This incident occurred on August 5, 2017 near Yosemite National Park, California. My ex fiancée and I were avid climbers, hikers, and explorers of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and we decided to go up to Yosemite to climb. Now Yosemite is stupid crazy to get campsite reservations, so we decided to stay on BLM land a few miles down the 395 from Mammoth where we didn’t have to pay for camping.
We pitched our tent and got settled in, made dinner then I went to go set up our trash bag about 1000 feet from camp (I don’t like having bears close to my tent). It started to rain a little so we went into the tent and went to sleep around 2030. It was probably 0130 on the 5th it had stopped raining and I had to take a leak. So I put my flip flops and head lamp and start walking to the spot where I figured it’s far enough away that it wouldn’t attract anything. Now it had just stopped raining and it was dead quiet, but I dismissed the silence as everything was hunkered down. So from where I was taking a leak The trash bag was about 200 yards to my right. As I finish up I look to make sure the bag wasn’t blown down during the relatively heavy storm that just finished up and it wasn’t in the tree. So I look at the ground and saw the biggest black bear I’d ever seen, so I start hollering and screaming making a lot of noise to scare it off. Then it f**king stood up and looked at me. It was completely covered in hair, stood about 8’ with shoulders as wide as a meter stick. After a few seconds, it ran off. I headed back towards the tent and sprinted the entire way.
I get back in the tent and my fiancée asked my why I was yelling and I told her I was scaring off a bear from the trash bag. She snuggles back in and falls asleep. I’m wide awake listening contently for any movement when I start hearing footsteps around the car (where we kept the food). Then the footsteps started coming towards the tent and I got scared thinking that this thing or whatever could just come through the tent if it wanted to. It started touching the tent and I can hear heavy breathing and grunting then my fiancée wakes up. She freaks out thinking it was a bear and grabs the keys and hits the panic button on the car and the creature ran off.
I didn’t encounter anything again that trip and I played it off to her as it was a bear and we should probably find somewhere new to camp the next night. That day we packed up and left early to go climb in Yosemite. When we came back that night to the new campsite I approached another camper that I recognized from previous campsite. He asked me if I noticed anything weird going on the previous night. I told him the story and he said that he heard my screaming and car alarm and both times shortly after something went at a full lope through his campsite. While going into his vehicle the next morning he noticed that there were huge handprints on his cars windows and was freaked out enough to move to a new spot as well. He pitched a tent 30 feet from where we were at and we stayed together for the remainder of our trip. I’m not sure what I saw but the closest thing I can relate it to was Bigfoot. HH
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Bigfoot, Yeti, and the Last Neanderthal: A Geneticist's Search for Modern Apemen
Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot
Bigfoot Terror in the Woods: Sightings and Encounters, Volume 1
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