated before the first heavy snow.
Luke and I were skeptical, but Ryan had that look in his eye, the one that said he was going whether we came or not. So, we packed our gear, drove out to the trailhead on a gray Thursday morning, and started hiking. The woods felt wrong from the start, but I told myself it was just the weather. Heavy clouds, air so still you could hear your own heartbeat. We didn’t see another soul on the trail, not one.
By midday, we’d passed the outpost. Roof caved in, windows shattered, door hanging crooked like a broken jaw. Something about that place made my skin crawl, but I didn’t say anything. We pushed another three miles past it and set up camp near a frozen beaver pond, tucked into a stand of lodgepole pines. The silence out there wasn’t peaceful. It was the kind of silence that makes you whisper without knowing why.
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That first night, nothing happened. We built a fire, ate freeze-dried chili, talked about past hunts. Luke joked that we’d probably hike all this way just to get skunked. Ryan laughed. I didn’t. I kept looking at the tree line, feeling like something was looking back. I didn’t sleep much that night, and when I did, I dreamed of footsteps circling the tent, slow, deliberate, just outside the nylon walls.
The next morning, Ryan found the tracks.
Ryan found them about a quarter-mile from camp, down by a muddy creek bed where the ground was still soft from yesterday’s melt. He radioed us over, voice tight, and when Luke and I got there, we just stood there staring. They were footprints, human-shaped anyway, but massive, easily 17, maybe 18 inches long. The toes were spread wide, like whoever made them had been walking barefoot through cold mud, and the impressions were deep. Real deep. Whatever left these weighed a hell of a lot more than any man I’d ever met.
“Bear?” Luke offered, crouching down beside one. But even as he said it, I could hear the doubt in his voice. Bears don’t walk on two legs for this long, Ryan said, pointing down the creek. The tracks continued in a steady line for at least 60 yards, then looped back in a wide circle, like something had been pacing. Deliberate, methodical.
I didn’t like that at all. Luke pulled out his phone and snapped a few pictures, then measured one print with his hand. His palm didn’t even cover half of it. He’d been guiding hunts in Montana and Wyoming for over a decade, seeing just about every kind of animal track you could imagine. He looked up at us with this expression I’d never seen on him before. Not quite fear, but close. Uncertainty, maybe. That shook me more than the prints themselves.
“Could be a hoax,” I said, trying to convince myself more than them. “Some jackass in custom boots trying to scare hunters out here?”
Ryan gestured around at the endless forest. “We haven’t seen another person in two days, Jake.”
And look, he pointed at the depth of the print, the way the mud had been compressed and pushed up around the edges. You’d need to weigh 300 pounds minimum to make an impression like that. And the stride length, he paced it out—nearly six feet between steps.
We followed the prints for a while upstream toward a cluster of mossy boulders. They circled a flat area near the water, then vanished into the rocky ground where the soil was too hard to leave marks. It looked like whatever it was had stood there for a long time, just watching the creek, maybe, or waiting.
That’s when I noticed something else. Scratches on one of the boulders. Long, deep gouges in the stone running parallel like claw marks, except they were too uniform, too precise, almost deliberate.
I ran my fingers over them and felt my stomach drop. They were fresh. No lichen growing in the grooves, no weathering.
“We should head back,” Luke said quietly. He wasn’t looking at the scratches. He was looking past them up into the forest where the trees grew thick and the shadows pulled like black water. I followed his gaze but saw nothing. Still, the feeling was there, that electric prickle on the back of your neck when you know you’re being watched.
Ryan wanted to keep tracking, see if we could figure out what we were dealing with. Luke and I voted him down. We hiked back to camp in silence, each of us scanning the woods, hands resting a little too close to our rifle straps.
The wind had picked up, pushing clouds across the sun, and the temperature was dropping fast. That night, we kept the fire high. We took turns on watch that night, though none of us admitted we were scared. Ryan had first shift. Luke took midnight to 3, and I drew the pre-dawn hours.
I tried to sleep during Ryan’s watch, but couldn’t. I just lay there in my sleeping bag, listening to the fire crackle and the wind move through the pines. Around 11, I heard the first click. It was sharp, deliberate, like two rocks being struck together. Once, twice, then silence.
I sat up, saw Ryan by the fire, head tilted, listening. He looked over at me and I knew he’d heard it, too. We waited, barely breathing, but it didn’t come again. After a few minutes, he shrugged and I lay back down. Probably just the fire popping, I told myself. Or a branch snapping somewhere in the cold. But I knew better. That sound had been too clean, too purposeful.
When Luke took over at midnight, I was still awake. I listened to Ryan’s breathing slow and deepen beside me, envied him for it. Then, maybe 20 minutes into Luke’s shift, the clicking started again. This time, it was closer, definitely outside the firelight, somewhere in the trees to our left. Click, click, pause, click, click, click. Like Morse code, except it meant nothing. Just noise designed to get our attention.
Luke stood up, grabbed his flashlight, and swept the beam across the tree line. Nothing but darkness and pine trunks. The clicking stopped the moment the light came on. He kept the beam up for a solid minute, panning slowly back and forth, then finally lowered it. I saw his jaw working, grinding his teeth the way he did when he was thinking hard about something he didn’t want to say out loud. Then came the hum. Low, vibrating, almost subsonic. I felt it in my chest before I actually heard it. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, drifting through the forest like something alive. It would swell, hold for a few seconds, then fade completely.
Then it would start again, but from a different direction, east, then south, then somewhere behind us. Moving too fast. Way too fast. That woke Ryan up. He unzipped his tent and crawled out, rifle in hand, face pale in the firelight.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said quietly. He was still standing, still scanning the woods, but his hand was shaking slightly where it gripped the flashlight. “I’ve never seen Luke rattled, not once in all the years I’d known him.”
The humming continued for maybe 10 minutes, circling us, getting closer and then farther away, playing with distance like it was testing how we’d react. Then it just stopped. Complete silence. Even the wind died. No insects, no nightbirds, nothing. Just the pop and hiss of our campfire and the three of us standing there like idiots, armed and useless.
“We’re leaving at first light,” Luke said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
Ryan started to argue, but I cut him off. “He’s right. Something’s not right out here.”
We stayed up together the rest of the night, feeding the fire, keeping it bright. None of us said much. We didn’t have to. Around 4:00 a.m., just before dawn started graying the sky, I walked to the edge of camp to piss. That’s when I saw them. Tracks, fresh ones, circling our entire campsite in a wide loop, maybe 30 feet out, just beyond where our firelight reached. The same massive prints from the creek bed, only now there were dozens of them, overlapping in places, like whatever made them had walked around us again and again while we sat there by the fire.
I didn’t tell the others right away. I stood there in the pre-dawn cold, staring at those prints and felt something shift in my gut. This wasn’t curiosity. This wasn’t some animal passing through. This was deliberate.
I showed them the tracks as soon as there was enough light to see clearly. Ryan crouched down, ran his hand along the edge of one print, then stood up without saying a word. Luke just stared, his face unreadable. We packed up camp in silence, moving fast, glancing over our shoulders every few seconds. The plan was simple. Hike back the way we came, get to the truck, and get the hell out. But Ryan had other ideas. He wanted to move higher up into the rocky terrain where we’d have better visibility, better defensible positions.
“Whatever this thing is,” he said, “it’s using the forest to stalk us. We get above the tree line, we’ll see it coming.”
I didn’t like it, but Luke agreed. Higher ground made tactical sense, even if it meant staying out here another night. So, we shouldered our packs and started climbing, leaving the frozen beaver pond behind.
The terrain got rougher fast, loose scree, steep granite faces, patches of old snow that crunched under our boots. By midafternoon, we’d gained maybe 1,000 feet in elevation and found a decent spot to set up—a rocky shelf with our backs to a cliff face and a clear view of the forest below. While Ryan and Luke pitched the tents, I scouted the immediate area.
That’s when I found it.
There was a split in the rock wall, narrow, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. I squeezed through and found myself in a small hollow, maybe 10 feet deep and twice as wide. The smell hit me first. Damp earth, rot, something else I couldn’t place. Then I saw what was inside. Branches, hundreds of them, stacked deliberately in the back corner, woven together in a loose structure that might have been a nest or a shelter. Scattered around the floor were bones—deer, elk, smaller animals I couldn’t identify. All of them picked completely clean. Some of them snapped in half for the marrow. Scraps of hide were piled against one wall, stiff and dried.
But it was the marks on the stone that made my blood go cold. Scratches, deep parallel gouges carved into the rock, running in patterns across the back wall. They weren’t random. Some formed rough geometric shapes, circles, lines, crosses. Others looked almost like tally marks grouped in fives and tens.
I stood there staring at them, trying to make sense of it, and couldn’t. Animals don’t mark territory like this. Animals don’t count.
I backed out of the hollow slowly, my heart hammering, and nearly ran straight into Luke.
“Jesus, Jake,” he stopped when he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
I told him. He squeezed into the crevice, stayed for maybe 30 seconds, then came back out looking like he’d aged five years.
“We’re not staying here,” he said flatly.
But it was already late afternoon, and the nearest viable campsite was hours away through rough country. Ryan argued we’d be safer here, high up with our backs protected than stumbling through the forest in the dark. He had a point. Reluctantly, Luke and I agreed to stay put, but we moved our camp 100 yards from the crevice, built the fire big, and kept our rifles loaded. As the sun set, the forest below us went quiet again. That same unnatural silence, like something had cleared out every living thing for miles.
I kept thinking about those marks on the wall, deliberate, intentional, the work of something that could think, plan, remember. Ryan tried to lighten the mood, cracking jokes about Bigfoot and asking if we’d get rich off the book deal. Luke didn’t laugh. Neither did I. We just sat there feeding the fire, watching the darkness gather in the valleys below.
Around 9, we heard the voices. Distant at first, echoing up from somewhere deep in the forest. Human voices or something close. Laughter, maybe fragments of speech that almost sounded like words, but were just slightly wrong, stretched, and distorted. They seemed to come from multiple directions at once, bouncing off the rocks, making it impossible to pinpoint a source.
Luke stood up, grabbed his flashlight, and swept the beam across the tree line. Nothing but darkness and pine trunks. The clicking stopped the moment the light came on. He kept the beam up for a solid minute, panning slowly back and forth, then finally lowered it. I saw his jaw working, grinding his teeth the way he did when he was thinking hard about something he didn’t want to say out loud. Then came the hum. Low, vibrating, almost subsonic. I felt it in my chest before I actually heard it. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, drifting through the forest like something alive. It would swell, hold for a few seconds, then fade completely.
Then it would start again, but from a different direction, east, then south, then somewhere behind us. Moving too fast. Way too fast. That woke Ryan up. He unzipped his tent and crawled out, rifle in hand, face pale in the firelight.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said quietly. He was still standing, still scanning the woods, but his hand was shaking slightly where it gripped the flashlight. “I’ve never seen Luke rattled, not once in all the years I’d known him.”
The humming continued for maybe 10 minutes, circling us, getting closer and then farther away, playing with distance like it was testing how we’d react. Then it just stopped. Complete silence. Even the wind died. No insects, no nightbirds, nothing. Just the pop and hiss of our campfire and the three of us standing there like idiots, armed and useless.
“We’re leaving at first light,” Luke said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
Ryan started to argue, but I cut him off. “He’s right. Something’s not right out here.”
We stayed up together the rest of the night, feeding the fire, keeping it bright. None of us said much. We didn’t have to. Around 4:00 a.m., just before dawn started graying the sky, I walked to the edge of camp to piss. That’s when I saw them. Tracks, fresh ones, circling our entire campsite in a wide loop, maybe 30 feet out, just beyond where our firelight reached. The same massive prints from the creek bed, only now there were dozens of them, overlapping in places, like whatever made them had walked around us again and again while we sat there by the fire.
I didn’t tell the others right away. I stood there in the pre-dawn cold, staring at those prints and felt something shift in my gut. This wasn’t curiosity. This wasn’t some animal passing through. This was deliberate.
I showed them the tracks as soon as there was enough light to see clearly. Ryan crouched down, ran his hand along the edge of one print, then stood up without saying a word. Luke just stared, his face unreadable. We packed up camp in silence, moving fast, glancing over our shoulders every few seconds. The plan was simple. Hike back the way we came, get to the truck, and get the hell out. But Ryan had other ideas. He wanted to move higher up into the rocky terrain where we’d have better visibility, better defensible positions.
“Whatever this thing is,” he said, “it’s using the forest to stalk us. We get above the tree line, we’ll see it coming.”
I didn’t like it, but Luke agreed. Higher ground made tactical sense, even if it meant staying out here another night. So, we shouldered our packs and started climbing, leaving the frozen beaver pond behind.
The terrain got rougher fast, loose scree, steep granite faces, patches of old snow that crunched under our boots. By midafternoon, we’d gained maybe 1,000 feet in elevation and found a decent spot to set up—a rocky shelf with our backs to a cliff face and a clear view of the forest below. While Ryan and Luke pitched the tents, I scouted the immediate area.
That’s when I found it.
There was a split in the rock wall, narrow, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. I squeezed through and found myself in a small hollow, maybe 10 feet deep and twice as wide. The smell hit me first. Damp earth, rot, something else I couldn’t place. Then I saw what was inside. Branches, hundreds of them, stacked deliberately in the back corner, woven together in a loose structure that might have been a nest or a shelter. Scattered around the floor were bones—deer, elk, smaller animals I couldn’t identify. All of them picked completely clean. Some of them snapped in half for the marrow. Scraps of hide were piled against one wall, stiff and dried.
But it was the marks on the stone that made my blood go cold. Scratches, deep parallel gouges carved into the rock, running in patterns across the back wall. They weren’t random. Some formed rough geometric shapes, circles, lines, crosses. Others looked almost like tally marks grouped in fives and tens.
I stood there staring at them, trying to make sense of it, and couldn’t. Animals don’t mark territory like this. Animals don’t count.
I backed out of the hollow slowly, my heart hammering, and nearly ran straight into Luke.
“Jesus, Jake,” he stopped when he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
I told him. He squeezed into the crevice, stayed for maybe 30 seconds, then came back out looking like he’d aged five years.
“We’re not staying here,” he said flatly.
But it was already late afternoon, and the nearest viable campsite was hours away through rough country. Ryan argued we’d be safer here, high up with our backs protected than stumbling through the forest in the dark. He had a point. Reluctantly, Luke and I agreed to stay put, but we moved our camp 100 yards from the crevice, built the fire big, and kept our rifles loaded. As the sun set, the forest below us went quiet again. That same unnatural silence, like something had cleared out every living thing for miles.
I kept thinking about those marks on the wall, deliberate, intentional, the work of something that could think, plan, remember. Ryan tried to lighten the mood, cracking jokes about Bigfoot and asking if we’d get rich off the book deal. Luke didn’t laugh. Neither did I. We just sat there feeding the fire, watching the darkness gather in the valleys below.
Around 9, we heard the voices. Distant at first, echoing up from somewhere deep in the forest. Human voices or something close. Laughter, maybe fragments of speech that almost sounded like words, but were just slightly wrong, stretched, and distorted. They seemed to come from multiple directions at once, bouncing off the rocks, making it impossible to pinpoint a source.
Luke stood up, grabbed his flashlight, and swept the beam across the tree line. Nothing but darkness and pine trunks. The clicking stopped the moment the light came on. He kept the beam up for a solid minute, panning slowly back and forth, then finally lowered it. I saw his jaw working, grinding his teeth the way he did when he was thinking hard about something he didn’t want to say out loud. Then came the hum. Low, vibrating, almost subsonic. I felt it in my chest before I actually heard it. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, drifting through the forest like something alive. It would swell, hold for a few seconds, then fade completely.
Then it would start again, but from a different direction, east, then south, then somewhere behind us. Moving too fast. Way too fast. That woke Ryan up. He unzipped his tent and crawled out, rifle in hand, face pale in the firelight.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said quietly. He was still standing, still scanning the woods, but his hand was shaking slightly where it gripped the flashlight. “I’ve never seen Luke rattled, not once in all the years I’d known him.”
The humming continued for maybe 10 minutes, circling us, getting closer and then farther away, playing with distance like it was testing how we’d react. Then it just stopped. Complete silence. Even the wind died. No insects, no nightbirds, nothing. Just the pop and hiss of our campfire and the three of us standing there like idiots, armed and useless.
“We’re leaving at first light,” Luke said. It wasn’t a suggestion.
Ryan started to argue, but I cut him off. “He’s right. Something’s not right out here.”
We stayed up together the rest of the night, feeding the fire, keeping it bright. None of us said much. We didn’t have to. Around 4:00 a.m., just before dawn started graying the sky, I walked to the edge of camp to piss. That’s when I saw them. Tracks, fresh ones, circling our entire campsite in a wide loop, maybe 30 feet out, just beyond where our firelight reached. The same massive prints from the creek bed, only now there were dozens of them, overlapping in places, like whatever made them had walked around us again and again while we sat there by the fire.
I didn’t tell the others right away. I stood there in the pre-dawn cold, staring at those prints and felt something shift in my gut. This wasn’t curiosity. This wasn’t some animal passing through. This was deliberate.
I showed them the tracks as soon as there was enough light to see clearly. Ryan crouched down, ran his hand along the edge of one print, then stood up without saying a word. Luke just stared, his face unreadable. We packed up camp in silence, moving fast, glancing over our shoulders every few seconds. The plan was simple. Hike back the way we came, get to the truck, and get the hell out. But Ryan had other ideas. He wanted to move higher up into the rocky terrain where we’d have better visibility, better defensible positions.
“Whatever this thing is,” he said, “it’s using the forest to stalk us. We get above the tree line, we’ll see it coming.”
I didn’t like it, but Luke agreed. Higher ground made tactical sense, even if it meant staying out here another night. So, we shouldered our packs and started climbing, leaving the frozen beaver pond behind.
The terrain got rougher fast, loose scree, steep granite faces, patches of old snow that crunched under our boots. By midafternoon, we’d gained maybe 1,000 feet in elevation and found a decent spot to set up—a rocky shelf with our backs to a cliff face and a clear view of the forest below. While Ryan and Luke pitched the tents, I scouted the immediate area.
That’s when I found it.
There was a split in the rock wall, narrow, almost invisible unless you were looking for it. I squeezed through and found myself in a small hollow, maybe 10 feet deep and twice as wide. The smell hit me first. Damp earth, rot, something else I couldn’t place. Then I saw what was inside. Branches, hundreds of them, stacked deliberately in the back corner, woven together in a loose structure that might have been a nest or a shelter. Scattered around the floor were bones—deer, elk, smaller animals I couldn’t identify. All of them picked completely clean. Some of them snapped in half for the marrow. Scraps of hide were piled against one wall, stiff and dried.
But it was the marks on the stone that made my blood go cold. Scratches, deep parallel gouges carved into the rock, running in patterns across the back wall. They weren’t random. Some formed rough geometric shapes, circles, lines, crosses. Others looked almost like tally marks grouped in fives and tens.
I stood there staring at them, trying to make sense of it, and couldn’t. Animals don’t mark territory like this. Animals don’t count.
I backed out of the hollow slowly, my heart hammering, and nearly ran straight into Luke.
“Jesus, Jake,” he stopped when he saw my face. “What’s wrong?”
I told him. He squeezed into the crevice, stayed for maybe 30 seconds, then came back out looking like he’d aged five years.
“We’re not staying here,” he said flatly.
But it was already late afternoon, and the nearest viable campsite was hours away through rough country. Ryan argued we’d be safer here, high up with our backs protected than stumbling through the forest in the dark. He had a point. Reluctantly, Luke and I agreed to stay put, but we moved our camp 100 yards from the crevice, built the fire big, and kept our rifles loaded. As the sun set, the forest below us went quiet again. That same unnatural silence, like something had cleared out every living thing for miles.
I kept thinking about those marks on the wall, deliberate, intentional, the work of something that could think, plan, remember. Ryan tried to lighten the mood, cracking jokes about Bigfoot and asking if we’d get rich off the book deal. Luke didn’t laugh. Neither did I. We just sat there feeding the fire, watching the darkness gather in the valleys below.
