I've told this story a hundred times over the years, and it still gets me right here in the chest. People always want to hear about the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. Well, this is it. And I'll tell it the same way I've always told it, because that's exactly how it happened. My name's Bobby. I'm from Yakima, Washington. I'm a cowboy, always have been. I broke horses, rode in rodeos, even served on a sheriff's posse for a while. That's how I met Randy Pierce, actually. We were both rodeo guys, both amateur boxers too. Local champions in our weight classes, if you can believe that. Met him at a gas station back in '61. He came up to me all excited, said he wanted to show me something. Came back with this big plaster cast of a footprint. Huge thing. He said, 'This is a Bigfoot track.' I didn't know what to make of that. I was kind of down the middle of the road about the whole thing. But Randy, he was obsessed. He'd been reading about these creatures since the late fifties, made trips down to this area in Northern California called Bluff Creek. He'd found some tracks down there in '64, and that just fueled him even more.
So October 1967, Randy shows up at my place all worked up. Said he'd gotten word about fresh tracks down near Bluff Creek, wanted me to come with him. I'd been fighting with my landlord all week about the fence line, so I wasn't in the best mood. But I agreed to go. We loaded up three horses in my truck, drove all the way down to the Six Rivers National Forest. That's about 580 miles from Yakima. Long drive, horses positioned sideways in the trailer. I'll be honest with you. I wasn't sure I believed in any of this Sasquatch business. But Randy made me promise something before we left. He was insistent. He said, 'Jimmy, if we see one, we don't shoot it. We don't try to kill it.' I agreed to that. Seemed reasonable enough at the time. We set up camp about three miles from where we'd be searching. Spent a few days riding around on horseback, looking for tracks, looking for anything unusual. Randy had his camera with him the whole time. Expensive thing, a 16mm Cine-Kodak. He'd rented it for a documentary he was working on. Always kept it in his saddlebag, ready to go.
October 20th. I'll never forget that date as long as I live. It was a Friday, beautiful sunny day. Nice and warm for that time of year. We were riding northeast along the east bank of Bluff Creek, upstream. The leaves were all changing, reds and yellows everywhere. Randy was taking pictures of me on the horse, leading the packhorse. Just a regular afternoon. Somewhere around one thirty in the afternoon, we came around this overturned tree with a massive root system. Thing was almost as high as a room. There was a logjam nearby, debris left over from a flood a few years back. And that's when Randy's horse started jumping and lunging, going crazy. sensing danger before humans is documented - Kelly' I looked left, across the creek, and there it was. Standing right there on the opposite bank. About maybe 25, 30 feet away from us. And the moment I saw it, I said to myself, 'Oh my God. They really do exist.'
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