But since a recent video of an alleged bigfoot taken from the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad went viral, believers have been coming out of the woodwork...and into the Outpost.
The main draw here is the museum, which includes a history of bigfoot sightings, casts made from bigfoot tracks (both of "babies" and full-growns), plaques explaining phenomena attributed to bigfoot and a large map that guests can mark with pins based on their sightings. Red pins symbolize visual sightings, black indicates footprints, blue reports rocks thrown (a classic bigfoot move), green represents those who've heard a bigfoot (via howls or knocking on trees), and yellow attests to breaks in trees, or trees twisted into archways or a tipi shape (these are thought to be bigfoot nests). Headphones hanging on one wall reveal recordings of bigfoot sounds — a loop of haunting, whooping howls.
Myers rented the building, the oldest in Bailey, in 2012; he and his wife first ran it as a market, but also encouraged people to report bigfoot sightings there. "Well, that took off, and more people were coming in to talk about bigfoot than people who are buying groceries," Myers recalls. They took out the grocery section and rebranded the place as the Sasquatch Outpost in 2015; they bought the building the next year.
Fascination with the creature goes back to Myers's childhood. "What kid isn't interested in bigfoot?" he asks. "I mean, it's a fascinating topic if they're a myth, which they're not. But if they were a myth, it's a good one. Their appearance and behavior lend themselves to being an urban legend, if you want to call it that. But they're real. And there's more of them than anyone wants to admit. And more people have seen them than anyone could ever imagine."
A couple on the train, Stetson and Shannon Parker, who posted the video, saw a bipedal, brownish figure walking in shrubs on a slope before crouching down and appearing to almost fade into the surroundings. You know, the way people in camo hunting suits do.
But the Parkers have no doubt about what they saw. In an interview with the New York Times, Stetson said that the figure had arms too long to be considered human, and it moved like an animal. "I'm a believer now," he told the Times, adding that it "didn't look like anything I've ever seen before. I don't think it's a hoax. And if it is, it was a really good one."
Unlike Stetson, Myers is a longtime believer — but he calls the video "a hoax" that shows a man in a bigfoot suit. Such ersatz sightings are a frustrating challenge for bigfoot researchers like him, who take their work very, very seriously. "If you do that, then you have no credibility with people," Myers says of the video, shaking his head.
It also stokes the flames of what Colorado filmmaker and paranormal researcher Alan Megargle calls "Squatch fever."
"You have a bigfoot encounter or something of some sort, and now all of a sudden you're seeing things everywhere," he explains. "Your mind kind of takes over."
Megargle, who has collaborated with Myers on films and bigfoot research (most notably, the documentary The Bigfoot of Bailey Colorado and Its Portal, in which they identify "an alien portal located in a Native American sacred tree"), founded the National Paranormal Network in January 2022, which includes his production imprint Twisted Tree Films; a series called Trails to the Unknown; the Sasquatch Clothing Company; and Bigfoot Adventure Weekends, which he hosts seasonally in Bailey with Myers. "A lot of people are putting a lot of stuff out there, including the new video, and you should question and be cautious of that," Megargle warns.
Alan Megargle is mostly a paranormal researcher, but his fascination with bigfoot goes back to his childhood.
courtesy of Alan Megargle
It's not just videos or photos that people need to question, he says, but also their own minds. He recalls one couple who reported a bigfoot sighting to his National Paranormal Network; they were absolutely convinced that the sounds and other mysterious happenings around their cabin were signs of a bigfoot. But after a couple of days of research, Megargle and his team found nothing conclusive. "I think a lot of what they were experiencing was kind of fabricated in their heads, because they wanted it to happen so badly," Megargle says. Squatch fever.
Along with Estes Park and Pikes Peak, Bailey is a hot spot for sightings — as well as for people like Myers and Megargle, who will validate what others believe they saw (with the right evidence, of course). According to Megargle, you can "just tell" when someone is being truthful about their experience.
Back in 2012, when a national TV show crew featured Bailey, there was a bigfoot conference in the town. Hundreds of people were there, many sharing stories of sightings. "I remember sitting there thinking, 'Wow, and that's just around here,'" Myers recalls. "So everybody who thinks this is a phenomenon of the Pacific Northwest is completely wrong. In fact, they've been seen in every state in the continental U.S. and virtually every continent in the world.
"So yes, there's more than one bigfoot," he adds, rolling his eyes. People have asked him that question "ad nauseam," he says.
But what, exactly, is a bigfoot? According to Megargle, there are two schools of thought. "There's some who think it's an undiscovered great ape or primate. That group also thinks of it more as a monster and maybe something to fear," he explains. "Another group believes it's something more intelligent, maybe inter-dimensional. Because when some of these experiences happen, you feel like you're in the presence of an animal, but there's something else happening, like a white orb, a strange flash of light in the sky — other weird things seem to happen.
"And when you do this for a while, you can either embrace those weird things, like I've done, or you can just dismiss those weird things that happen when you're in the woods," he adds.
Myers fully embraces the weird; like Megargle, he leans more toward the inter-dimensional cryptid perspective. He's seen single bigfoot tracks in the snow that begin at one random point and end at another, with no nearby trees to climb or jump from. He's also seen glowing eyes at night, photos of which are in the museum.
With years of research under their belts, Myers and Megargle say bigfoot experts have discovered commonalities among sightings that prove there are clear identifiers when a sasquatch is nearby. That includes hearing heavy paces aligning with your own; sudden, complete silence coupled with the instinctual feeling that something is watching you; trees bent in arches or snapped in half; rocks being thrown at you, or hearing large rocks or branches clacking together. That can be used as a way to possibly communicate with a bigfoot, Myers says: "If I knock, it's with a genuine interest to see if a sasquatch is gonna reply. ... It's totally whatever happens happens. But it happens more often than people would ever believe.
"If you do get a reply, you can never be sure that it's not another human who heard my knock thinking it was a bigfoot, and then they're knocking back at my knock. That can always be the case," he admits. "But whenever we go out, I'm always trying to go places where I don't think there's any people and there's no cars, and we go as far as we can to determine there's nobody out there."
On the Bigfoot Adventure Weekends and Sasquatch Outpost excursions, people may have a sighting, but the majority of the time, Myers says, he and his groups find the more circumstantial evidence. The Adventure Weekends offer a three-day, two-night excursion, as well as an intriguing "Advanced Night Ops" mission that involves primitive camping and nighttime exploration.
Nighttime is when Myers finds the most "evidence," which includes seeing glowing eyes and hearing howls that he knows aren't emitted by bears, coyotes, wolves or big birds.
"If I'm out there at midnight with some people, or even after midnight, and I hear something, then to me it's pretty clear that one is gonna have a pretty high chance of being real, because nobody hangs out in the woods till one in the morning," Myers says confidently. "The later I stay out, the more validity I give anything that I see or hear. Because people, we are creatures of comfort. It's cold. It's scary. Just to fool somebody, it's not worth it. ... No one's going to hit on your tent at 2 a.m. [like a bigfoot] — they could get shot."
The Bigfoot Adventure Weekends sell out quickly, which is no surprise: The bigfoot community is enormous. Megargle says it's held together by the internet and such organizations as the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which was founded in the ’90s and involved the creators of Finding Bigfoot. Megargle even met his wife through the bigfoot community, via his film collaborator and now father-in-law, Ron Meyer.
"The network is huge," he says, adding that he meets fellow believers at his film premieres, bigfoot and paranormal conferences and other gatherings. "There are people in every state in the country and in Canada, so online is probably the biggest thing. The community's really ingrained in Facebook and things like that. There's lots of groups, and we all kind of friend each other and keep in touch that way."
Because they proliferate on the internet, stories — as well as videos like the current train clip — can be tough to validate. But there are clues. "I can usually tell within the first minute or two of someone talking to me where this is going to go," Megargle says. "There's just something about the storytelling that's very different from someone who's been traumatized by something versus someone who's trying to convince me they saw something that they themselves really aren't really convinced of."
Still, the experts are willing to listen. So if you spot a bigfoot in Colorado, don't hesitate to head to the Outpost and put a pin on the map, Myers advises.
"If you see one, don't just run — and don't take your eyes off of it, because you're never gonna get that again the rest of your life," he says. "If you're lucky enough to have that — that's a once-in-a-lifetime encounter — just look at the sasquatch. It will be the first one to break off, because that's just the way it happens."
