Retired Border Patrol Officer Recalls Chilling Bigfoot Encounter in Montana Wilderness

Posted Tuesday, June 23, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and I think any researcher or witness out there needs to hear about it. It comes from the Bigfoot Sasquatch Stories channel, and it's a detailed first-person account from a retired US Border Patrol officer named Marcus who now lives as a part-time hunter in the Montana wilderness near Bozeman. What makes this one stand out isn't just the encounter itself, but the level of physical evidence Marcus describes stumbling across before he ever laid eyes on anything. Early one November morning, he headed into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness with his Remington 700 and his old German Shepherd, looking for white-tailed deer to stock up for winter. The moment he crossed the Yellowstone tributary, something felt off. The forest went dead silent. No jays, no squirrels, no wind. His dog dropped low, tail tucked, fangs bared. Every animal in that valley knew a top-tier predator had entered the area. The first piece of evidence was a wild raspberry bush with branches twisted into a deliberate X shape at chest height, driven into the snow. Not nibbled, not clawed, twisted by an incredible muscular force. Then came the footprint. Eighteen inches long, seven inches wide at the ball, with toes embedded nearly two inches into semi-frozen mud. The stride between prints was over five feet. And right in the middle of the arch, there was a slight ridge, the mid-tarsal break, an anatomical feature found only in large primates that walk bipedally. Grizzlies don't leave that. Humans don't leave that at that scale. Marcus kept moving, and the surveillance got more intense. He used old scout tricks to confirm he was being followed, and something snapped a thick pine branch clean off with bare hands about 50 yards away as a warning. Then came the smell. That infamous sulfurous stench mixed with rotting flesh and unwashed fur, the kind old hunters in the Northwest have talked about for generations around pubs in Red Lodge. The "smell of the hairy one." But the most chilling part of the whole story comes near the end of the video. Around sunset, a herd of over a hundred bison came charging down the valley like a black flood, and right in the middle of the stampede, Marcus saw a colossal nine-foot Sasquatch covered in dark red fur spreading its arms wide to shield two smaller ones behind it. A family. Protecting their young from a bison stampede. The roar that accompanied the scene was described as having an extremely low frequency with an eerie metallic resonance, powerful enough to create a visible shockwave and make his ribs vibrate. This is the kind of account that deserves a closer listen. Marcus's background as a Border Patrol officer in the northern border region for years gives his observations serious weight. He knows terrain, he knows how to read tracks, and he knows what fear feels like versus what rationalization feels like. The details he provides, from the mid-tarsal break to the deliberate branch structure to the protective behavior during the bison charge, align with patterns reported by credible witnesses across decades of Sasquatch research. If you haven't caught this one yet, it's worth the watch. Stories like this remind us that these beings aren't just surviving out there, they're raising families, defending their territory, and interacting with the landscape in ways we're only beginning to document.