I've told parts of this story to a few people in my life, but this is the first time I'm laying it out start to finish.

I'm 35 now. What I'm about to talk about happened when I was 24, back in the fall of 2013,

on a backpacking trip in the southern Appalachians. At the time, I thought of myself as a halfway

serious hiker.

I wasn't some ultra-light through-hiking legend, but I had a decent pack, decent legs,

and enough trips under my belt to think I knew what was out there.

Bears, coyotes, snakes, people occasionally.

I did not believe in Bigfoot.

I thought stories like that were just local color and campfire fuel.

After that trip, I stopped laughing at those stories.

I don't know if what we saw fits the standard Bigfoot template,

and honestly I don't care what label someone wants to put on it.

I just know we had something big, hairy, and very aware of us moving

around our camp for days, and that what it did with our voices has stayed with me in a way

I can't shake. There were four of us on that trip, me, my younger brother Nate, our friend

Chris, and Chris's girlfriend, Lily. We were all all mid-20s except Nate, who was 22.

We lived in different places by then, but we'd grown up in the same small town

and had been messing around in the woods together since we were kids. This trip was supposed to be a

reunion of sorts. The plan was simple on paper. We'd meet at a trailhead in

North Carolina, hike a four-day loop that used a section of the Appalachian Trail, hit a couple

of balds and ridgelines we'd seen in photos, then come back out where we started. It wasn't

some epic through hike, roughly 40 miles total, enough to feel like we'd done something, not enough to be insane.

...