Alone on the Ridge: A Midnight Mystery in Washington’s Backcountry

This would have been back in two thousand and eight. I was working in Washington outside of Walla, Walla, and it would have been in August. It's heading towards ball and archery season was coming up. I'm a Montana boy, so I grew up hunting. I grew up on a farming ranch kind of in the middle of nowhere. I was looking forward to getting out. It's the Blue mountains there in Washington, and I need to get out, and I need to do some pre season scouting. If you're not a hunter, scouting, it's just simply trying to locate the animals you hope to hunt. In Washington. This was going to be really important because the archery season was pretty short. I think it was the better part of like maybe a week ten days. And so I go to a map and kind of the way I round out on where I'm gonna hunt is I try to find places that are sort of inaccessible to the mainstream traffic flow of people. Typically that's where I have luck finding animals. They're going to be where humans aren't. So I found a spot. I of course got out of town late. I was working a job at that time. It was kind of a week on week off stretch. So I ended up driving up into the mountains and it was getting into the afternoon. I wasn't particularly thrilled about that, because I really wanted to be able to kind of drive the roads and find out where logging roads were gated, where they were open, and just kind of further refine that access question, where are people getting into and where can I get? As I was driving up there and watching the clock and the sunset, I just knew I didn't have time to really do that. I couldn't spend the time I needed to really investigate the roads. So I called an alternate in my head that that's fine. I'll just get up kind of in the general area I looked at on a map, and I'll stop and I'll just hide. Scouting isn't just seeing animals. You're looking for sign You're looking for feed, you're looking for water. You're looking for the habitat that's going to support your animals and hopefully signs thereof So I park on the side of this logging road, I just take off bushwhack and immediately I don't follow any trails. I just cut down this steep terrain and cross through this bottom and kind of start climbing up the other side. The whole time again I'm looking for all these signs of animals or no signs, and then I can rule this area out. It was a little bit shocking because the vegetation was so much more thick than what I'm used to from the Montana Mountains. Like it's this isn't coastal Washington, but it's obviously getting a lot more rainfall than I'm used to, So it's essentially green ferns and plants from about my calves down on about every step. But I'm still I'm not finding any game trails, and I'm losing light rather quick. I don't get to hype that far before I'm coming up the other ridge, and I'm running out of time, and I've got to set up camp for the night. And again this is just a solo trip. I'm packing pretty light. I've just got minimal food, water, very little light. You know, I'm just not playing to do much other than just look around, and so the most important thing at this stage is probably water and binoculars. So I get up on this ridge, I find a cleared off ridge where I can set up my tent. I don't have a whole lot of time, so I'm kind of in a rush to get this set up. But I still I get everything set and then I have a moment to eat a light snack for dinner. Been drinking a lot of water, you know, this whole time, just making sure I'm hydrated, making sure I'm going to have a good evening. And I see one dough come out. She actually comes out not far from where I had originally parked. When I look back across, and she kind of stepped out into the road that I drove on, and then to hang out very long, and she almost took off, almost startled, didn't want to be there, And I thought, oh, that's kind of funny, like obviously that road muscu some traffic and she's used to that. It's not what I'm there to hunt. I'm trying to find out, so it's not a big deal to me. Call it quits and I go to bed early. Ideas I got to get up early because animals are going to be most active first light. And last night I hit the bunk and I'm out. I'm sure I was in bed by probably ten o'clock at the latest. Fast forward boom. I just wake up at a start, like not cold sweat, but I need to just full wide away and my head is just pounding. The instant I wake up, I hear this weird animal call. I just I don't even have really the ability or capacity to focus on that, because my head is just like splitting apart. Like I have this pain I've never experienced before. I've never experienced it since It's just like this pulsing pain. It was like a throb that would build it like a pulse pain, pulse a little harder. It do that maybe three, four or five times. It just kind of each time was just more and more into The last one was just unbearable, and then it would reset, it'd start again. Get this straight. I'm on this ridgetop middle of the mountains. There's no one near me. I'm by myself, and my head is just splitting apart, and I have no idea why again there's this call going off, But I just I tell myself, like, you can't focus on that, you know, And I'm kind of I'm uncomfortable with it because I don't know what it is, but I know I don't have the capacity to focus on it. I got to solve me right now. I know I'm not dehydrated. I knew that I was very careful on my hydration. I mean I was overhydrated. I made sure I was drinking water. I made sure that I had my electrolytes. It's definitely not dehydration. And it's like, what else could it be? And I'm trying to stay calm. I'm trying to stay collect because I'm by myself. I've been in this position many times where I'm by myself in the woods. I've never had this sort of instance, but you know, things can happen and you've got to be prepared, and so I'm trying to figure it out if I I'm realizing that I feel like I'm short of breath, and I thought, okay, so that's something I really focus on some breathing techniques and I'm doing my best to you know, breathe out, breathe in, try to make sure I'm getting the right amount of oxygen into myself. And maybe that's what's causing this. And I'm having a little luck, but really not much like that. Pain is just still doing that pulsing build, pulsing build, then just snacks you and then starts over it, and finally it doesn't really get better. But I've gotten used to it enough to where I can acknowledge what it is. It's not something I'm used to, but I'm to a point where it's not going away, and I'm just trying to deal with it. And at that point I let my mind start to focus in on this animal just been calling this whole time. And when I say calling, you know, obviously animals make calls. Growing up how I did, I did a lot of animal calling. I got into pastor hunting when I was a young kid. I called my first coyote in when I was ten years old. When I got into big game hunting, especially archery, I got into elk calling. You know, if you're calling elk, you're calling coyote, you're calling dear. It's all about mimicking those calls. It's all about understanding their language. And the best advice, like I received when I was learning as a kid, is not just trying to mimic, but trying to put in the emotion of a call. That's so critical. And any of your listeners who are hunters and do good call like they understand that it's that emotion that really can sell an animal, Like if I really put a distress into a rabbit leat, that's going to sound so much more attractive to a kyote than if I'm just strictly trying to mimic the sound. I particularly like calling elk. There's nothing like it in the world. If you can get a bull elk to come in on the fight, it's next level. There's a lot of things with elk that apply to what I'm trying to figure out. That it's called that's is booming outside my tent. When I hear a bugle in the woods, or even if you're out working cattle, like you have an immediate idea of the animal you're dealing with, both his size and disposition based on his call. A younger, smaller bill, he's just incapable of those heavy bass notes in his bugle. Even domestic beef pals. You know, bulls, if you listen to them, the bigger bulls definitely have that bigger base. And you know, I think this is just attributed to their size. They've got that bigger vocal chamber, they have all that heavy muscle through their neck to reverberate the sound, and all that additional testosterone from being the bowl that's been around, and so when you hear a bugle, you have a pretty good idea what you're dealing with. One of the things that's real great with the elk bugle is that lead up right before he goes into his whistle. Is if he's on the fight, and I mean you, you've cut him off with your calls and you've got him to the point where he's just fighting. Man, Like I've had a rip rush up right in front of me, tear up dirt and they're just on the fight. At the start of their bugle, they'll do what's called we call it a growl. It's just this deep grumble and build up to that bugle. The growl is so cool. And when you first hear it, especially like as I did as a young mounts like, oh, that's awesome, I'm going to do that. And you know, I got on a couple of elk one time, a couple of younger bulls, and I'm like, I'm gonna I'm going to use this great knowledge, and you know, I threw out this nice growley bugle and it was like hitting him with a hot shot, like they couldn't get away from me fast enough, because I probably sounded like something that was going to just hit their butts and eat their lunch, like they that had no interest in me at that point, Whereas if you sound like a little weaker bowl that I've had, those satellites come in like, hey, here's somebody who can kick the crap out of them. So it's you got to have a passion in your call. Now. All that said, I'm just kind of giving you an idea of like, I'm pretty familiar with how these animals talk and their emotions, and that's really important and something I really enjoy it. And this call it's just sounding off, and I mean it is. You can set your watch to it. It's just repetitive, and it's starting off with this growl. It's just this throwady beat Day's growl, and then it's proceeding into these whoops, and it's doing three or four of them in a row, and then stop and then immediately growl, whoop, growl, whoop. When I finally focus in on this sound and I'm giving it by full attention, I realize a couple of things. One, this is no animal that I know of in the Northwest Woods, and I've hunted and killed everything that I can now grant. I've never got to kill a moose, sheep, or goat because I can't draw the permit. But I've talked with loose, I've called loose and played with them. I've called him elk. I've killed them. I've called in deer, I've killed them, i have called in kidanes. I know my animals. I've dealt with them, I've hunted, I've killed them. I'm not saying they can't make a sound. I've never heard that. This is not any of them, so I know it's nothing I don't and that's concerning. And I also know just in my head, just immediately it pops up that this is about a nine hundred pounds animal. And you could say, how do you know that, I'd say that comes a lot from working cattle as well as the elk, counting that just that size, like I said in earlier, that vocal chamber size that's required to get that big base. And if you want a visual of this, like go through a sporting good store and look at ELP bugles and you'll see kind of like these little pack bugles, but you'll see the bugles that they'll sell for like trying to mimic bigger elk. They're big bugles, right, they're big sound chambers, you know. I suppose that's why a tuba is bigger than a trumpet, right, It's got this bigger chamber to it. So I just kind of immediately recognize nothing of an animal I'm aware of, and a good nine hundred pounds or so, and this thing is just continually going on. I mean, it will not shut up. And now it's kind of helping out with the pain because now I'm focused in on this sound and I can't really give it out of my head because you won't shut up. And I'm laying there in just absolute misery, and I'm realizing I fought it for probably I think it's about forty minutes. This was a while back, but I remember laying there for a long time. I finally just realized, like, I am not sleeping tonight. This isn't gonna work. I'm not sure what my medical condition is, you know, maybe this is something more serious than I wanted to believe. Maybe it's some weird stroke. I'm not sure. So I finally come to terms with like I think I need to leave. Like I said, this is eight and I don't have a smartphone. I do have a garden GPS, and luckily it did have some kind of crude naps. At the time, we didn't think that. We thought it was pretty awesome, but compared to what we have now and you know, it's pretty creative. But I pull it up and I turn it on and I realized that I had crossed this deep draw where I'd parked on top, and there was a logging road that kind of circled around the edge of this kind of in a big bowl, and it was actually just above me, and I only had to hike up a little ways further and I'd catch this old logging room and I can actually hike that around back to where my truck is. So that was a huge relief because I just bushwaped. I didn't follow any trails or nothing. And the vegetation, for you minever, it was like it was so thick that I knew I was going to have a hard time going back because underneath all of that green growth that's up to you know, my means pretty much is a lot of deadfall, a lot of snags. Not something you want to do in the dark, and I just know that's not going to work. So I make up my mind that I'm going to hike up to this road and I'm going to walk this road back. Now. The only hesitation I have on this whole plan as if this road is going to lead me directly at this call, this still going on. You know, that was not something I really wanted to do, but I kind of just had to come to terms with, like, this is it. This is my only real option here. So I pack up real quick. Luckily, you know, I didn't bring much with me, so it wasn't hard to stuff everything in the pack. And I only have one little headlamp because I wasn't really planning on doing anything. Now. I did have a nineteen eleven forty five and it's not great for bears. I would never recommend it, but it's all I had at the time, and so I had it with me. It was a nicer model, had trenty and night sights, so the open site's actually glow in the dark. So just for such an occasion, right, I can actually see my sights in the dark. The way I was raised and brought up, like we never chamber around even when I'm hunting. A lot of people chamber around when you're hunting. I never do. I hunt with an empty bower, and when I see an animal, I load and I shoot. If you don't think that's possible, you know, I'm telling you it works. You just have to be mindful of what you're doing. But just how I was raised, but it's also when you're raised like that, it's natural and it's hard not to follow that. And so for me to conceal carry is always really challenging because you kind of need things loaded. I don't like a loaded gun when I'm hiking and walking unless I'm going to shoot something. But I was so unnerved by this event that I racked around in the chamber of this nineteen eleven and I gripped it in my hand, and I started hiking this road and I'm walking towards this call. So I've got this loaded pistol in my hand, which completely unlike me, Like I'm not enjoying this at all, Like I'm not comfortable doing that, but I just feel like I don't have a choice, and I'm walking towards this sound, this animal that just keeps calling. I started off my campus about six hundred yards from where this was. I went back and measured it all, and you know, I'm closing the distance, and I'm pretty much walking straight at it. And I get to about probably a little over halfway there. I'm probably closing close to two hundred yards from this sound, and I mean it is loud, it is big, and it is unnerving, and then it just cuts out complete silence. You know, as much as that should have been a relief, it really bothers me now even more because now I don't know where the hell it is. As I get there, the way, this road kind of loops under kind of hard to explain, but this dry cross like it kind of comes up into a bowl and this road cuts around me. Well, this call is coming from above the road as I'm walking, and I start to kind of walk through this curve in the road through the top of this bowl. This sound now would have been coming just from the timber above me, like we're talking maybe fifty hundred yards. Ah. Boy, I just it did not feel right. I felt like I was being watched. I had a lot of anxiety. I'm sure some of it was just simply that call was so crazy, but I definitely did not feel right. So I'm walking and I'm gripping that forty five and my headlamp is not very bright, and I'm I can and I just feel like my like eyes are on me. Now I've I've got through the corner and I'm walking to my truck and now it's sourced my back and it was really hard not to keep trying to turn around and look and again, granted, this whole time, my head is still doing this throbbing, aching pain thing. It's just crazy. And I finally catch a glimpse of my truck, so I'm walking over to it. And the peak terror was when I had to like give up my guard to focus on getting into my truck with my back to this direction of where this call was, where all this feeling was. Boy, that was really unnerving, you know. I had I pretty much had to make myself a hard or some vulnerable just to get into my truck. I remember just like keep it together. I like rehearsing in my brain because I knew it was not going to be fun what to do, and I just kind of had it all mapped out exactly the quickest way into my truck, and so I do and I you know. I throw my pack I think, in the back and right into the truck as fast as I can, and luckily the F one fifty fire right up, and I take off the way this road was laid out, It wasn't very long, and I'm dropping altitude. I think I was camping only at like fifty five hundred elevation, because one of the ideas I had was maybe this was like altitude sickness, which it's hard for me to believe that. Like I said, I'm from Montana, I hundred eight thousand feet. I've never had any issues like this before, it never had since. But whatever make of it, I drop out of the mountains, getting lower and lower, and the headache resolves, the breathing resolves, and now I'm just completely stuck with just the memory of what the hell was that? Like any good country where I've got some elk diaphragm calls in my mid console, so I pull one out and I just start doing that call that I heard. I start mimicking it till I got it, and I'm just doing it again and again, like what could that be? I can't remember how long of a drive it is back to town. An hour and a half maybe or something. But like that whole drive, I'm just rehearsing this call again and again and a gigs. I'm like, I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want to forget it. It's freshing my brain, obviously, And so I get home and it's it's pretty late. I get on the computer. I don't think there that was anything as special as it is now, but I start googling, and I'm like, I got to listen to Washington bird sounds and that's probably on some autumn on Society whatever websites, and I'm listening, and you know, big shocker, but there's not really any birds over there in the eastern Washington that I haven't encountered in Montana. So I'm not finding any candidates that I can even imagine are responsible for this, even though you know, at this point, I just kind of know that's a pipe dream, but I'm trying to sell myself on it. You know, I just had this leg and suspicion in the back of my head, and finally I think I put it in Google, something like whooping sounds and blue mountains or something. You're in Washington. Sure enough, these websites come up and they're all about bigfoot. I saw a link to a sound file and it's about like a bigfoots and I clicked on that. I'm telling you my blood round. I mean, I sat there listening is moving sound that I just had a quarter. Mile from my tent, just loud, everything loud. Did I see anything? No? Can I say that that website had recorded bigfoot sounds? Well, I guess they're recording what they thought was bigfoot. I don't know, but again I can tell you it's nothing. I know is probably eight nine pound animal to have a voice like that, You know. I did a lot of thinking about this after the fact. Of course, can't help but reflect on these things. And I went up that same spot probably a week later, actually hiked up to where I thought that sound was coming from. I couldn't find anything again that that vegetation is so thick in those woods. It's just it's so different, like you can't even see the dirt on the ground, so like, I couldn't tell tracks. Everything was so soft and a lot of shit just I don't know how long you could be able to find tracks, but it certainly I wasn't able to find anything at that point, and I can't again, not in that same spot, but probably a mile from there later, because I actually did find Elk not too far from there. But I thought about it a lot, and one of the things I come up with is one of my banes of existence is a terrible snor. I've been known to probably challenge at Chainsaw some nights. I think what happened was is I think I went to bed and I bet you I was snoring up a storm, and I think I pissed this thing off. I think he heard my snore as a challenge, because what I was hearing from him was a challenge. Call it a territorial challenge call. Like you'll hear that from the big bull Elk. You'll hear that from Mayo Kyo to him when they're saying this is my territory, They're going to do a challenge howl bart you know there there. It's aggressive, it's mean, and it's telling everyone else around this place is mine, Get the hell out. And I think that's what I was listening to. Is I think I was listening to a challenge call, and I bet you I sent him off with my snoring. I have never figured out what the sickness was. I don't know if that was you know, I've heard some talk of like infrasound. I don't think that could have been it. I really don't know. To this day, I don't have a good answer. I'd never experienced anything like it. But I'm pretty convinced that I ran into something that's not supposed to be out there, not what they claim is out there, and I think my store and set them off. It's one hundred percent changed my opinion of what's out there. I mean, I never disbelieved that there could be something, because I've been in the woods enough to know that there's all kinds of a room for things out there. But I know it's nothing that I'm aware of.