Colorado’s Recent Sasquatch Sighting Is Probably a Prank—Right?

Y’all love bigfoot.

I’m not passing judgement, merely stating a fact. You see, I spend much of my day staring at traffic analytics for Outside Online—numbers that tell me which articles you actually read. Our older stories about Sasquatch continually capture your attention, no matter the season or time of day or prevalence of bigfoot in the national zeitgeist.

I totally get it. Bigfoot is a mysterious and scary and also somewhat silly cultural figure. It was the focus of many of the movies and shows we grew up watching: Unsolved Mysteries, Sightings, and my personal favorite, Harry and the Hendersons. Bigfoot was—and continues to be—ratings gold. I’ve lost count of the number of reality TV shows about backwoods folk attempting to trap Sasquatch. Apparently, season 4 of Expedition Bigfoot is currently airing on the Discovery Channel, for anyone looking to scratch their Sasquatch itch.

Like all good Sasquatch videos, this one is impossibly grainy and opaque, and thus generates more questions than answers about what we’re actually seeing. Is it a hunter clad in camouflage? Is it a cosplaying Chewbacca en route to a mountain town ComiCon? Is it a local dressed up as Phoenix Suns mascot Go the Gorilla? Or is it a real-life Sasquatch out for a Sunday stroll? Nobody can say for sure—not even the woman who saw it.

“I don’t know. I mean, I just think we saw what we saw,” Shannon Parker told The Durango Herald. “I don’t know that I’ve seen anything that’s definitive.”

But the clip has been a shot in the arm for Sasquatch interest, both nationally and in the southwest corner of the state. John Livingston, a public relations officer with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s southwest division, said he and his coworkers in the Durango office watched the clip a few times before coming up with theories of what, exactly, they were looking at.

“My first thought was that it was a bow hunter in a ghillie suit stalking a deer—the guy basically looks like he’s pursuing a an animal,” Livingston said. “Because when it’s rifle season you need to wear an orange vest.” But Livingston said the date of the video debunked his theory, because Colorado’s bow-hunting season ended on September 30, more than a week before the sighting. I asked if the Sasquatch could simply be a bow hunter who forgot to check the Parks and Wildlife website for seasonal closures. Livingston didn’t know—and told me that he and his coworkers aren’t convinced that the video is an animal.

“There are 950 species that we are responsible for managing. Bigfoot is still not one of them,” he told me. Still, Livingston did point out that the communities in southwestern Colorado are famously “Squatchy”—i.e., there’s a history of alleged sightings. The Bigfoot Field Research Organization, an online community that charts such reports, lists four in the region dating back to 1989. A 2008 report from Crater Lake, a hiking area head north of Durango, states that a family of five saw a “large hairy figure, approximately 7-9 feet tall” walking through the woods. In another one, also from 2008, a hunter states that he found 16-inch footprints in the mud that appeared humanoid.

Livingston says the local Parks and Wildlife office has also received a few reports of Sasquatch activity over the years. “One guy came in and said there was a whole family of bigfoots living up Junction Creek Road toward the Colorado Trail,” Livingston said. “Apparently he said they liked Twinkies and he would regularly go feed them.”

Alas, this comment references the other explanation that Livingston and many other Durango residents believe—it’s a prank. You see, southwestern Colorado has a full history of public hijinks involving bigfoot. Take this glorious spoof film shot near Wolfe Creek Ski Area, a small resort outside of Pagosa Springs. The fake news report was part of the community’s attempts to torpedo a major housing development in the area.

According to the Durango Herald, multiple trickers have, over the years, donned Sasquatch suits and run alongside the narrow-gauge railroad to entertain tourists. DeAnne Gallegos, executive director of Visit Silverton, told the newspaper that the current county sheriff used to do it before taking on his post. Charming.

Gallegos told the Herald that she suspects the bigfoot in the video is a filmmaker who stopped into her office the week prior to the video and asked about Sasquatch sightings. She did not divulge the person’s name. “If you couldn’t drum up any sightings, why wouldn’t you create your own?” she told the paper.

Other online commenters pointed to a local business in Silverton with a history of bigfoot-themed shenanigans: Sasquatch Expedition Campers, makers of camping trailers. Apparently the company’s co-founder, Kass Kremer, owns a bigfoot suit and often dons it for sales events and overlanding expositions. He’s even worn it for promotional shoots on hillsides near the sighting.

The company posted a somewhat cryptic message on its Instagram handle after the sighting, and announced a raffle for free T-shirts.

I phoned Kremer and asked if he was, indeed, the bigfoot seen from the train. He said no, but quickly divulged that traffic to his website was higher than ever: 10,000 visits in one day, he said. Whoever—or whatever—walked along that hillside had inadvertently given his business a marketing boost.

“It never even crossed my mind to go run around up there with the suit on, get someone to film me, and generate indirect exposure like that,” he said. “It wasn’t me. But we ran with it and got all the people who believe in Sasquatch all worked up.”

Kremer’s comments confirmed my suspicion: bigfoot is still ratings gold.