STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTOS BY DAVID SCHWARTZ

Is Bigfoot vacationing in Sun Valley this summer?

David Schwartz was hiking along the streambed heading up Warm Springs towards the hot springs at Frenchman’s Bend when he confronted what appeared to be very large footprints leading out of the brush heading down to the water.

He estimates the footprints were about 16 inches long and six to seven inches wide.

“They were very large!” he said.

This is not the first time locals have reported possible Bigfoot sightings. One man said he saw what appeared to be a Bigfoot character out East Fork years ago.

Bigfoot sightings aren’t unique to Sun Valley. Becky Cook wrote the book “Bigfoot Still Lives…in Idaho,” in 2015. The book is a compilation of eyewitness accounts from people who describe the smells and sounds associated with the big guy.

High school students filmed a dark ape-like figure walking through the forest that appeared on ABC News.

And Idaho State University anatomy/anthropology professor Jeffrey Meldrum has been researching Sasquatch for decades. He reports that he has seen footprints too large to be human, too human to be animal in southeast Washington.

He now has more than 300 Sasquatch footprint casts in his Pocatello lab. He told Meg Walter of the Deseret News that sightings are rare because Sasquatches are few in number—perhaps one Sasquatch for every hundred black bears. They’re also solitary creatures who may inhabit 1,000 square miles.

Those he has interviewed include a woman who spotted a 9-foot Sasquatch 15 feet away in 2003 while hiking the Continental Divide Trails through Colorado.

The closest Meldrum has come to Sasquatch was in Alberta, Canada when he spotted large swinging arms attached to a large body walking off into the forest where he and his team later found 13-inch footprints.

Stranger than fiction?

Keep your eyes peeled.