Welcome to stop three on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip. Tonight we're climbing up onto one of the most overlooked Sasquatch landscapes in the country, the Mogollon Rim of central and eastern Arizona, a two-hundred-mile shelf of stone where the Colorado Plateau drops off into the Sonoran Desert and ponderosa pine country meets red rock canyon. It's a place most people don't picture when they hear the word Bigfoot, and that's exactly what makes it so interesting.

Because for as long as anyone in Arizona has been keeping records, witnesses have been coming down off that Rim with the same story. Something big up there. Something fast. Something that screams across whole canyons and watches camps from the tree line and throws rocks into fire rings in the middle of the night.

We open the episode the way the Rim opens most of its stories, with a quiet camp and four experienced campers who realize, all at once, that the forest around them has gone silent.

 From there we build the history of the country itself, how the Rim got its name, why the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Coconino and the Tonto national forests stack together to make one of the largest unbroken pieces of timber and wilderness in the lower forty-eight, and how the Mogollon Monster legend traces back well before statehood, into the oral traditions of the people who knew that country first. Then we get into the encounters.

A guide and his horseback hunters running into something on a ridge in the Apache-Sitgreaves that didn't react to them the way an animal is supposed to react. A family at an established campground hearing something walk a deliberate circle around their tent at one in the morning, twice, and finding a track in the duff at first light. A solo bow hunter sitting in a tree stand while something stands fifteen feet below him and breathes.

A five-man hunt camp that loses a night to rocks on the canvas, a dog that won't get off the floorboard for a week, and a track measurement that no one in the group has been able to explain since. A Forest Service employee with thirty years on the Apache-Sitgreaves who heard something one summer afternoon that nobody at the office wanted to write down.

And a couple driving home from Big Lake on State Route 260 who watched something step backward off the shoulder of the highway and clear a four-foot embankment in a single motion.We close with the question that always sits underneath these conversations. 

Why here. Why this country. Why does the Rim, of all the places in the American West, produce a Sasquatch tradition this dense and this consistent. The answer has to do with the geography itself, the food and the water and the cover and the canyons that no one has ever surveyed, and with the kind of witnesses this country produces, ranchers and hunters and Forest Service folks and law enforcement, people who know the difference between an elk and a bear and a man, and who keep telling the same story year after year.

So pour a cup of something warm, pull your fire up a little closer, and come ride with me up onto the Mogollon Rim. Just don't go off looking for whatever's screaming across the canyon.

It already knows where you are.If you've had your own encounter on the Rim, or anywhere in Arizona's high country, reach out. Every story matters, and this show runs on yours.

Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

Email your encounter to [email protected] for a chance to be featured on a future episode of Backwoods Bigfoot Stories.

Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

Follow the show and turn on automatic downloads so you never miss a chilling encounter from the forest. Listen with the lights off… if you dare.