Bigfoot Deer Hunt
This week on Sasquatch Odyssey, I sit down with Brett from Colorado, a lifelong outdoorsman, avid hunter, and longtime listener who finally decided to send his story in. What unfolds across this conversation is one of those grounded, no-frills encounters that I think hits harder than the big sexy sightings, because Brett isn't trying to sell you anything.
He's a guy who grew up in the Colorado mountains, knows what belongs out there, and ran headfirst into something that didn't.Brett's first brush with the unknown happened when he was around 16 or 17 years old, somewhere in 2006 or 2007, while camping at the alpine lakes on the western side of I-25 in southern Colorado.
A fire, a friend, a quiet night, and then a sound coming out of the tree line that didn't match anything he had ever heard in those mountains. He describes it as a howl, but a howl with bass to it, something guttural that didn't track as canine. His buddy went pale almost immediately and told him his grandpa had warned him about Bigfoot. That was the first time Brett had ever really heard the word in any serious way, and the wood knocks rolling in from the timber that night did the rest of the work. The bigger story, and the one that has stayed with him for almost twenty years now, happened in the summer of 2009 on a remote stretch of road between Durango and Alamosa.
Brett, his now-wife, and his best friend Paul were on a road trip out to California after graduating high school. Somewhere south of the Four Corners, deep in unfamiliar country and lost off the MapQuest directions, a doe ran out in front of the Jeep and refused to leave the road. She kept pace in the headlights for a couple hundred yards, which any hunter will tell you is not normal deer behavior.
Then Brett saw it on an embankment off the driver's side. Seven to ten feet tall, black and shaggy, and a pair of eyes he describes as Texas Longhorn orange catching the headlights and then dimming as he passed.His friend Paul, who comes from a Hispanic and Native American family, refused to discuss it for the next ten or fifteen miles down the road. When he finally broke, he confirmed everything Brett had seen, then immediately shut it back down with three words that get to the heart of so much of this phenomenon.
We don't talk about him. Paul had been raised to believe that talking about this creature is what brings him around to take children. That cultural weight, that learned silence, is something I've explored on this show many times with Fred from Alaska and others, and Brett's experience puts a fresh face on it.We get into the wood knocks Brett heard up at the alpine lakes and how they compare to what I heard with Todd Standing up in Radium and what I've experienced right here on my own property in North Carolina.
Brett describes the sound as more of a hollow whop than a wood-on-wood thud, and we talk through my growing belief, shaped by years of conversations with Doug Hajicek and Tom Powell, that a lot of these knocks are being made with the mouth and hand rather than with sticks or clubs.
The simple reality is that you cannot walk into the woods and reliably find a piece of wood solid enough to produce that kind of report. The physics don't work.The conversation moves into eye shine, which is where Brett's hunting background really earns its keep. He breaks down the difference between the green and white shine you get off deer and elk, the yellow on cats and bears, and the quick flash of a mountain lion crossing a road, and then explains why what he saw that night fit none of it. The eyes were steady. They tracked the Jeep without flinching. The creature didn't move, didn't hide, didn't react the way anything in those woods is supposed to react.
Brett's read, and I think it's a sharp one, is that the thing was hunting that doe and the Jeep just happened to roll into the middle of it.We spend real time on the question of why people clam up after these encounters, and Brett's answer is honest and uncomfortable. Most of the time it's not culture, it's social pressure. He had this conversation with his own parents after the sighting and got the standard dismissals. Probably a bear. You were tired. It was late. He's watched friends shut down their own stories mid-sentence at a bar because of how the table might react.
His framing is one I appreciated. If you are comfortable with who you are, it shouldn't matter whether your best friend believes you. The story is yours either way.There's a moment in this episode I want to call out because it caught me off guard in the best way. Brett pauses the interview to ask me a question, which almost never happens on this show, and he proposes a theory about my own experiences filming My Bigfoot Life out in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2024. He suggests that the calm I felt during that night hike, when I was within ten feet of one of these things and chose to chase it up the ridge rather than retreat, is the same conditioned response that kicked in during my sixteen years in law enforcement, including the two times I was shot at on the job with the Atlanta Police Department. The sheepdog reflex. Run toward the danger, not away from it. I had never quite framed it that way myself, and he might be onto something.
We close with Brett's confirmation moment, which came years after the sighting when a Native American truck driver from the Four Corners region described the exact same orange eyes on the exact same pass without Brett feeding him a single detail. That kind of independent corroboration, from a man whose culture has been quietly tracking this creature for centuries, is the kind of data point that doesn't show up in a documentary but matters more than most of what does.
Brett's encouragement to anyone sitting on a story is the same encouragement I have been giving for years on this show. Send it in. It doesn't have to be five feet away. It doesn't have to come with video.
Every account is another data point in a repository we are still building together, and the only way this conversation moves forward is if people stop swallowing what they saw.
A huge thank you to Brett for trusting me with his story, for the great questions he turned back on me, and for being exactly the kind of grounded, thoughtful witness this subject needs more of.
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