Cryptomundo » Why A Bigfoot Trap?

Why A Bigfoot Trap?

Posted by: Loren Coleman on September 3rd, 2006

During the hunt for the Yeti, then Bigfoot, the Texas oil and beef millionaire commissioned the building of elaborate feet-oriented traps to capture those unknown hairy hominoids. All we have left are the drawings, apparently. But out west, a different and more elaborate Bigfoot trap still exists. Craig Woolheater discussed the trap here at Cryptomundo on August 25, 2006.

In the Sunday, September 3, 2006, edition of the Medford, Oregon, Mail Tribune, Ron Olson explains why he built that Bigfoot trap.

‘I’ve always believed there is a Bigfoot’

By PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune
Despite popular belief, the legendary Bigfoot trap west of Applegate Lake was never designed to capture the elusive creature for public display.
“I wouldn’t ever want to see Bigfoot held in captivity,” stresses Ron Olson. “The idea was to learn about him. We wanted to put a transmitter on him. We wanted to find out how they evade people and where they migrate to.”
Olson ought to know about the massive trap: He, along with his late father and a friend, built it in 1974.
“We weren’t going to kill it — we had a tranquilizer gun,” he explains. “We had a sled built to put him on. We even had big manacles ready if we got one and the tranquilizer started to wear out. We had it pretty well organized.”
Olson, now a businessman in his native Eugene, was — and is — a Bigfoot believer. He figures what crypto-zoologists have dubbed Gigantopithecus americana is out there, even if he was never able to prove its existence.
“I’ve always believed there is a Bigfoot,” he says.
And he was tickled to learn two weeks ago from the Mail Tribune that a group of volunteers in the U.S. Forest Service’s Passport In Time program were restoring the wooden structure, which had been grazed by a storm-driven tree. Although most projects in the program involve historic or archaeological sites, the Bigfoot trap, which draws hundreds of curious humanoids each year, was unusual enough to be included, observes Jeff LaLande, archaeologist for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.
Located in the Applegate Ranger District along the Collings Mountain Trail a half mile west of Applegate Lake, the Bigfoot trap is believed to be the only one of its kind in the nation, perhaps on the planet.
Measuring 10-feet-by-10-feet, it’s a wooden box built of 12-inch wide and 2-inch thick planks. A heavy expanded metal grate served as the trap door, triggered by the big fellow reaching a hairy hand for the bait — a deer or rabbit carcass — hanging at the rear of the structure.
Heavy metal bands binding the planks and telephone poles anchoring it to the ground were meant to keep the burly beast from breaking out. Citing safety concerns, the Forest Service bolted the trap door open in 1980. Uncle Sam didn’t want tourists trapped, bigfooted or not.
A Eugene-based filmmaker when the trap was built, Olson was the director of an group called “North American Wildlife Research” which received a special use permit to build it. The group’s letterhead read “Bigfoot/Sasquatch: The Search for the World’s Most Intriguing Mystery.”
It all began back in the summer of 1968, when Olson, who was then distributing wildlife films, met a fellow named Roger Patterson. Bigfoot buffs will know Patterson, who later died from cancer, as the fellow who shot film footage of an alleged Sasquatch along Bluff Creek, Calif., in October 1967. Bluff Creek flows into the Klamath River about 50 miles south of Happy Camp.
“Roger had been looking for it for a long time,” Olson recalls. “I met up with him and talked about doing a movie. But we needed more data information.
“When he was ailing, he would call me up and ask me to check out a sighting,” he adds. “I covered several sighting for him.”
Olson became known for his work and established the now-defunct research center. He figures they investigated some 300 sightings.
“Unfortunately, there are some imaginary sightings,” he says. “But we had some real ones, too.”
It was the story Patterson asked him to check out by longtime miner Perry Lovell that brought Olson to the upper reaches of the Applegate River. Lovell reportedly found 18-inch human-like tracks in his garden near the river. The tracks told the story of a creature with a 6-foot stride.
Although the old miner had apparently died by the time Olson arrived, his tales left big tracks.
“The fellow I talked to told me this great story how Perry would go to his mine right up the trail there from where we put the trap and he would see these things,” Olson says.
“He said it was always in the fall when they would come in,” he adds. “He would look across the canyon and see them. They appeared to be crossing through there that time of year.”
Lovell’s story, coupled with Bigfoot tales in local Indian lore and computerized predictions, convinced Olson that was a good place for the trap. Remember, this was back before Applegate Dam was built, before a road skirted what is now the west side of the lake.
“We rented a Cat and pulled it up there,” he says. “I hired an old miner and gave him a tranquilizer gun and a movie camera and put him in the cabin.”
He was referring to what is now a dilapidated shelter about 200 feet back down the trail. The miner would be alerted about a Sasquatch in the trap by an electronic signal.
“We managed to catch two bears so we knew it worked,” Olson says. “It was a good trap.”
A year after installing the trap, Olson wrote and produced the movie, “Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot.” The flick was distributed throughout North America.
“I’ve been on a lot of really good sightings,” he says of first-person accounts. “But over the years you get off it. You have a wife and kids. You put things on hold.”
Someday, he says, he would like to re-edit the film, perhaps even put in footage he left out.
“It was a very enjoyable time in my life,” he adds. “It was fun to be able to make a movie about Bigfoot and build that trap.”
And leave a legacy that still traps imaginations.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 6:31 am and is filed under Artifacts, Bigfoot, Breaking News, CryptoZoo News, Cryptozoology, Expedition Reports, Sasquatch. You can follow responses via our RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.

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8 Responses to “Why A Bigfoot Trap?”

WVBIG_2006 responds: September 3rd, 2006 at 9:23 am
I feel some sort of live trap must be built to conclusively prove the existence of Bigfoot. Photos & videos can be faked & DNA results from hair, scat, etc, will be inconclusive until there is a 100% verified Bigfoot DNA sample to compare others to. Like the late Rene Dahinden said during a discussion between himself, Robert Morgan, & John Green in “Bigfoot: Man Or Beast?” The photos, films, tracks, etc are interesting & it’s nice to think Bigfoot can be proven to exist with those. But it will take an actual creature. Living or dead, to prove it once & for all.

My organization “West Virginia Bigfoot Investigations Group” has been discussing different methods of capturing a Bigfoot alive because we are a no-kill organization.
twblack responds: September 3rd, 2006 at 11:47 am
I really enjoyed reading the above article. And I agree someway to capture without doing harm to the Big Fellow is the way to go.
TemplarKnight21c responds: September 3rd, 2006 at 7:33 pm
I like the idea of a live trap, but…a bear is one thing, a primate quite another. By most reports, sasquatch tend to have very thickly muscled limbs, and primates tend to be very intelligent (excluding us, of course). Is a trap such as that one going to be enough? A net seems more effective, but much more dangerous and traumatizing.
crypto_randz responds: September 3rd, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Finally, a researcher who got smart to try to capture bigfoot i agree maybe a net would be safer. This the only way to prove bigfoots existence, all this time through many years nobody ever came up with a idea of setting a trap, but this gentleman has the right idea.
mystery_man responds: September 4th, 2006 at 2:09 am
I still think they might want to try changing the bait. Just look at gorillas. I Know they are not the same, but if the Big guy is anything like other large primates, such as gorillas, then he is probably a herbivore and thus a rabbit carcass might not be to his liking. I also think that the Bigfoot is a very intelligent, wary animal and find it hard to believe he would stumble into this trap, especially when so many have come to see the trap and the area must reek of humans. If I were a Bigfoot, that’s the last place I’d be likely to go.
WVBIG_2006 responds: September 4th, 2006 at 9:42 am
mystery_man says: “if the Big guy is anything like other large primates, such as gorillas, then he is probably a herbivore and thus a rabbit carcass might not be to his liking” There are numerous reports of a Bigfoot eating fish, wild boar, etc… I also believe they are highly intelligent creatures who can move through the woods very quietly & also may have exceptional hearing and/or eyesight. This may explain why the trap didn’t work. I favor a snare baited with berries & fish native to the area in which the trap is set since there is almost always a creek or river very near to where these creatures are seen. I think audio & video equipment should be set up at the trap site in case the bigfoot escapes. And if the trap works, the creature should be tranquilized and hair, blood, & tissue samples should be taken before transferring it to some sort of facility for further behavioral study. I do not favor one being euthanized & dissected for the sake of science.
Brian05404 responds: September 21st, 2006 at 8:10 am
I feel so wrong about this trap. I mean come on. A bigfoot must have a family and we don’t know if the male or female has a family to look after. Why can’t you just get a better equipment to capture it in motion. All I ever hear is the noises and short clip video of a bigfoot. If we capture one, it would change society and change lives of others. I just believe that bigfoot are the only pre-historic creatures that manage to survive though the years and develop intelligence as it watches us from the mountains. They probably roam when they hear gun shots when hunters are on a deer seasons.

Let me ask you this, I know it sound stupid or silly but why hasn’t anyone beat their chest to see if a bigfoot response in a form of communication. If it doesn’t, then it’s smarter than an ape. I already know it’s smarter but what would it mean if they do. I live in Vermont and I don’t go out looking for a Champ Monster in the Lake. I do fear black water but let it go and let it be free. If you try to capture it, it might become exstinct. You messing with something that belong in nature.
trueyemage responds: December 17th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I went camping at Red River Gorge on Eagles Nest and heard something at 4:30 AM and again 30 minutes later that reminded me of a chest beating sound. It was a very deep base sound, that started slow then picked up speed but did not change tone. (about 15 to 20 beats) It also did not get fast enough to make me think it was some sort of engine to something starting off in the distance. If there hadnt been crunchy ice on the ground I would have thought it was something heavy picking up speed as it ran towards me on the rock. Good thing for crunchy ice covered ground. Unforunately I was the only one up and it can only be left to speculation so it might as well just been a moon shine still processing some back country white lightning.

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