Retired BLM Surveyor Shares Decades of Bigfoot Encounters in California

A retired BLM surveyor with decades of experience in some of Northern California's most remote terrain recently sat down to share stories that will stick with you long after the video ends. Clifford Nicks, now 78, spent years working the Six Rivers National Forest backcountry starting in the early 1970s, and what he encountered out there goes way beyond anything in the official survey manuals. The video, posted by Cryptid's Den on YouTube, features Nicks recounting his experiences in his own steady, matter-of-fact way. He doesn't come across as someone looking for attention or trying to sell a story. He comes across as a quiet, methodical surveyor who stumbled onto things he couldn't explain and spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of them. Nicks started working for the Bureau of Land Management out of their Arcata field office in 1972, surveying parcels that overlapped with Six Rivers National Forest and even the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. The country he describes is the kind of place that doesn't see many visitors—deep canyons, knife-edge ridges, old-growth Douglas fir and tanoak forests where sunlight barely reaches the river below. The kind of place where something could live completely unnoticed for generations. His first strange find came in August 1973, about 14 months into his time in the Six Rivers. He was working a ridge line above Mill Creek, roughly eight miles east of Hoopa, when he pushed through some young tanoak into a small clearing and found a structure. It was conical, about seven feet tall, made of large branches three and four inches in diameter that had been stripped of bark and woven together. The opening faced downhill toward the creek, and inside, the ground had been cleared and covered with fresh fern fr