A Nine-Foot Figure Emerged From the Colorado Woods and Glided Uphill

Lori Bowling was watching for deer and moose as she and her husband drove through the Colorado mountains on July 28, 2026. They were descending Slumgullion Pass along Highway 149 when she spotted something enormous moving near the edge of the forest.

A dark, towering figure had emerged from the trees and was climbing the hillside. Its arms hung unusually low, and its head seemed to rise directly from its broad shoulders. It moved with long, effortless strides that looked more like gliding than walking.

Lori tried to tell her husband what she was seeing, but she couldn’t get the words out.

Something Moving Along the Tree Line

It was 3:41 in the afternoon, and Lori and Bill Bowling were travelling toward Lake City with their dogs, pulling a fifth-wheel trailer behind their truck. They had just passed through a thunderstorm, and the sky was still overcast.

The couple knew these mountains well. They had lived in Lake City for approximately 12 years, and Bill’s family had been exploring the surrounding wilderness since the 1950s. Spotting wildlife along the highway was nothing unusual for them.

Lori had been scanning the wooded slope about 200 feet away when the figure caught her attention. Its hair was dark brown, almost black, and its arms appeared remarkably long in proportion to its body.

She watched it move uphill beside a stand of young spruce trees. The area had been cleared of beetle-damaged timber several years earlier, leaving smaller trees standing approximately four or five feet tall. Using those trees for comparison, Lori estimated that the creature stood between seven and nine feet.

Its movements were unlike anything she had seen before. The massive figure covered the slope in four or five enormous strides, moving smoothly over the uneven ground before the highway curved and blocked her view.

By the time she could speak, they had already driven past it.

Bill, Stop the Truck

Bill noticed his wife struggling to tell him something. He assumed she had spotted an elk or moose, the sort of animals they often watched for during their mountain drives. When Lori finally found her voice, she told him what she had seen and asked him to turn around.

Bill drove to the nearby County Road 50 turnoff, turned the truck around, and headed back toward the hillside. Lori directed him to the area where the enormous figure had disappeared. They stopped at a pullout overlooking the slope and searched the forest with binoculars. The creature was nowhere to be seen, and the trees offered plenty of places for something that large to disappear.

Bill could see how deeply the encounter had affected his wife. After nearly 39 years of marriage, he knew her reactions well, and he had rarely seen her so excited and frightened at the same time.

Lori kept describing the creature’s appearance and the extraordinary way it had moved. She had spent years watching wildlife in these mountains, but nothing in her experience resembled what had crossed her field of vision that afternoon.

She wanted to go back and look for tracks.

A Bare Footprint in the Mountains

The couple returned home, dropped off their trailer, and headed back to Slumgullion Pass. This time, they could leave the truck and investigate the ground near the tree line. The area was away from the established hiking trails, surrounded by steep forested slopes. Bill began searching for signs of anything that might have passed through the clearing.

He found deer and elk tracks scattered across the ground. Eventually, he came across an impression that looked remarkably like a bare human footprint. Bill photographed the mark with his four-and-a-quarter-inch knife beside it for scale. Small reddish plant stems were pressed into the impression, giving him the sense that something had recently stepped there.

The footprint was smaller than he expected from a creature of such enormous height. He searched the surrounding ground for more impressions, but the terrain made following a trail difficult. He also examined the opposite side of the highway, looking for signs that the creature might have crossed the road before Lori spotted it. There were plenty of animal tracks, but nothing that revealed where the towering figure had come from.

The couple returned the following day to continue searching. During their second visit, they discovered another possible footprint, slightly larger than the first. They examined the ground around it, hoping to find additional signs leading into the forest.

Before they could finish, another mountain storm approached. Lightning began moving across the surrounding peaks, and they had to abandon the search. Rain would soon be falling over the same ground they had been looking at.

The Creature That Changed Everything

The encounter stayed with Lori long after they returned home. She could still picture the enormous figure climbing the slope, its dark hair, long arms, and unusually smooth movements standing out in her memory. Bill began looking into other Bigfoot encounters, reading witness accounts from people who had seen similar creatures in remote mountain regions. He found descriptions that reminded him of what Lori had experienced.

The couple shared their encounter with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, where it became Report #81439. The organization classified the sighting as Class A, its category for a clear visual encounter. The account included the location, the couple’s descriptions, and photographs associated with their return visits to the mountain.

Slumgullion Pass sits in the rugged San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Highway 149 winds through steep slopes, dense stands of spruce, and stretches of wilderness that continue far beyond the road. Lori had driven through this landscape countless times before. She knew what elk, moose, and bears looked like, and she knew how they moved through the mountains. But the creature she saw that July afternoon was unlike any of them.

She came home believing she had seen Bigfoot.