Geology Student Recounts Bigfoot Encounter During Colorado Field Trip

A scientist with a geology background recently shared a pretty wild story about an encounter she had while doing fieldwork in Colorado, and it's the kind of firsthand account that makes you sit up and pay attention. The interview, hosted by Stacy Brown Jr. and featured on Les Stroud's channel, dives into details that any researcher would find fascinating — strange scat, missing time, and a backpack that seemed to have a mind of its own. Rachel, who was a geology student at the time, was part of a group of four attempting to summit a mountain at around 8,200 feet. Nothing too extreme, but the late start and a night of beers before the hike might have set the stage for what was about to unfold. About halfway up, she started noticing scat that didn't quite match anything familiar. It had the consistency of a cow pie but with berry components similar to bear droppings — only shaped all wrong. Being a biology major, she joked with her group about collecting a sample to test for Sasquatch DNA. Everyone laughed it off, but that little detail is exactly the kind of thing that makes a researcher credible — she knew what she was looking at, and it didn't add up. Then things got weird. Rachel started feeling sick and figured it was altitude sickness, so she let her group continue to the summit while she stayed behind at a vista point. She set her backpack on a rock, took a break, and when she went to grab it — gone. She spent the next 40 to 50 minutes frantically searching the area, getting frustrated and vocal about it. And then, just as mysteriously, the backpack was right back where she thought she'd left it. For years, she chalked it up to her own incompetence or the disorienting landscape, but in hindsight, she recognizes how strange that whole experience was. It was enough to start a personal rule: never walk away from a pack without strapping it to her body. Frustrated by lost time, she decided to take a more direct route down the mountain — a decision she now calls a huge mistake. She ended up going down the wrong side of a saddle and found herself in a natural bottleneck, a flatter area squeezed between two cliff faces with a creek cutting through that would require crossing it twice to get back on track. That's where the discussion cuts off, but you can imagine where this story is heading. What makes this account stand out is the witness herself. Rachel isn't someone who set out looking for Sasquatch. She's a scientist trained in observation, someone who grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries and dreamed of spotting one in the Colorado woods as a kid, but who had long since settled into a more skeptical view. The fact that she still brings up the encounter with such seriousness — and that she noticed the anomalies in the scat, the time loss, and the backpack incident — gives her story a lot of weight. The full interview is worth watching for anyone interested in credible witness testimony. Rachel goes into detail about the geography, her state of mind, and the moments leading up to whatever happened in that bottleneck. It's a reminder that Sasquatch encounters don't always happen to people actively searching — sometimes they happen to trained observers going about their day in the field.