On Sunday, June 1st, 2003, my wife and I decided to take a somewhat impromptu trip to the Patuxent Wildlife Preserve located in Odenton, Maryland. The path of this park is shaped like a 3-leaf clover which travels around 2 small ponds which are joined together by a small inlet. The preserve is located off of Patuxent Road in Odenton, an area which has had many sightings according to Mark Opasnick's Maryland Sightings Guide.
Upon parking our car we noticed a man fishing with his two young children on the opposite side of the pond. As we began to walk I remember calming myself internally by thinking "there is no way a sasquatch could inhabit Maryland, let alone this preserve". I was doing this because I didn't want to be too jumpy and start over- analyzing what my eyes were taking in. Incredibly, not soon after we started, we came across a dark patch of muddied dirt which was wet enough to leave an imprint. My wife noticed an odd impression in the mud. It appeared to be an impression of a right foot as it had what appeared to be four visible and distinctive toe marks. The impression was much broader in the ball of the foot rather than the heel and there was no apparent arch in the foot. Unfortunately, we did not have a ruler, but we did estimate the print as 9 inches long X 4 inches wide (ball) X 2.5 inches wide (heel).
As we walked we noticed a family of Canadian geese and we watched gleefully as the baby geese swam with their parents. A little while after we passed the ducks we noticed a large impression just slightly off to the right of the trail. This print caught our attention due to its size. It was a foot shaped print, and could have been caused by a huge foot, or by a boulder which had been taken from the spot. Anyway, we photographed my size 13 boot next to the print. We estimated that the print, whether made by foot, or by rock, was around 14" - 15" in length with a width of 6.5" at the ball and 4.5" at the heel. An interesting side note is that the path around the preserve contained many small pebbles and stones, but no rocks over 3 inches...
Finally, after walking past the midpoint of the 3-leaf clover path we found a pair of tracks in stride formation which were not side to side as a human print, but more in a single-line fashion. [View corresponding photo entitled "Stride"] We looked closely at the prints and how they were shaped we noticed that the right print was curved and angled towards the water as if what ever made the prints decided to turn to its left as it stepped down with this foot, this curving action distorted the overall shape of the impression. While examining the left foot we made a startling discovery. The foot matched the track which we had first seen upon entering the preserve! It had the exact proportion in that it was around 9 inches long as well as the ball of the foot being much broader than the heel. I decided to measure the stride by performing my own natural stride along side the prints. Amazingly, the prints while only being 9 inches in length had a heel to heel stride which was roughly a foot longer than the stride of my 6'3" body and 13 inch shoes! We later estimated the stride to be around 39 inches, based on adding 12 inches to my heel to heel stride. It was at this point at which we decided to pull out the camera and start documenting what we had found. We had been reluctant to do so earlier because we did not want to fall into the trap of over-analyzing. We did not want to get bigfoot fever and begin seeing evidence everywhere we looked. Looking back I think we did an objective job of consciously analyzing and taking in what we saw.
We are not exactly sure what made the prints. The dimension of the prints (wider at the ball rather than heel) and the 'straight-line' formation of the stride prints are representative of known sasquatch prints. However, the size of the smaller prints (9 inches) and the lack of definition on the large impression make it impossible for us to determine whether the prints were indeed sasquatch or those of a barefoot human, or perhaps even another unknown species of animal... Only time will tell as we do plan on making more visits to the wildlife preserve.
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