WHITEHALL, NEW YORK

Sometimes I could just kick myself.

Much of the time during my 20s and 30s was spent backpacking in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. For those of you not familiar with the area a great deal of it is State Park and or timber company holdings, with rugged mountains and hundreds of lakes. My favorite spot is called the Pharoah Lake Wilderness Area, north of the town of Lake George. I had also kept a sailboat on Lake George at one time.

Lake Champlain is very large, and long. It drains north , into the St Lawrence seaway in Canada. The southern end, below Ft. Ticonderoga, narrows to a few hundred feet wide and resembles a river, but with no current. This southern end is perhaps 18 miles long and terminates at the town of Whitehall, NY, right on the border with Vermont.

Who has ever read MONSTERS OF THE NORTH WOODS, by Paul Bartholomew? Not me anyway, until years after I started Bigfoot research.I had been traveling to the Northwest , on my vacations for my trips. This was not only very expensive,but took a lot of planning and free time.

Imagine my delight, as I kicked myself repeatedly, when I read this book to discover that 5 hours north of my home in NJ was Whitehall, NY an incredible hotspot of Sasquatch activity. Not only that, but it was in an area I already knew well from my years of camping and sailing there, Whitehall being just over a ridge from Lake George. I truly wonder how many signs or opportunities went unnoticed by me during those earlier years.

I took the book and plotted as best as I could all the sightings onto a map.
Just North of Whitehall, on the Eastern side of Lake Champlain is a long swamp called The Drowned Lands. Roger’s Rangers whine about having to slog through it during the French and Indian War. To the East of The Drowned Lands is a line of small mountains, steep, and famous for rattlesnakes. A lot of the land between the mountains and the river is owned by the Nature Conservancy, including a small pocket where there was a frontier farm, severalcenturies ago. It seemed to me that this area formed a sort of “Lost World”, being bordered by swamps and mountains full of snakes, closed to hunters, and a big pain in the ass to get to. If I was a Squatch and wanted a safe place to hang out,with food and water, this is where I’d go.
So I did, and found tree breaks and large, really large, rocks picked up and thrown aside, with their beds dug up.

I went back every couple of months, slipping through the swamp with a canoe.Usually I went alone. Two rattlesnakes (now hanging on my wall) , one trip to the emergency room from a bad fall down a rocky hillside and some 7 YEARS later and….. nothing. Not a peep or a footprint or a knock or tree break.

I was ready to give up when at 3am one weekend night (Its ALWAYS 3am when stuff happens, at least to me) I was just getting up to go out and thermal scan my surroundings. As I laced up my boots I was rewarded with five whoops from King Kong on steroids. Truly, they were almost painfully loud, echoing off the mountains next to me, across the valley to the mountains separating Lake Champlain from Lake George and back again.

I jumped out with my thermal imager, but there was nothing to see. However, my psychic battery was instantly and fully recharged. I had finally been rewarded with an event which unequivocally put me in the “True believer” camp.

Shortly after that I joined the BFRO and began attending Expeditions across the country. We had two in Whitehall ;both were interesting and produced eye shine, whoops and knocks. On one of them I came across a large beaver that had just been hit by a car. I took him back to camp and skinned him, then used the body as bait that night. We had set up camp out in the woods by a house that was being rebuilt. I climbed up into the belfry and set up the Thermal Imager so I could look way out across the field to where we placed the beaver.

There is an especially interesting Class A witness story from Whitehall.
On one Expedition we all went to the local Chinese restaurant for dinner. When the manager found out what we were up to, he produced two cooks from his kitchen. This is their story ( the paraphrasing is mine, the translation, the manager’s)

“We had only come from China a few months earlier, hoping for a better life working in the United States as cooks. One of us speaks a little broken English, the other only Chinese. On our day off we went fishing just north of Whitehall, on the bank opposite the big swamp. As we stood there a giant ape came out of the woods on the other side and began wading through the shallows. His lower legs were in the water but he was much bigger than a man , covered with black hair and stood erect. He seemed to be looking for something in the water. As we watched him my friend whispered to me,”I didn’t know there were gorillas in America.’ I agreed. After a minute or two it walked back into the woods and vanished. When we returned to the restaurant we told the manager what we had seen.. and he told us it was a Bigfoot and how there were lots of them around. We had never heard of Bigfoot before.”

We had the cook who spoke a little English draw us a sketch of what he saw.
You know what it looked like.

Here is an amusing Expedition story from Whitehall.

I took a group in my boat up to camp by the Drowned Lands. It was a cold and rainy night. One of the party was a very annoying, fussy Englishman who kept asking stupid questions and generally getting in the way and being a pain in the ass. Everyone set up their tents and the Englishman pulled out a hot water bottle , urinated into it, and put it in the bottom of his sleeping bag to warm it up. Apparently this is not an infrequent custom in England, where central heating is not universal.

We were amused.

When we went to bed, Lord Fussy took off his boots and placed them right outside his front tent flap. We awoke in the morning to cursing and found the guy shaking liquid out of his boots. During the night he had had to pee and had taken his full, but now cold, water bottle and emptied it out through the front flap of his tent in the dark, right into his waterproof boots. He had peed into the water bottle again and placed it back in his sleeping bag. Being waterproof, the boots held the urine nicely till he tried to put them on in the morning.

We were VERY amused.