In early November of 2005 my 11 year old daughter and her friend wanted me to take them to the mall. Ha ha ha! I took them hiking to some waterfalls instead. On this trip, we found evidence of a large creature up in the mountains.

We drove from Cottage Grove past Dorena Lake and Disston up into the Layng Creek watershed. We visited two waterfalls, Spirit Falls and Moon Falls. Both cataracts are in the Umpqua National Forest on the western slopes of Patterson Mountain. A storm was moving in and there was intermittent drizzle. The temperature was cool but not cold.

Spirit Falls are lovely and the hike from the road isn't too far. Moon Falls are bit further but worth the trip. They tumble over a cliff made of enormous flakes of rock which are peeling away from the hill. The broken flakes form deep little 'pocket pools' at various heights on the falls. There is a short spur road down to the trailhead but we parked at the main road and walked down the spur for the exercise.

This was where we made our 'find'. The trail traverses a steep slope that was clear cut not too long ago. Above the trail is open and stumpy, along and below the trail are planted trees about six to eight feet tall mixed with rhodies and other thick undergrowth. We found a place where some tall grass had been pressed down as if a large animal had been resting there. The pressed-down area was maybe four feet wide and ten feet long and led to a spooky opening into a thicket of little trees and bushes. I went partway into the thicket but couldn't really see anything and it was hard to move around through the branches. I was also a bit worried about meeting something like a bear or mountain lion in such a confined space although with two kids along I'm sure we made enough noise to scare any animals away. Finally, at the edge of the pressed down area, right next to the trail we found some very fresh scat.

Most animal poop has bits of undigested nuts and berries and in the case of predators, fur and bone fragments. This contained none of those things. It was yellowish tan about the size and shape of human poop but I don't think it was. While predators may leave scat visible to mark territory, most people will go further off the trail to do their 'bizness'.

I told the girls I thought it was maybe a bear or a lion and they liked this idea. Maybe the gloomy day affected me but I felt uneasy as though we were not really alone out there. I picked up a nice heavy rock and taught the girls a noisy game to play as we returned to the van. The idea of bigfoot never entered my mind.

Later I was reading a website called oregonbigfoot.com. This site is a ton of fun, with lots of 'eyewitness reports' of bigfoot sightings. As I read, I began to notice that there were many recent stories (last five years) and many of them were to have taken place in the very area where we had been, including one on the east side of Patterson Mountain. "Wow!", I thought, "could we have come close to meeting... Bigfoot?"