September 26, 2025 • 23 mins
A hobby gold prospector goes looking for gold - and finds something he never expected along the river in California.
If you have an encountery you'd like to share, email it to: Contact@buckeyebigfoot.com
If you've enjoyed this episode, there are hundreds more on the youTube channel.
Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@BuckeyeBigfoot
If you have an encountery you'd like to share, email it to: Contact@buckeyebigfoot.com
If you've enjoyed this episode, there are hundreds more on the youTube channel.
Find us on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@BuckeyeBigfoot
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I have never been a superstitious man.
(00:10):
Gold makes scientists out of us.
You learn to read the water, the sand, and the rock.
You learn to trust geological clues and evidence as you find them.
You know that if the flood washed all the heavies to the outside bend of the river, you
want to work the inside bend.
If the black sand in your pan stacks up behind the magnetite, well, you're in the right
(00:35):
church at least, if not maybe the right pew, as my long gone daddy used to say, "Rivers
don't lie."
And the middle fork of the American River in California is as honest as they come.
The day it happened, the air had that Sierra Clarity you only get after a few cold nights,
(00:56):
bright enough to make every needle on every pine stand out, and the day is sharp enough
that the granite smells like it had just been wet-stoned.
It was late October, and the sky was the color of a new dime.
The maples growing along the canyon banks were already throwing out reds and oranges
against all the gray rock, and the canyon walls glowed with color.
(01:22):
I parked at the end of a four-service spur that looked like it had been chewed up by a
backhoe, and then forgotten.
I shouldered my pack and my aluminum sluice, and started down the switchbacks.
Two miles, loose stuff over the hard stuff.
Man's Anita waiting to rake your shins if you got soft.
(01:44):
My shovel clanked against my pack frame with each step like a metronome.
I've made that hike so many times over the years I could do it blind, but I still stopped
at the last bend, and listened the way I always did, not for people, but for the river.
The first rushing sounds of the river always instantly calmed me.
(02:08):
The river was a constant.
It was ancient, and it was a welcome and beautiful sound to my ears.
The middle fork was running low and glass clear.
It was late season, and that is when I like it best.
The noise is just a whisper instead of a loud shout, and you can see the cobbles under
(02:29):
the water.
I've got a spot down there that I call the bend.
I know, really original, but it's a place where the water slips under a granite slide and
then dumps into a long, slow inside turn.
You probably wouldn't notice the pay there, unless you knew to look for that thin black
seam behind the ripples in the bedrock.
(02:52):
If you caught the light just right, the sand there had a pepper of fine gold through
it, enough that it would pay for your gas that day, and maybe buy you a burrito on the
way home.
Havigold, they call it.
The kind that makes you feel like you're part of the old story, even if you don't really
go home with heavy pockets.
(03:14):
I set the sluice at the top of a shin deep ruffle where the flow pinched, and then I sided
along the sidewalls to make sure I was catching a good even sheet.
Then I wiggled it down with my boot until the ruffle sang out the note that I wanted.
You know if you run a sluice long enough, you get to know that note.
(03:35):
It's water, talking through the metal.
The tone that says, "Your mat will hold what matters, and it's going to spit along what
doesn't."
I shoveled pay into the five-gallon bucket, worked my classifier, and fed the box spoon
by spoon.
The world narrowed down to the routine.
(03:55):
"Shuffle, shake, swirl.
Look for the gold flakes that won't float."
Repeat.
It was an ordinary day, until it wasn't.
The change was small at first.
Suddenly all the jays went quiet.
Not like an alarm kind of quiet.
(04:16):
They just toned the chatter way down.
The river sounded the same, but I had the oddest sensation that I was on a stage down there
in the canyon, and that I was being watched intently.
Just a bear, I told myself.
As a reason is a comfort, even if the reason is wrong.
(04:38):
I worked a little faster.
Ankle bones getting numb in the cold water flow.
The sluice ripples winked, a thin purple line of garnet and magnetite building behind
the aluminum, promising color when I cleaned up.
That's when a rock hit the water, five feet upstream, and throughout a sheet of cold water
(04:59):
right up my shirt.
I jerked my head up.
Looking along the cliff face, looking to see if loose stones were about to tumble.
But there was nothing overhead but blue.
And one pine tree leaning a little harder than I remember it doing before.
Looking both ways.
No one upstream, no one downstream.
(05:20):
No one on the opposite bank.
The slope through there is straight, and the man's a knight is woven into cedar and black
oak, and all of it is too tight to hide anyone dumb enough to prank a man working a
sluice with a shovel in his hand.
I looked at the rock that now lay in the shallow water.
It had the fresh wet look of a toss, not a tumble, smooth quartz with a rusty vein running
(05:46):
through it, about the size of a baseball.
Different from the rocks in the water bed there.
I put it on the gravel bar, kind of automatically, the way you pocket a coin that you just found.
A second rock then came down track.
This was smaller, and it skipped twice like a kid was trying to learn how.
(06:09):
It died beside the sluice with a thunk that made the box ring.
I stepped up onto the bank and shaded my eyes, searching the tree line.
That's when I caught it.
It wasn't a person.
It wasn't a deer or some bear.
I saw a movement that didn't belong to anything I had already named for.
(06:31):
The angle between two man's and eat a trunks changed, then changed back, as if someone had
leaned in and eased back again.
I wouldn't have sworn to it in court, but I would have been willing to bet a day's panning
of gold on it down at the bar.
But it was a smell that reached me next, and if you've hunted or camped or just lived
(06:54):
outdoors enough, you know how much the nose will tell you.
It wasn't garbage or carrion, or anything else I knew.
This was a heavy and green smell, pungent and mineral flavored all at the same time.
The hair along my arms stood up.
(07:15):
I could have gone for the 357 in the side pocket of my pack.
My fingers had already found the zipper.
But then I let the zipper go.
I can't tell you why.
It wasn't that I felt safe.
It was that I felt I was just being measured up, being watched by something that was weighing
(07:37):
options.
A gun is a statement, and I felt that any chance at peace here would be gone, although I
didn't feel there was anything peaceful about what was happening.
This was a very confusing few seconds because I had nothing in my knowledge or history to
compare it to.
"Hello?" I shouted out.
(08:00):
Immediately I felt ridiculous.
The sound of my voice hit the canyon walls and died suddenly, going no further.
I got an answer all right.
But not in words.
I heard a single wood knock, clean and hollow, from somewhere up on the canyon cliffs.
(08:21):
It's a sound that you get with good dry limb hitting a solid trunk on purpose.
I didn't understand what I'd heard.
I waited probably a full minute with nothing else happening, and then I went back to it.
I fed the sluice and pretended that I wasn't counting my own heartbeats.
(08:42):
I was kneeling to check the mat.
When a sound came down the slope that made reasoning unnecessary, a slow and heavy crack
than another, not a bunch of branches breaking in an uncontrolled slide.
Now this rhythm was wrong for that.
What I heard were spaced out like little steps, as if something big was shouldering their
(09:06):
way through carefully, placing its feet with deliberation along the path.
I backed off the riffle, my soul sliding on the wet cobbles until water flooded around
my boot heels.
I've dealt with bears before.
You wave, you talk loudly.
You give them a clear line of retreat, and you keep this space between the two of you
(09:31):
very, very wide.
I've walked elk out of a willow tangle when we both chose the exact same doorway to walk
through.
But whatever was coming didn't sound like either, because it didn't sound like four
points of contact on the ground.
I heard two.
Two heavy, steady, and upright.
(09:54):
The man's a need of bowed and sprang.
Leaders rubbed their bows together, showing where something was starting to part them.
I saw the hand first.
It was a hand just like mine, only a lot more of it.
Long, dark fingers, skin like worn leather along the palm where the hair thinned.
(10:18):
It gripped a cedar trunk without hurry, flattened the brush to make room, and then the head cleared
the green.
If I say it stepped out, you'll hear some drama that I don't mean.
One moment there was only the trunks of trees, branches, and leaves.
(10:38):
The next there was a human form shaped that was certainly not human.
This creature, this being, this saskwatch, stood with its weight forward, the way a hiker
would easing down a steep pitch.
Knees flex slightly for its balance.
The hair lay across the shoulders and down the arms, and it was the color of dark walnut.
(11:03):
The chest was broad and unexpectedly smooth in the dead center.
The hair was thinner there, so I could see the skin color.
It was the color of walnut wood rubbed lightly with oil.
The head sat low on the shoulders.
I don't mean a no-necked kind of thing, the way they show in cartoons.
(11:24):
But a short and wide neck that flared out to the wide shoulders on each side.
The brow was heavy enough to shade the eyes even in daylight.
And those eyes.
People have asked me, "What color were the eyes?"
And all I can honestly say is dark.
(11:44):
Not black buttoned all eyes, not glowing eyes.
There was nothing supernatural.
They were alive and alert.
But that's all I can say.
It was roughly 50 feet away, coming out of the line of trees along the bank, right across
the slick cobble tongue and the narrowest braid of the river.
We regarded each other the way two animals do when they meet on a very narrow trail.
(12:09):
Neither wanting to go backwards into what's behind them.
And neither wanting to walk forward into the other space.
I don't know how long we stayed looking at each other.
But it was way more than just a few seconds.
We were both looking, weighing our options, making decisions.
(12:30):
It moved first.
It didn't come at me, but went across in front of me roughly 20 feet, and it angled down
toward the main channel out in front of my sluice.
As it came down, one big hand rested a moment on a smooth boulder.
It touched the boulder, lifted its hand momentarily, then pressed back down on the boulder again
(12:53):
more firmly.
If I had to say, it was testing to see if it was safe to balance its weight as it worked
its way down on the loose rock.
Its descent wasn't fast, careless, or threatening.
Even in my shock state I could recognize that.
At the bank it crouched on the big tendon of its heel, and it looked straight down
(13:18):
the sluice box.
This change in posture put the shoulders above the knees and tighten the skin across the
chest, and I saw muscle move under the hair.
It watched for a moment, then cocked its head looking at the ripples as they flashed.
He seemed mesmerized by the movement.
(13:39):
A noise came out of the creature then.
Not a growl or a bark, but the sound of a gravelly rumble that sounded exactly like the
way we say, "Hmm, it was a sound of curiosity, a sound of acknowledgement, but not warning
or danger.
If I had to translate, I'd call it in, "What is this you're doing?"
(14:04):
And that is 110% guessing on my part.
I slowly raised my hands, palm out, elbows bent and easy.
It was a posture that says exactly what it's been saying for millennia between strangers
that meet.
"Hey, man, I'm just here.
I mean no harm."
(14:24):
It put its focus back on me then, and I'm not saying it nodded at me or said okay in
its own little way, but there was a slow control in its look and the head movement, and
I read that as a form of acknowledgement.
I realized I had been clenching my jaw so hard my teeth were aching.
(14:46):
I relaxed my mouth and let it ease open just slightly and breathe through my mouth quietly.
The river lacked the sluice, making little tinkling sounds, and I have an odd memory of
the sunlight on the Sasquatches' shoulders as I hear that sound.
When it rolled or wheeled, the bulk of its body aroused slowly and cautiously until it
(15:12):
faced away from me, and it began moving away along the bank.
It had the feel of trying to be sure that I wasn't going to do something stupid once it
turned its back on me.
It wasn't hurrying away at all.
It was being sure of me, however.
Somewhere along the opposite rim on the river.
(15:34):
I heard a car door shut in the distance.
Laptor invoices little along the canyon rim, and they fell in shreds through the trees.
A dog barked, along with the trill of some children's high laughter.
The sounds were distant, but sound travels down the river canyons.
(15:56):
The creature stopped and turned to look across at the human sounds.
I saw it briefly in profile as it listened.
It seemed to be deciding better of being out in the open on the bank.
It took two steps away from the river, into a line of cedars that hid it from any sight
from the opposite rim.
(16:17):
If I hadn't been there and watched it and known right where it was, it would have quickly
been lost among the shelter of the trees.
It was a quick and fluid movement, and it made me change something in my thoughts about
this sassquatch.
It took away some of my fear and panic.
(16:38):
I now saw not a mindless monster, but a being that has learned how not to be seen.
I saw the sunlight flash once more off the walnut fur as it walked between trees and
vanished along the heavier tree cover on the banks.
Then it was gone.
(16:59):
I looked around and disbelieved at what I had just seen, witnessed, encountered, experienced.
Some ways distant along the bank there were some plain footprints.
Front part of the foot was wide, the heel firmly planted.
The toes were split wide in one print, and close together in another, as if the toes
(17:22):
had curled to grip in the mud.
I don't remember deciding to pack.
I don't know how long after this encounter I started packing.
But my hands did pack everything up.
I rinsed the mat in a pan and caught the black sand and flower gold.
I told myself I'd look at it later.
(17:44):
I slid this Lewis up on a boulder where the river couldn't take it as I strapped the
shovel to the pack with fingers that suddenly had a problem tying the same knots.
I'd been tying since I was a very young boy.
I gathered everything and began to trace my steps out.
The hike out is always longer than the hike in, but that day it wasn't a hike at all.
(18:07):
It felt like I was moving away from someplace.
I didn't feel I belonged in anymore.
Dry leaves rattled against me in Sanito on the slope, and I jumped.
But it was nothing.
I heard the dog bark again in the distance.
Near the end of my hike, the world suddenly tilted back into its familiar axis.
(18:30):
At my truck I sat with the door open, letting the breeze flowing through to cool me down.
I hadn't realized how overheated and sweaty I was, probably from adrenaline.
My hands were still shaking, and I didn't notice it until I fished a water bottle out of
the small cooler.
I got the top of the bottle off, and suddenly small splashes of water were popping out of
(18:54):
the top onto my hand.
That's when I saw the slight shake of the bottle from my shaky hands.
At home I spread my concentrate on the black pan, and teased the gold out along the lip
one careful swirl at a time.
The specks of gold winked in the sunlight.
There wasn't much there, but it was enough to count.
(19:18):
I collected the flakes and added them to my small vial of collected flakes.
I set it in the sun on the window sill.
The rest of the day is kind of a blur.
I do know I slept that night with the window cracked as I like to do on cool autumn nights.
I woke up twice during the night, and I don't know why.
(19:39):
There were no footsteps or tree knocks or any of that.
But I marked it down as something unusual because I usually slept very soundly.
I put it down to the adrenaline rush from that day.
I went back to the river that next weekend.
I knew that if I didn't, I probably never would.
(20:01):
I walked in with slower feet, using my best force manners along the way.
I stopped.
I looked and listened often.
But the river in the banks felt normal, alive that day.
I set this Lewis box in, and I started to work.
I gathered enough flakes that day to once again pay for my gas and buy me some dinner through
(20:24):
a takeout window on the way home.
I've had folks ask me since, if I'm scared to go out there alone now.
The answer is no, I'm not afraid.
But I do pick my times and days a little more carefully.
I also now have an emergency beacon that I carry, not just because of Sasquatch.
(20:47):
But reality has shown me that anything could happen.
I could fall in the river.
I could break my ankle hiking in or out.
I could be attacked by an animal.
Any number of things could happen.
And of course, there is always the possibility that I could meet with an unfriendly Sasquatch.
(21:08):
Like this, full of possibilities, some are good, some are not.
People always want proof of this story, but I have none.
I wasn't out there to collect anything on Sasquatch.
I was looking for gold, not an animal, not Sasquatch.
(21:28):
It's gotten so bad I don't even try to tell people about this anymore.
It tends to cause more grief than good.
After the months that winter, the heavy rains washed out the berm that I had made.
I took this as a sign to move on, to try another stretch of the river, and I did.
(21:50):
I'll keep panning for gold as long as my back lets me.
I'll take this Lewis down to the river on blue days, and I'll work until the rift will
sing.
Some mornings, usually when the light is bright and the air suddenly feels hazy.
The cannume will go still in that strange way that it does.
(22:10):
And I will call out hello to no one in particular.
I always wait for an answer, and I have not gotten one back since, and I'm satisfied with
that.
But if something chooses to watch me from the man's Anita up on the hills, I would not mind
it.
Either way, I'll keep searching for those gold flakes.
(22:33):
I'll take them home, and put them in the small little vial up on the windowsill.
I'll keep doing what men have always done along the California rivers.
I'll be looking for gold in Sasquatch.
Well, that's my story.
Now that you've heard it, you can pass it along the way old timers pass around their
(22:54):
stories, or you can let it be forgotten in your memory.
That's up to you.
Now, please excuse me.
I have some gold to go find, and maybe I'll find Sasquatch too.
Signed, Nate.
[Silence]
I have never been a superstitious man.
(00:10):
Gold makes scientists out of us.
You learn to read the water, the sand, and the rock.
You learn to trust geological clues and evidence as you find them.
You know that if the flood washed all the heavies to the outside bend of the river, you
want to work the inside bend.
If the black sand in your pan stacks up behind the magnetite, well, you're in the right
(00:35):
church at least, if not maybe the right pew, as my long gone daddy used to say, "Rivers
don't lie."
And the middle fork of the American River in California is as honest as they come.
The day it happened, the air had that Sierra Clarity you only get after a few cold nights,
(00:56):
bright enough to make every needle on every pine stand out, and the day is sharp enough
that the granite smells like it had just been wet-stoned.
It was late October, and the sky was the color of a new dime.
The maples growing along the canyon banks were already throwing out reds and oranges
against all the gray rock, and the canyon walls glowed with color.
(01:22):
I parked at the end of a four-service spur that looked like it had been chewed up by a
backhoe, and then forgotten.
I shouldered my pack and my aluminum sluice, and started down the switchbacks.
Two miles, loose stuff over the hard stuff.
Man's Anita waiting to rake your shins if you got soft.
(01:44):
My shovel clanked against my pack frame with each step like a metronome.
I've made that hike so many times over the years I could do it blind, but I still stopped
at the last bend, and listened the way I always did, not for people, but for the river.
The first rushing sounds of the river always instantly calmed me.
(02:08):
The river was a constant.
It was ancient, and it was a welcome and beautiful sound to my ears.
The middle fork was running low and glass clear.
It was late season, and that is when I like it best.
The noise is just a whisper instead of a loud shout, and you can see the cobbles under
(02:29):
the water.
I've got a spot down there that I call the bend.
I know, really original, but it's a place where the water slips under a granite slide and
then dumps into a long, slow inside turn.
You probably wouldn't notice the pay there, unless you knew to look for that thin black
seam behind the ripples in the bedrock.
(02:52):
If you caught the light just right, the sand there had a pepper of fine gold through
it, enough that it would pay for your gas that day, and maybe buy you a burrito on the
way home.
Havigold, they call it.
The kind that makes you feel like you're part of the old story, even if you don't really
go home with heavy pockets.
(03:14):
I set the sluice at the top of a shin deep ruffle where the flow pinched, and then I sided
along the sidewalls to make sure I was catching a good even sheet.
Then I wiggled it down with my boot until the ruffle sang out the note that I wanted.
You know if you run a sluice long enough, you get to know that note.
(03:35):
It's water, talking through the metal.
The tone that says, "Your mat will hold what matters, and it's going to spit along what
doesn't."
I shoveled pay into the five-gallon bucket, worked my classifier, and fed the box spoon
by spoon.
The world narrowed down to the routine.
(03:55):
"Shuffle, shake, swirl.
Look for the gold flakes that won't float."
Repeat.
It was an ordinary day, until it wasn't.
The change was small at first.
Suddenly all the jays went quiet.
Not like an alarm kind of quiet.
(04:16):
They just toned the chatter way down.
The river sounded the same, but I had the oddest sensation that I was on a stage down there
in the canyon, and that I was being watched intently.
Just a bear, I told myself.
As a reason is a comfort, even if the reason is wrong.
(04:38):
I worked a little faster.
Ankle bones getting numb in the cold water flow.
The sluice ripples winked, a thin purple line of garnet and magnetite building behind
the aluminum, promising color when I cleaned up.
That's when a rock hit the water, five feet upstream, and throughout a sheet of cold water
(04:59):
right up my shirt.
I jerked my head up.
Looking along the cliff face, looking to see if loose stones were about to tumble.
But there was nothing overhead but blue.
And one pine tree leaning a little harder than I remember it doing before.
Looking both ways.
No one upstream, no one downstream.
(05:20):
No one on the opposite bank.
The slope through there is straight, and the man's a knight is woven into cedar and black
oak, and all of it is too tight to hide anyone dumb enough to prank a man working a
sluice with a shovel in his hand.
I looked at the rock that now lay in the shallow water.
It had the fresh wet look of a toss, not a tumble, smooth quartz with a rusty vein running
(05:46):
through it, about the size of a baseball.
Different from the rocks in the water bed there.
I put it on the gravel bar, kind of automatically, the way you pocket a coin that you just found.
A second rock then came down track.
This was smaller, and it skipped twice like a kid was trying to learn how.
(06:09):
It died beside the sluice with a thunk that made the box ring.
I stepped up onto the bank and shaded my eyes, searching the tree line.
That's when I caught it.
It wasn't a person.
It wasn't a deer or some bear.
I saw a movement that didn't belong to anything I had already named for.
(06:31):
The angle between two man's and eat a trunks changed, then changed back, as if someone had
leaned in and eased back again.
I wouldn't have sworn to it in court, but I would have been willing to bet a day's panning
of gold on it down at the bar.
But it was a smell that reached me next, and if you've hunted or camped or just lived
(06:54):
outdoors enough, you know how much the nose will tell you.
It wasn't garbage or carrion, or anything else I knew.
This was a heavy and green smell, pungent and mineral flavored all at the same time.
The hair along my arms stood up.
(07:15):
I could have gone for the 357 in the side pocket of my pack.
My fingers had already found the zipper.
But then I let the zipper go.
I can't tell you why.
It wasn't that I felt safe.
It was that I felt I was just being measured up, being watched by something that was weighing
(07:37):
options.
A gun is a statement, and I felt that any chance at peace here would be gone, although I
didn't feel there was anything peaceful about what was happening.
This was a very confusing few seconds because I had nothing in my knowledge or history to
compare it to.
"Hello?" I shouted out.
(08:00):
Immediately I felt ridiculous.
The sound of my voice hit the canyon walls and died suddenly, going no further.
I got an answer all right.
But not in words.
I heard a single wood knock, clean and hollow, from somewhere up on the canyon cliffs.
(08:21):
It's a sound that you get with good dry limb hitting a solid trunk on purpose.
I didn't understand what I'd heard.
I waited probably a full minute with nothing else happening, and then I went back to it.
I fed the sluice and pretended that I wasn't counting my own heartbeats.
(08:42):
I was kneeling to check the mat.
When a sound came down the slope that made reasoning unnecessary, a slow and heavy crack
than another, not a bunch of branches breaking in an uncontrolled slide.
Now this rhythm was wrong for that.
What I heard were spaced out like little steps, as if something big was shouldering their
(09:06):
way through carefully, placing its feet with deliberation along the path.
I backed off the riffle, my soul sliding on the wet cobbles until water flooded around
my boot heels.
I've dealt with bears before.
You wave, you talk loudly.
You give them a clear line of retreat, and you keep this space between the two of you
(09:31):
very, very wide.
I've walked elk out of a willow tangle when we both chose the exact same doorway to walk
through.
But whatever was coming didn't sound like either, because it didn't sound like four
points of contact on the ground.
I heard two.
Two heavy, steady, and upright.
(09:54):
The man's a need of bowed and sprang.
Leaders rubbed their bows together, showing where something was starting to part them.
I saw the hand first.
It was a hand just like mine, only a lot more of it.
Long, dark fingers, skin like worn leather along the palm where the hair thinned.
(10:18):
It gripped a cedar trunk without hurry, flattened the brush to make room, and then the head cleared
the green.
If I say it stepped out, you'll hear some drama that I don't mean.
One moment there was only the trunks of trees, branches, and leaves.
(10:38):
The next there was a human form shaped that was certainly not human.
This creature, this being, this saskwatch, stood with its weight forward, the way a hiker
would easing down a steep pitch.
Knees flex slightly for its balance.
The hair lay across the shoulders and down the arms, and it was the color of dark walnut.
(11:03):
The chest was broad and unexpectedly smooth in the dead center.
The hair was thinner there, so I could see the skin color.
It was the color of walnut wood rubbed lightly with oil.
The head sat low on the shoulders.
I don't mean a no-necked kind of thing, the way they show in cartoons.
(11:24):
But a short and wide neck that flared out to the wide shoulders on each side.
The brow was heavy enough to shade the eyes even in daylight.
And those eyes.
People have asked me, "What color were the eyes?"
And all I can honestly say is dark.
(11:44):
Not black buttoned all eyes, not glowing eyes.
There was nothing supernatural.
They were alive and alert.
But that's all I can say.
It was roughly 50 feet away, coming out of the line of trees along the bank, right across
the slick cobble tongue and the narrowest braid of the river.
We regarded each other the way two animals do when they meet on a very narrow trail.
(12:09):
Neither wanting to go backwards into what's behind them.
And neither wanting to walk forward into the other space.
I don't know how long we stayed looking at each other.
But it was way more than just a few seconds.
We were both looking, weighing our options, making decisions.
(12:30):
It moved first.
It didn't come at me, but went across in front of me roughly 20 feet, and it angled down
toward the main channel out in front of my sluice.
As it came down, one big hand rested a moment on a smooth boulder.
It touched the boulder, lifted its hand momentarily, then pressed back down on the boulder again
(12:53):
more firmly.
If I had to say, it was testing to see if it was safe to balance its weight as it worked
its way down on the loose rock.
Its descent wasn't fast, careless, or threatening.
Even in my shock state I could recognize that.
At the bank it crouched on the big tendon of its heel, and it looked straight down
(13:18):
the sluice box.
This change in posture put the shoulders above the knees and tighten the skin across the
chest, and I saw muscle move under the hair.
It watched for a moment, then cocked its head looking at the ripples as they flashed.
He seemed mesmerized by the movement.
(13:39):
A noise came out of the creature then.
Not a growl or a bark, but the sound of a gravelly rumble that sounded exactly like the
way we say, "Hmm, it was a sound of curiosity, a sound of acknowledgement, but not warning
or danger.
If I had to translate, I'd call it in, "What is this you're doing?"
(14:04):
And that is 110% guessing on my part.
I slowly raised my hands, palm out, elbows bent and easy.
It was a posture that says exactly what it's been saying for millennia between strangers
that meet.
"Hey, man, I'm just here.
I mean no harm."
(14:24):
It put its focus back on me then, and I'm not saying it nodded at me or said okay in
its own little way, but there was a slow control in its look and the head movement, and
I read that as a form of acknowledgement.
I realized I had been clenching my jaw so hard my teeth were aching.
(14:46):
I relaxed my mouth and let it ease open just slightly and breathe through my mouth quietly.
The river lacked the sluice, making little tinkling sounds, and I have an odd memory of
the sunlight on the Sasquatches' shoulders as I hear that sound.
When it rolled or wheeled, the bulk of its body aroused slowly and cautiously until it
(15:12):
faced away from me, and it began moving away along the bank.
It had the feel of trying to be sure that I wasn't going to do something stupid once it
turned its back on me.
It wasn't hurrying away at all.
It was being sure of me, however.
Somewhere along the opposite rim on the river.
(15:34):
I heard a car door shut in the distance.
Laptor invoices little along the canyon rim, and they fell in shreds through the trees.
A dog barked, along with the trill of some children's high laughter.
The sounds were distant, but sound travels down the river canyons.
(15:56):
The creature stopped and turned to look across at the human sounds.
I saw it briefly in profile as it listened.
It seemed to be deciding better of being out in the open on the bank.
It took two steps away from the river, into a line of cedars that hid it from any sight
from the opposite rim.
(16:17):
If I hadn't been there and watched it and known right where it was, it would have quickly
been lost among the shelter of the trees.
It was a quick and fluid movement, and it made me change something in my thoughts about
this sassquatch.
It took away some of my fear and panic.
(16:38):
I now saw not a mindless monster, but a being that has learned how not to be seen.
I saw the sunlight flash once more off the walnut fur as it walked between trees and
vanished along the heavier tree cover on the banks.
Then it was gone.
(16:59):
I looked around and disbelieved at what I had just seen, witnessed, encountered, experienced.
Some ways distant along the bank there were some plain footprints.
Front part of the foot was wide, the heel firmly planted.
The toes were split wide in one print, and close together in another, as if the toes
(17:22):
had curled to grip in the mud.
I don't remember deciding to pack.
I don't know how long after this encounter I started packing.
But my hands did pack everything up.
I rinsed the mat in a pan and caught the black sand and flower gold.
I told myself I'd look at it later.
(17:44):
I slid this Lewis up on a boulder where the river couldn't take it as I strapped the
shovel to the pack with fingers that suddenly had a problem tying the same knots.
I'd been tying since I was a very young boy.
I gathered everything and began to trace my steps out.
The hike out is always longer than the hike in, but that day it wasn't a hike at all.
(18:07):
It felt like I was moving away from someplace.
I didn't feel I belonged in anymore.
Dry leaves rattled against me in Sanito on the slope, and I jumped.
But it was nothing.
I heard the dog bark again in the distance.
Near the end of my hike, the world suddenly tilted back into its familiar axis.
(18:30):
At my truck I sat with the door open, letting the breeze flowing through to cool me down.
I hadn't realized how overheated and sweaty I was, probably from adrenaline.
My hands were still shaking, and I didn't notice it until I fished a water bottle out of
the small cooler.
I got the top of the bottle off, and suddenly small splashes of water were popping out of
(18:54):
the top onto my hand.
That's when I saw the slight shake of the bottle from my shaky hands.
At home I spread my concentrate on the black pan, and teased the gold out along the lip
one careful swirl at a time.
The specks of gold winked in the sunlight.
There wasn't much there, but it was enough to count.
(19:18):
I collected the flakes and added them to my small vial of collected flakes.
I set it in the sun on the window sill.
The rest of the day is kind of a blur.
I do know I slept that night with the window cracked as I like to do on cool autumn nights.
I woke up twice during the night, and I don't know why.
(19:39):
There were no footsteps or tree knocks or any of that.
But I marked it down as something unusual because I usually slept very soundly.
I put it down to the adrenaline rush from that day.
I went back to the river that next weekend.
I knew that if I didn't, I probably never would.
(20:01):
I walked in with slower feet, using my best force manners along the way.
I stopped.
I looked and listened often.
But the river in the banks felt normal, alive that day.
I set this Lewis box in, and I started to work.
I gathered enough flakes that day to once again pay for my gas and buy me some dinner through
(20:24):
a takeout window on the way home.
I've had folks ask me since, if I'm scared to go out there alone now.
The answer is no, I'm not afraid.
But I do pick my times and days a little more carefully.
I also now have an emergency beacon that I carry, not just because of Sasquatch.
(20:47):
But reality has shown me that anything could happen.
I could fall in the river.
I could break my ankle hiking in or out.
I could be attacked by an animal.
Any number of things could happen.
And of course, there is always the possibility that I could meet with an unfriendly Sasquatch.
(21:08):
Like this, full of possibilities, some are good, some are not.
People always want proof of this story, but I have none.
I wasn't out there to collect anything on Sasquatch.
I was looking for gold, not an animal, not Sasquatch.
(21:28):
It's gotten so bad I don't even try to tell people about this anymore.
It tends to cause more grief than good.
After the months that winter, the heavy rains washed out the berm that I had made.
I took this as a sign to move on, to try another stretch of the river, and I did.
(21:50):
I'll keep panning for gold as long as my back lets me.
I'll take this Lewis down to the river on blue days, and I'll work until the rift will
sing.
Some mornings, usually when the light is bright and the air suddenly feels hazy.
The cannume will go still in that strange way that it does.
(22:10):
And I will call out hello to no one in particular.
I always wait for an answer, and I have not gotten one back since, and I'm satisfied with
that.
But if something chooses to watch me from the man's Anita up on the hills, I would not mind
it.
Either way, I'll keep searching for those gold flakes.
(22:33):
I'll take them home, and put them in the small little vial up on the windowsill.
I'll keep doing what men have always done along the California rivers.
I'll be looking for gold in Sasquatch.
Well, that's my story.
Now that you've heard it, you can pass it along the way old timers pass around their
(22:54):
stories, or you can let it be forgotten in your memory.
That's up to you.
Now, please excuse me.
I have some gold to go find, and maybe I'll find Sasquatch too.
Signed, Nate.
[Silence]
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