Sasquatch Mother Hides Injured Hunter From Hunters in 1978

Posted Saturday, September 05, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

A story recently surfaced on YouTube that has the research community absolutely buzzing. It's a first-hand account from an 81-year-old retired bear hunter out of Haywood County, North Carolina, who claims a Bigfoot mother saved his life in the Great Smoky Mountains back in December 1978. The witness, Dale Jenkins, was 34 at the time and had been running bear hounds in those mountains since he was 9 years old. He came from serious stock—his family had bred Plott hounds in that same county for nearly 200 years, those brindle, barrel-chested dogs with noses that could pull a cold track off wet rock. Dale knew the terrain like the back of his hand. Or at least he thought he did. On December 16, 1978, Dale and his cousin turned their dogs loose on a ridge above Cold Springs Creek. The dogs struck a hot track and took off west, straight across the park boundary where no hunting is allowed. Dale made the call to hike in after them—a decision he would spend the next 47 years turning over in his mind. A blizzard rolled over Mount Sterling that afternoon. Dale fell on a hidden slick rock face, blew out his knee, lost his rifle, and found himself stranded in remote backcountry as the light died and the temperature dropped. What happened next is the kind of encounter that makes you reconsider everything you thought you understood about the forest. According to Dale, a Bigfoot mother found him on the third night. She had two young ones with her. Instead of leaving him to freeze in the snow, she picked him up like he weighed nothing and carried him through a laurel thicket so dense a rabbit would have thought twice about entering. She hid him in a place no map has ever shown. But here's the part that really sits with you—she wasn't just protecting him from the cold. There were men on that mountain that week. Men with dogs and rifles and money behind them, sweeping the drainages one by one. And they weren't looking for a lost hunter. They were hunting her. They were hunting her children. For four days and nights, this mother who owed Dale nothing hid him