Hunter Rescues Baby Bigfoot From Flash Flood, Family Appears at Dawn

So I just came across this absolutely wild video over on YouTube, and I have to share it with you because it's the kind of story that stays with you long after the screen goes dark. A hunter named Joe Freeman, a 52-year-old lineman from Loveland, Colorado, recounts an experience from September 12th, 2013, that sounds like something straight out of a cryptid documentary, except he swears it happened to him in the Comanche Peak Wilderness along the North Fork of the Big Thompson River. Joe had been an elk hunter for 35 years and knew that valley like the back of his hand. He'd set up camp on a grassy bench about a mile above what's known as the deserted village, a spot tied to the Earl of Dunraven, an Irish nobleman who once tried to buy up most of Estes Park for his own private hunting ground more than a century ago. Now there's nothing left but a few piles of rotten logs and rock foundations in a meadow, but the area above it gets steep, narrow, and wild, and it's loaded with elk every September. It was Joe's spot. But things started getting strange on Tuesday morning. Joe bugled at first light and got a response from a good bull up on the north slope. He worked his way toward the animal for about an hour, cow calling, closing the distance to around 150 yards. Then the bull just quit. Not the way a bull quits when he's winded you, Joe explains. The herd had been screaming every two minutes, and then they all just took off, crashing up over the ridge, 20 or 30 elk by the sound, running hard, and never making another sound. The wind was in Joe's face. They hadn't smelled him. So what had they smelled? Joe describes a heavy, sour odor that came down the slope on the wet wind, something like a wet dog kennel that nobody's cleaned in a month with a smell like skunk cabbage under it. He told himself it was a bear, but he'd smelled plenty of bears in his life, and this wasn't that. That evening, back at camp, he found a track in the mud at the edge of the creek about a hundred yards below his tent. A barefoot print, pressed deep into the wet sand at the water's edge, about 15 inches long with five toes. Joe got down on his knees and laid his hand in it, and it went past the end of his fingers by a good two inches. There were three more going downstream along the water's edge, spaced wide apart, and then they went into the creek and didn't come out on his side. Beside the big ones, there was a little one, just one, in a soft spot of mud by a rock, like a child's footprint, maybe six inches long. Then came Tuesday night, and this is where things get really interesting. Joe had hung his food the proper way, in a stuff sack from a spruce limb about 15 feet up and 10 feet out from the trunk, with a rope tied off to another tree. When he went to get his breakfast Wednesday morning, the rope was untied. His food bag was sitting on the ground at the foot of the tree. It wasn't torn. The drawstring was still pulled shut. Nothing was missing. Somebody had untied the knot, let the bag down, looked at it, and left it there, sitting upright on a rock. As Joe points out, a bear doesn't untie a knot. A bear tears the bag open and eats everything in it and chews the tube of toothpaste for dessert. Now here's where the story takes a turn that I genuinely had to pause and process. Joe had a deeply personal reason for being out there in the first place, and for carrying 50 feet of parachute cord in his pack. Back in 1976, when he was just 15 years old, his family was camping near Drake, where the North Fork comes into the main river, on the evening of July 31st. A thunderstorm parked itself over the upper Big Thompson Canyon and dropped about a foot of rain in four hours. The river came up 19 feet and went down that canyon like a wall, killing 144 people. Joe's dad got the family up the hill behind the campground in the rain and the dark, and they lived. But from that hillside, in a flash of lightning, Joe saw a car go by in the river below them. It was upside down, and there was a little girl on it, maybe six years old, in a white nightgown, holding on to the wheel on the underside of that car. He was close enough to see her face. Close enough that if he'd had a rope, he could have thrown it to her. He didn't have a rope. And in the next flash of lightning, she was gone. He carried her face around with him for 37 years. So when Joe went up the North Fork that September, he carried that parachute cord. And when the flood came up that night, eight feet in four hours, rolling boulders the size of refrigerators, he heard something in the water. He went in with his trekking pole, his bare hands, and that length of cord, and he pulled a baby out of the flash flood. He kept it alive all night inside his sleeping bag, pressed against his chest. When the sun came up the next morning, its family was standing in the trees about 40 yards from his tent. There were three of them. The biggest one was holding a broken aspen limb in one hand like a walking stick, and the smallest one was barely taller than Joe, and all three of them were looking at his tent. Joe says he'd been scared in the woods before, but he'd never been scared like he was when he unzipped that tent flap and saw them. I won't spoil the rest because this story deserves to be heard in Joe's own words. The way he tells it, with the weight of that 1976 flood behind him and the birth of his first grandchild waiting for him back home, gives the whole thing a gravity that a lot of witness accounts just don't have. His daughter Lauren was due on September 26th, and he'd promised to be in that hospital waiting room. The timing of this hunt, the weather, the elk behaving strangely, the tracks, the food bag, and then the flood and the family in the trees, it's the kind of layered account that makes you lean in. You can find the full story over on YouTube on the Backcountry Mystery Files and The Deep Forest Tales channels. Trust me, you want to hear Joe tell this one himself.