Retired Machinist Finds Bigfoot Tracks Near 1987 Vanishing Site

A story out of the Appalachian Mountains has resurfaced online, and it's one of those tales that sticks with you long after you hear it. A hunter named Harold Dixon, now 76 years old, shared a remarkable account from his decades of hunting the ridges of Scott County, Virginia, and it involves fresh tracks, a man declared dead, and the strong possibility that someone was living alongside a Sasquatch in the deep timber. Back in September 1987, a 71-year-old man named Chester Owens packed up his gear and told his neighbor he was heading into the mountains north of the Clinch River to camp for a few days and clear his head. Chester had recently lost his wife Edna after 46 years of marriage, and folks around Fort Blackmore figured he just needed some time alone in the woods. Chester was no stranger to those mountains either. He'd run trap lines up there as a boy in the 1920s and 30s, and he knew that country better than just about anyone alive. Two weeks passed and Chester didn't come back down. His old Ford pickup was found at the end of a forest service road, but he was nowhere to be found. The search that followed was massive. Over 200 people walked those hollows. Rescue squads from three counties came in. Dogs were brought up from Abingdon. National Guard helicopters flew the ridges out of Bristol. Sheriff Carl Simmons did everything by the book. They found Chester's camp on the fourth day, pitched on a bench above a creek the maps call Stony Branch. His sleeping bag was inside. His food was hung properly in a tree, the way an old woodsman would do it. But his rifle was still leaned inside the tent. And as Harold points out in his account, an experienced trapper doesn't walk away from his rifle. Not for an hour. Not for any reason he chooses. That detail alone told every man on that search party something was very wrong. The dogs took a line from the tent that headed up the mountain toward the sandstone cliffs under High Butte. Then the line fell apart in the rhododendron thicket, and the dogs sat down and refused to work. Two different handlers, two different days, same result. One handler told the sheriff his dog had never quit a track in eight years. He said the dog wasn't confused. He said the dog was afraid. That little detail never made it into the Gate City newspaper, but you can bet it made the rounds at every coffee counter in the county. By October 1st, the search was called off. The official finding was that Chester had likely suffered a heart attack or stroke somewhere in the cliff country and fallen into one of the crevices or sinkholes that vein that whole formation. His church held a memorial service on October 11th. No casket, just a photograph of Chester and Edna on the communion table. Harold was there. He sang with everyone else. But he went home and told his wife Ruth that the whole thing didn't sit right with him. He couldn't explain why. Chester was 71 and grieving, and old grieving men do die on mountains. The official story was reasonable on paper. But Harold had hunted with this man. He'd seen him read a hillside like other men read a newspaper. The picture of Chester just falling into a hole wouldn't stay stuck in his mind. It kept sliding off. So when deer season opened that November, Harold made a decision. He didn't go to his usual stand on Copper Ridge. He drove up the Dungannon side, parked where Chester had parked, and hunted his way toward Stony Branch. He told Ruth he wanted new country. She looked at him across the kitchen the way she always did when she knew there was more arithmetic than he was showing. But she packed him two days of food without a word about it. That's Ruth. That's one of a thousand reasons Harold stayed married to her for 51 years. The morning of November 21st was cold, around 26 degrees before daylight, with frost on the broomsedge and the creeks running full from a wet fall. Harold climbed through the dark with his rifle slung and a flashlight he hardly used, because a man who's hunted one mountain range his whole life carries most of it behind his eyes. He saw seven deer that morning and let every one of them walk, because the truth he hadn't fully admitted to himself was that he hadn't come up there for deer. He reached Chester's camp a little after one in the afternoon. The Forest Service had left it alone. The canvas tent had gone gray-green and slumped on its poles. Leaves had drifted against the north side in a wave. The fire ring held charred wood gone soft with rain. The sleeping bag still lay in the tent, molded to the shape of nothing. A blue enamel coffee pot sat by the fire ring with three inches of rainwater and dead leaves in it. Harold stood in that camp a long time. He describes it as a particular kind of quiet, the quiet of a dead man's camp. The gear waits. A chair by a fire ring waits for somebody to sit down, no matter how long it's been, and the waiting gets into you. Then he walked the edges of the bench, reading ground the way a lifetime of hunting teaches you to do. And on the downhill side, where a game trail crossed a seep and the ground stayed soft year-round, he found the tracks. The first one stopped him the way a wall stops you. Seventeen inches heel to toe. He laid his rifle down and put his boot beside it. His boot, a size 10 insulated pack, looked like a child's shoe next to that print. Five toes splayed wide, the big toe heavy and slightly angled in. A deep, clean heel strike. A pressure ridge of squeezed mud standing up between heel and forefoot. No claws. No pad. Harold has looked at bear tracks his whole life, and a big bear's hind foot can fool a man in poor ground for about one second. This wasn't poor ground. It wasn't one second. And it wasn't a bear. The stride to the next print was better than five feet. Walking, not running. And the tracks were fresh. Fresh enough that water was still seeping into the heel of the biggest one when Harold knelt beside it. The camp had been empty for weeks. The tracks around it were hours old. And they led up the mountain into timber so thick a dog couldn't push through it. Everything in front of him said two impossible things at once. The dead man might be alive. And he was not alone. This is the kind of account that makes you pause. The detail about the dogs refusing to track, the rifle left behind, the fresh 17-inch prints with five toes and no claws, and the implication that Chester Owens may have been taken in by a Sasquatch family in those cliffs under High Butte. Harold Dixon doesn't claim to have seen anything that day. He just found the tracks and let the evidence speak for itself. And the evidence, as he puts it, said two impossible things at once. The full account is worth your time. Harold tells it in his own voice, and there's something about the way a man who's spent his whole life in those mountains describes what he saw that carries a weight you don't get from secondhand reports. If you're interested in Sasquatch encounters from folks who actually live in the woods and have no reason to make anything up, this one deserves your attention.