The Mysteries of Blanca Peak, Part II
Of Bigfoot, Supernatural Buffalos, and Crypto-Platypuses…
Last week we took a closer look at Blanca Peak, the imposing 14,345-foot mountain sentinel that overlooks the San Luis Valley from the unbroken wall of the Sangre de Cristos.
Specifically, we delved into the extraterrestrial and otherworldly mysteries that seem to cluster about this mountain, the fourth highest in Colorado, and which is also known to the Navajo as Sisnaajiní—the Sacred Mountain of the East, which represents one of the four great peaks delimiting the boundaries of their world. But while there is certainly a great deal of UFO activity in the SLV generally, and around Blanca Peak specifically, the lofty mountain is also home to other forms of paranormal and cryptozoological phenomena, and that’s just what we’re going to examine today.
First up is a pair of Bigfoot sightings, which happened about six years apart and occurred on opposite sides of the mountain. Crucially, both sightings happened in the vicinity of one of the plentiful mountain tarns that lie in the glacial cirques around Blanca Peak.
The first encounter, which is classified as Report #4614 on the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization website, took place in 1994, and was reported by an anonymous witness with a degree in biology who is (or was) employed as a wildlife biologist. The sighting occurred near Lily Lake, one of the several high mountain tarns to the north of Blanca Peak. Lily Lake is actually located within a beautiful, forested vale called Huerfano Valley, and is the source of the Huerfano River, a tributary of the mighty Arkansas.
According to the witness, it was springtime, and he was hiking to the mountain lake with a party of friends:
“After hanging out at the lake we had all started to turn back. After a while we decided to race down the hill off the trail back to camp (last one there was cooking). I hung back with another friend to just walk back and carry people’s gear. Shortly after everyone took off like a bat out of hell, we saw something jump between two trees. The figure was stretched out like someone doing a jumping-jack while jumping in a lunge. It must have been at least 6 feet tall. At first we thought it was my brother messing with us, he was the only one in our group tall enough. Both me and my friend have a lot of outdoor experience. It was positively not a deer, sheep, elk or a bear. Although its color was very similar to the light-grey of a mule deer during that time of year. The arms were clearly visible as were the legs, but it moved very fast between the trees. At first we joked about how it looked like a Bigfoot creature, but blew it off as my brother. When we got back to camp everyone else was there and we noticed that my brother had a red shirt on, and was the second one back at camp. It rained that night and was a steep hike so we never went back to look for tracks.”
The witness also reported that the creature didn’t make the slightest sound—which was considered very unusual by this experienced outdoor enthusiast.
The second encounter occurred in August of 2000, this time on the other side of the mountain. In Report #348 on the BFRO website, the witness explained that he was four-wheeling on the rugged Lake Como Road (said—with good reason—to be the state’s roughest road) with his parents and uncle when he saw something inexplicable:
“We had made it past Lake Como and to the end of the Jeep road, where we fished for a while and ate our lunch. When we left the last lake, it was about 1:30 p.m., with my uncle and me in the lead on our four-wheelers. We had gone about a half a mile when my uncle and I spotted both something that looked like a dead, burned tree stump that was about 7 to 8 feet tall.
“We didn’t think too much of it until it moved. It stood upright and walked like a man. At first, we thought it was a hiker but it was all the same color, from head to toe. It walked about 15 yards before it walked into the trees. My uncle and [I] both stopped to make sure we saw the same thing. But we drove down the road about 300 to 400 yards before we decided to go look for it. We walked into the trees about 200 yards and came to a small meadow. My uncle was looking the other way when at the other end of the meadow it ran through. I yelled, ‘There it goes!’ We took off after it, on foot. This time I got a little bit better chance to look at it. The creature was a light to a medium brown and had shaggy long hair, it stood about 7 feet tall.
“When we reached the end of the meadow, each of us went in an opposite direction. My uncle went the same direction as the bigfoot, and I went the other way in case it double-backed on us. But we didn’t see the creature after that. We did find a few footprints, but didn’t have any plaster to make a mold. So we went back down the mountain.”
The sighting took place at around 11,000-11,500 feet, and the witness also reported—for what it’s worth—that the group had smelled something like celery in the same area as the sighting when they were coming up the mountain earlier in the morning.
It should also be noted that bears have become a serious nuisance around Lake Como in recent years, having learned that it’s an excellent place to raid campsites for food. Perhaps this activity attracts the attention of the local Bigfoot as well?
Finally, we should take some time to point out a few of the other paranormal or cryptozoological anomalies that have been seen in the vicinity of Blanca Peak—some of which border on the realms of high strangeness and the supernatural. Once again, the indefatigable Christopher O’Brien is the source for these remarkable tales, some of which he collected in the book Enter the Valley, a followup to his seminal The Mysterious Valley.
In 1997, O’Brien interviewed a prospector who claimed he camped in the area of the Winchell Lakes, two rather large lakes that lie to the southeast of Blanca Peak upon an imposing treeless shelf, and overlook La Veta Pass below and the majestic Spanish Peaks in the distance. This prospector, for one thing, claims that he was wont to catch some very unusual fish in these lakes, including ones with “real deformed heads
and the strangest looking fins;” their appearance was so alarming that he decided not to eat them, which is a sensible precaution.
At other times he witnessed even stranger sights:
“There’s some pretty strange things going on up there. I remember one night I was up at the lake, about an hour before dark, and I happened to look across the lake; it’s not very big, not even a quarter-mile across, and what do I see? A huge white buffalo just standing there, plain as day! I wondered to myself, what in the world is a white buffalo doing all the way up here? Then it just disappeared! I went over there and couldn’t find any sign of it, no tracks or nothing…”1
O’Brien further mentions that other weird, seemingly supernatural white-colored animals have been seen haunting the shores of the lonely Winchell Lakes—including an “impossibly large white buck deer.” These lakes are remote and unvisited, and are now on private land, and they seem as likely a place as any to have an encounter with the sacred spirits of Sisnaajiní. Perhaps these lakes, as some traditions hold, are in sooth the mysterious Sipapu—the place of emergence—of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians.
Either way, we’ll end with Lake Como, and another of its mysterious denizens. This time it happens to be an enigmatic “crypto-platypus,” which was seen by two fishermen in 1966, serenely swimming along the lake’s shoreline, and seemingly blissfully unconcerned that it hadn’t the slightest business being anywhere near that part of the world. According to the witnesses, the creature bore the distinctive hallmarks of the famous Australian monotreme, including the broad bill and flattened tail.
The platypus, it’s probably superfluous to observe, is strictly to be found in the Land Down Under; how one could arrive in a remote alpine lake high up in the Colorado Sangre de Cristos, is anyone’s guess—although North American crypto-platypuses are apparently not entirely unknown to the cryptozoological community. The witnesses in this instance even claim to have reported their sighting to the American Museum of Natural History, but that institution very sensibly refused to give them the time of day.
And that’s a great shame, for it just might have been one of the great zoological finds of the century.
Verdict: Mountains are, by their very nature, remote and inaccessible places—and this fact alone lends them an air of mystery and alienation from the human world.
Humans, in short, are strangers in the mountain realm; the high country has always been the abode of the gods, and men are unwelcome interlopers in these places—as anyone who’s ever been caught upon them in the midst of a ferocious summer thunderstorm, or a howling winter gale, can easily attest. That’s something we’d all do well to remember when we trespass upon the high peaks, and it’s why there’s a great deal of wisdom in leaving a small offering or two whenever you visit a remote mountain summit.
Blanca Peak—lofty, aloof, and imposing—is a sacred mountain, and it is not difficult to imagine that it acts in some way as a conduit between different worlds. That’s true, after all, in a material sense: on one side of the mountain is the arid, dusty San Luis Valley, and on the other is the wet, lush wonderland of the beautiful Huerfano Valley. Two worlds that haven’t anything to do with one another, linked by the mighty mountain peak.
So why shouldn’t it be true in a spiritual or supernatural sense as well?
No, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Bigfoot or Sasquatch or whatever Hairy Biped haunts the Sangre de Cristo Mountains makes his home on or near Blanca Peak; in fact, I’d be very surprised if he didn’t. And as for mysterious white buffalos, weird fish, and out-of-place platypuses—well, that’s merely the mountain vouchsafing us a glimpse of another world and another time…and it’s probably done in jest at that, for the sheer amusement of befuddling the irritating human creatures that so often disturb the mountain’s jealously-guarded solitude.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts on the mysteries of Blanca Peak, for whatever they’re worth. As always, if anyone reading this has experienced anything strange upon this mysterious and magical mountain peak—whether sightings of UFOs, or encounters with Bigfoot, or even a glimpse of an Australian monotreme in Lake Como—let me know in the comments.
Enter the Valley: UFOs, Religious Miracles, Cattle Mutilations, and Other Unexplained Phenomena in the San Luis Valley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pg. 250.