INTERVIEW: Bigfoot in the Adirondacks? These filmmakers think so.

Photo: On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey looks for a sasquatch in the Adirondacks. Photo courtesy of Small Town Monsters / Provided by JCPR with permission.

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Documentary filmmaker Seth Breedlove has built a career out of so-called “small town monsters.” Over the years he has produced a number of films looking at local legends like the Bell Witch, the Mothman and, of course, Bigfoot. His latest is the newest chapter in his ongoing On the Trail of Bigfoot series, subtitled The Journey. The film is now available on digital platforms after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

“This feels weird for it to just now be coming out because Kickstarter backers had it for two months, but, yeah, we’re pretty proud of this one,” Breedlove said in a recent Zoom interview. “It was actually originally supposed to be a movie called On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Origin, which was going to take us to British Columbia, and we were going to do this boat expedition off the BC coast.”

The plan for that project was for Breedlove and his team to spend some time in the woods both camping and filming the local area for any signs of the infamous bipedal monster. The director said it was going to be the wildest adventure yet, but then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. All plans were put on hold, and the “Small Town Monsters” team needed to find a subject matter a little closer to home.

“We had to shelf anything that was going to take us too far out of our immediate area, so this project came about because we had been talking about doing something taking us back to the Adirondacks for a long time,” he said. “And when The Origin got shelved, I basically just said, ‘Why don’t we just go back to upstate New York, and stay there for a few days, and focus on that region and finally get to got to some of the areas where we’d always wanted to travel.’ And then during the course of putting that whole thing together, getting all the trip plans in place … I decided to make it a little more personal. On the Trail of Bigfoot has always been told from a first-person perspective, but I think this one really takes it to another level. It’s much more from my POV and about us more so than anything we’ve done previously.”

Joining Breedlove on this trip were several other adventurers, some of whom should be well known to lovers of Bigfoot TV specials. Steve Kulls from MonsterQuest was along for the ride, as was Paul Bartholomew from Finding Bigfoot. Along the way, they made a pilgrimage to Whitehall, New York, home to an incident involving multiple members of law enforcement claiming to see a sasquatch in a field off a rural road, according to an official press release.

For Breedlove, the Adirondacks is a great hotspot for the potentiality of Bigfoot.

“We actually were just out in the Pacific Northwest, and that was my third time out that way,” he said. “So I’ve been out there, and I’ve experienced what most consider the perfect Bigfoot habitat. And when we were out there most recently, we were in the Olympic Peninsula, which to me, having been to northern California, I don’t think there’s anything else out on the West Coast that stacks up to the Olympic Peninsula in terms of size and scope and just how rugged it is. And yet even the Olympic Peninsula, you’re talking about something that’s just under a million acres, whereas the Adirondacks is 6 million acres. So just in terms of sheer scale, I don’t know that there is anything else in the United States, which is kind of wild because it’s in New York.”

For his team members, the Adirondacks proved to be quite rugged, yet able to be traveled. There were metropolitan areas nearby, which helped with a helicopter rental, and no brown bears, which meant traveling into the woods, at least in Breedlove’s mind, safer than other parts of the United States and Canada. “In New York, you just have rattlesnake and some black bear, but other than that, it’s fairly tame up in New York,” the director said. “To me, it’s the perfect place to go look for Bigfoot.”

That said, the Adirondacks is no walk in the park. The forests are dense, the weather can change on a dime, and some of the high peaks, although nothing like out west, are challenging to newcomers and experts alike. Most of all, it’s a playground that is easy to get lost in (or from the Bigfoot’s perspective, easy to evade a search team).

“Now once you get into the actual hiking and that kind of thing, I would say it stacks up against some of the most intense sort of hiking that you’re going to find anywhere in the United States, just because you’ve got such a large range of mountains and so many hills,” Breedlove said. “There’s a lot of rock. It’s not super-friendly when it comes to climbing, but it’s easy enough to get from location to location. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so appealing to me is that you can drive from the northern end to the southern end in a few hours, and you see a massive change in the terrain and the type of mountains you’re looking at, the types of forest you’re looking at. … I just think it’s strange to me that the Adirondacks and really all of upstate New York is so often overlooked because it’s got some of the best views, some of the best hiking — at least on the East Coast, if not all of the U.S.”

For believers, the Adirondacks may be an excellent location to spot Bigfoot on the side of the road. For skeptics, the Adirondacks may be an excellent location to spot a bear or moose on the side of the road. In the end, everyone walks home happy — even the sasquatch.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Journey, directed by Seth Breedlove, is now available on digital platforms. Click here for more information.