Tales of enormous, hairy creatures wandering the Rocky Mountains have been circulating for generations, from a mysterious encounter in Wyoming's Wind River Range in 1972 to reports that reached the superintendent's desk at Yellowstone National Park in 1980.
Since then, a steady stream of bigfoot reports has continued to emerge across the American West.
Some describe them moving through the trees, while others involve mysterious footprints, strange noises in the night or the unsettling feeling that something unseen is lurking nearby.
In recent months, two more accounts have surfaced, including one from a woman who claims she spotted the legendary creature in Colorado's San Juan Mountains on July 28 and another from an Idaho deer hunter who reported a strange encounter in the woods near St. Maries on Oct. 20.
"I saw what I saw," Colorado witness Lori Bowling said in a video posted to YouTube by her husband, William, after the alleged encounter. “I know it was a bigfoot.”
She offered a detailed report submitted to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, an independent group that collects and investigates alleged Sasquatch encounters.
The organization maintains a public database containing 398 reports from Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Utah. None constitutes scientific confirmation that bigfoot exists.
Stench Of Death
The most recent report is from an Idaho man named Gabe Coder.
On Oct. 20, 2026, Coder wrote that he was hunting deer in the mountains about 10 miles southeast of St. Maries, in the Idaho Panhandle.
It was about 5 p.m., and he was walking through thick pine forest near a creek bottom. The wind was calm, the sky clear and, as far as he could tell, he had the place to himself.
Then came the knocking.
From somewhere about 200 to 300 yards away, Coder heard what sounded like someone striking a tree. The knocking continued for five to 10 minutes.
Almost immediately, something else reached him.
Coder described an overpowering odor of decay, so strong it seemed as though he were standing directly over a dead animal.
He searched for a carcass but couldn't find one.
Then he heard something even stranger: What sounded like a deep voice, speaking words he couldn't understand.
“I did not see any human footprints or any signs of people on that trail or in the general area," he wrote. “I was the only truck I saw all day on the road leading to the drainage I was in.”
In his account, Coder said he had spent years hunting and exploring the outdoors without experiencing anything he would have considered a possible Sasquatch encounter.
Until that October evening.
BFRO classified his account as Class B, a designation used for encounters involving possible sightings at a distance, poor visibility or other circumstances that do not allow a clear view of the subject.
Whether the sounds came from another hunter, an animal or something else remains unknown.
The account contains no independently verified physical evidence tying the experience to bigfoot.
Several hundred miles south, another outdoorswoman says she didn't merely hear something unusual.
She got a good, long look at it.
'Stop The Damn Truck!'
Lori Bowling wasn't looking for bigfoot. She was looking for deer.
It was 3:41 p.m. July 28, and Bowling and her husband, Bill, were descending Slumgullion Pass along Colorado Highway 149 in the San Juan Mountains.
The couple, longtime outdoor enthusiasts who live in nearby Lake City, had just passed through a mild thunderstorm.
Bill was driving their truck and fifth-wheel RV, while Lori scanned the mountainside for wildlife.
Then, she said something moved near the tree line.
At first, Lori thought she was looking at a person wearing camouflage, but the figure was enormous.
She thinks it stood between 7 and 9 feet tall, covered in dark, blackish-brown hair, with unusually long arms and a head that seemed to blend directly into its shoulders.
“I watched as he turned to the right and started to walk uphill along the edge of the woods. Its gait was a glide," Bowling said.
She continued, “I saw this critter take four, five big gliding steps before it left my view due to the road curve.”
At first, she was too stunned to speak.
Then she recalled telling her husband, "Stop the damn truck! I just saw bigfoot."
Bill hadn't seen anything, but after nearly 39 years of marriage, he knew his wife well enough to recognize that something had rattled her.
In his written statement to BFRO, he described Lori as stunned, excited and frightened, a combination he had never seen in her.
And Lori, who said she'd never believed in bigfoot, was suddenly reconsidering.
"Trust me when I say I am not a bigfoot believer," she wrote, "but after what I saw I sure in the hell am now!"
Not On Wildlife List
If Bowling really did see something large and hairy moving through the trees near Slumgullion Pass, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has a suspect in mind.
"If she saw anything, our best guess is that it was a domestic sheep herder moving sheep through the high alpine, because that was happening during that same time," John Livingston, the agency's Southwest Region public information officer, told Cowboy State Daily on Friday.
"The herders often wear kind of scraggly clothing and kind of hide out in the trees and often attempt to be unseen," he added.
Many of the workers come from South America to tend sheep in Colorado's high country.
Livingston said his agency never received a direct report of Bowling's encounter, although word traveled quickly through tiny Lake City.
Bowling also claimed that a local game warden had told the sheriff about other reported sightings in the area.
"That's not a conversation we've had," he said, adding that the sheriff Bowling referenced is no longer in office.
The local game warden has spent more than 20 years working in the community, including setting out remote cameras every fall to survey lynx populations, but those cameras have never captured anything resembling Sasquatch.
"Never anything close to a squatch sighting," Livingston wrote in an email to Cowboy State Daily.
"It's pretty funny, this is now my third time talking about bigfoot in my five-plus years at CPW," he said. "Did not anticipate this being part of the job, but it always brings a little smile."
Among the stranger stories he's encountered was a claim that an entire family of Sasquatches had taken up residence near Junction Creek along the Colorado Trail outside Durango.
"Guy says they eat twinkies," Livingston said.
He suspects the Bowlings might have plenty to discuss with the believer in the Twinkie-eating bigfoot family, but as far as Colorado's wildlife officials are concerned, the legendary creature has yet to make the roster.
"We manage 960-plus wildlife species in Colorado," Livingston said. "While that list continues to grow, bigfoot is still not one of them."
Bigfoot Rides The Rails
Three years before Lori Bowling's reported encounter, a Cheyenne couple had their own brush with the legendary creature in those same Colorado mountains.
Shannon and Stetson Parker were riding the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in October 2023, enjoying the scenery and scanning the hillsides for elk.
Instead, Stetson spotted something moving upright through the brush on a distant slope.
He pointed it out to his wife and another passenger, who pulled out a cellphone and began recording.
Whatever the figure was, it appeared to be walking on two legs before squatting down in the vegetation.
The video went viral, attracting national attention and plenty of speculation about whether the figure was bigfoot, a hunter in camouflage or somebody having a little fun with tourists.
Stetson, an Air Force veteran and outdoorsman familiar with bears and hunting gear, wasn't convinced by the ordinary explanations.
"It wasn't moving like a bear or anything else I've ever seen," he told Cowboy State Daily in October 2023.
The couple had been skeptical about bigfoot before their train ride. Afterward, they weren't so sure.
Stetson had one particular regret: He'd left his binoculars in his pickup.
He told Cowboy State Daily he wouldn't make that mistake again.
Yellowstone's Bigfoot Files
Even Yellowstone National Park has a paper trail involving the legendary creature.
Buried among decades of routine correspondence about camping, wildlife and Old Faithful were letters asking park officials about bigfoot.
In October 1980, Yellowstone Superintendent Thomas O. Hobbs received two such inquiries, dated just a week apart.
The letters might have been prompted by a reported bigfoot encounter near Jackson earlier that year.
Hobbs searched the park's historical natural history records but found no documented sightings.
“We are unable to find any references to sightings of bigfoot in Yellowstone’s historical natural history records … with no reported sightings, there really is nothing further to pursue at this time," he responded.
More than three decades later, Yellowstone archives intern Hannah Marshall revisited the correspondence in a 2013 National Park Service article titled Unexplained and Unreported Phenomenon in Yellowstone.
While the park's historical correspondence provides a fascinating window into the legend, the number of alleged sightings that occurred within Yellowstone's actual boundaries remains unclear.
Cowboy State Daily reached out to park officials for more information about the extent of its bigfoot-related archives and is awaiting a response.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
