A summer job at a remote salt operation near Truckee, California, ended with an entire work crew staring at something walking across a mountain top.
The account comes from Reddit user LensShootr91, who shared it with the Bigfoot community after seeing news about new footage said to show the famous Patterson-Gimlin film was a hoax. The poster says they had only told the story to friends and family “because I know I’ll be ridiculed.” The post’s title makes the point plainly: the experience will make them a believer “regardless of PGF being a hoax or not.”
A Morning on the Ridge
In the summer of 2006, the poster’s father and uncle owned a salt mining business with “3 or 4 different solar evaporation locations throughout California.” The poster was working there while school was out. One morning in the middle of July, the crew was at the newest site in the Sierra Nevada, “close to Truckee but pretty far back into a remote area.”
Everyone was busy collecting salt when one of the workers pointed at a ridge and called out. In the poster’s words, “Walking across one of the mountain tops was a huge hairy Bigfoot.” It was “a good distance away but we knew exactly what we’re looking at, it was insane.”
Two of the men pulled out their flip phones, but it was “way too late.” The creature took just “3 or 4 steps” and was over the ridge and out of sight. “Huge glides!” the poster wrote.
In the comments, another user asked for more detail. The poster estimated the figure was “no more than 1,000 feet away,” far enough that “you had to really focus and almost squint your eyes.” They watched for about five seconds, glanced at a coworker, then looked back for “maybe another 5 seconds” as it crested the ridge. The sun was shining on it, so the crew could see brown and orange fur “exactly like a grizzly bear or orangutan.” The arms hung low, “like knee level,” and it was slightly hunched.
One of the men wanted to take the collection quad for a closer look. The poster’s dad said no, since there was not enough gas to get there and back, and “what if it was dangerous/territorial.” The crew talked about it for the rest of the day, and a couple of the men called their wives, “super excited and freaked out.” The poster admits, “I thought cryptids and paranormal were all nonsense up until that day.”
The Skeptic’s Side
Ten seconds at up to a thousand feet is not much to go on. The phones came out too late, and the crew decided against heading up for a closer look, so there were no photos, tracks, or hair to study. A bear moving upright at long range is the explanation skeptics reach for first, and the same goes for a person on the ridge.
The poster pushed back on the idea of a hoaxer. “I’m certain that it’s more plausible to see an actual living Sasquatch then it is to see some guy in a suit way up in a mountain just to scare some random workers,” they wrote. It is a fair point about effort, though it does not settle what the crew actually saw.
What Other Readers Added
The thread filled up with Northern California stories. One commenter said the Truckee woods always made them feel watched, and described a hike near Tahoe where something slammed against a tree, twigs snapped, and stones thumped onto the trail. A baseball-sized stone hit their arm and left a bruise for about a week. Another recalled the late 1980s in the Cache Creek wilderness of Lake County, with tree knocks, loud screams and growls that shook their bodies, and a terrible smell. A third pointed to boulders rolled onto dirt roads near Susanville.
Several readers also said the debate over the old film misses the point. As one put it, “Proving PGF is a hoax only debunks PGF. It doesnt debunk bigfoot.” When another reader asked which footage the poster meant, a commenter named the documentary Capturing Bigfoot.
Whether this was a bear, a trick of distance and sunlight, or something stranger, the crew saw what it saw, and the story stayed in the family for years. That is how many of these accounts survive: quietly, until something nudges someone to finally tell it.
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