I Spent the Morning Reading About Bigfoot

I've been a Bigfoot blogger for ten years now. Go ahead and laugh if you want to. It is weird how these things happen.

There's always been curiosity about the big elusive creature. Does anyone forget the first time they saw the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot video?



When my 2 youngest children were about ages 6 through 10 we took a lot of "home school field trips" and several times were in Trinity County, CA - to visit Weaverville, the Joss House, the museum there, and the area around Clair Engle Lake, aka. Trinity Lake. As we approached Trinity Center, CA - there was a Bigfoot statue, and I was immediately drawn to it. "This is what I've been looking for," my heart told me. "They're here."

Ever since I first heard about the town of Happy Camp, I wanted to be there. Happy Camp, CA is a very remote small town in the center of the Klamath National Forest in Northern California. On January 11, 2000 I moved into a cabin-like house there, surrounded by the forest. The house was just outside of the town, in a semi-secluded area. There were other houses nearby.

The town of Happy Camp is full of Bigfoot statues now, but when I moved there, the only Bigfoot statue was the one in front of the post office.

There were also "Bigfoot footprints" painted on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, and many of the businesses in the town were named after Bigfoot. There was the Bigfoot Trailer Park, Bigfoot Towing, and the Bigfoot Car Wash. That was in 2000 - several years before JavaBob opened his restaurant, JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli. Now that is closed but there's a place called the Bigfoot Store that has a deli in it, across the street from where JavaBob's restaurant was.

Brandon Tennant of Idaho, and JavaBob Schmalzback in JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli late in 2005, in Happy Camp, CA. At the time we met Brandon Tennant, he was doing research while organizing a Bigfoot conference held in Pocatello, Idaho in 2006.

Bigfoot Lives in Idaho
Brandon Tennant illustrated this.
Buy at Amazon.

I was always curious about Bigfoot, and wondered why so few of the Happy Camp local old-timers had anything to say about it. They acted like it was a joke, but they loved the annual Bigfoot Jamboree, a three day annual festival over Labor Day weekend.

By 2005 JavaBob was president of the Chamber of Commerce and I worked in a small office across the street from his deli. The chamber needed a focus for marketing Happy Camp and chose to market it as an artist's retreat town. I told JavaBob that we already had a theme in the town - and it was (and still is) Bigfoot.

Monsters, Myths, and Me
By Robert (JavaBob) Schmalzbach
Buy at Amazon

Anyhow, I got serious about wanting to find the truth about Bigfoot. I wanted to know why this town claimed a theme of Bigfoot but then denied any knowledge of Bigfoot sightings in the area. So I bought the domain name for my blog, Bigfoot Sightings, and started doing research.

I've never seen one, but many credible people have, and I know they're real. I collected no less than five Bigfoot sighting reports about sightings that happened within a mile of the cabin I lived in, there in Happy Camp.

When I moved to Idaho in 2013 I wanted to be able to continue Bigfoot research in the forests around where I live, in Northern Idaho. I live in Post Falls, which is on a prairie. No Bigfoot here! And I have no car anymore... so I can't do field research. But I do intend to continue working on my blog, which has been silent for many months now. I spent this morning "cleaning it up" - ie: making format improvements - and reading the amazing comments people leave there about their Bigfoot sightings.

I do believe I'll be blogging more there, soon. It is time for me to compile the rest of what I know about Bigfoot sightings in the Klamath River Valley.

... I said yesterday that I might write more about Keith today, but I'm just not ready. Maybe soon, but not today.

Update 8/23 - I decided to write about Keith on my other blog: How Comforting it is to Know He Takes Care of Us

Bewilderment Avenue

Remember that road sign... Linda Jo Highway? (See two posts below this one). Well, I think I've already come to Bewilderment Avenue. It happened like this. My daughter finally got a blog going this year. I will not give you the link because its a privacy issue. But I'm happy to say she's been writing extensively and I'm very proud of her somewhat profane efforts.

Anyhow, she managed to get the attention of her father (who hasn't seen her since she was three months old) and her paternal grandmother. So after about a month of visiting her site he finally started emailing and imailing with her. She was happy about that. Then a few days later he started badmouthing me and saying he wanted to sue me because he thought the kids weren't educated well enough. This quick judgment call was based on him quizzing her in imail on what she knew about World War 2 and the Constitution.

My daughter responded by calling me into their imail chat on MSN. This was the first time I'd chatted with him in years. I exchanged a few emails with him a few years back but other than that hadn't talked to him since we separated in 1989. And instead of being friendly he was attacking me and threatening to sue. And he claimed to be paying child support even though we didn't receive it. Hmmm.

Then a few days later I imailed him, we got through some anger and eventually agreed to work together for our kids' best interest and not to fight and sue each other in court. So I went to see a family law attorney in a town two hours distant from our home. Then I wanted to imail him to tell him what I found out, and discovered he's blocked me on MSN.

So this is Bewilderment Avenue. I've got no idea why he's cut off communication but I will guess it has more to do with his own failings that with ours. And by the way, the Family Support department says it hasn't received that child support he claims he sent and they're doing the research to see if it went to a different county or to the state.

Hit By a Car

My boyfriend keeps a scanner in our bedroom. This morning he heard a boy on a bike got hit by a car near the CNR Center in the old downtown area of our town. This was right after my 14-year-old son left to go visit a friend. On his bike. So naturally I jumped into my car and drove down there to see if it was my son. It wasn't.

The victim was a much younger boy who by the way lived through the experience just fine so don't start crying. I talked to the poor woman who was driving the car. She was still shaking and terribly upset. She said it happened up on Indian Creek Road. Two boys came down one of the dirt roads out of the hills as fast as they could on their bikes and without looking or stopping rode right in front of her. She hit the smaller boy, then he asked her to drive him to his grandparents' house which was downtown near the CNR Center.

It reminded me of the time my brother got hit by a car when he was seven and spent a month in a body cast in the hospital. As I recalled there was not much liability since my brother was riding erratically and wasn't looking where he was going.

I guess it is time to review bicycle safety with the kids. My son rides as fast as he possibly can around this town. He's very fast. I will corner him and discuss safety with him.. probably tonight during our homeschool session.

This semester I'm reading a bicycle touring manual with him so this will give us plenty of time to talk about the hazards of the road.

Aaron Learns How To Repair His Playstation 2

More on Playstation 2 repair...

It lasted a few days then needed to be cleaned again. This time Aaron took it apart and watched as I cleaned the laser lens. Then he put it back together and it works great again.

He's really happy now that he knows how to fix it himself. As he said, now he doesn't have to be unhappy if it quits reading the disks again. It is such a frustrating and helpless feeling not to know how to fix it.

There's so much dust in our countryside environment.. I'm sure this is a skill he'll use again and again.

I should probably be writing about this in our homeschooling weblog.

Webdesign and Homeschooling

I finally came up with a design I really like for my new webdesign website. It is complex to build but when done will be simple to view. I'll let you know when its ready! (This is my third attempt to get something on the web for Klamath Design.)

Homeschooling is going great this year. It is just Aaron and me (my daughter is at the local school) so we have lots of time to work one-on-one with just Aaron's interests in mind. It is lots of fun.