TL;DR: Wife and I are avid hikers. Never experienced anything in the forest before. On a recent hike, we heard a possible tree knock and large crashing sound. We also smelled a very strong sulfur smell that stayed a couple of minutes and disappeared. Wondering if these could be signs of Bigfoot nearby? Also wondering if anyone else has had experiences there? 

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I just wanted to share my experience and see what (if anything) you all thought it could be. No sighting, just some odd happenings. 

First, some background on me. I used to be into the paranormal in a big way. I founded a local paranormal investigation team that was very popular around here 10-15 years ago. We were in the paper, guests on radio talk shows, etc. I decided to leave that behind after doing it for many years due to some of the encounters toward the end. Which is another story in itself. However, once that’s a part of your life, it never truly leaves. You see things through a different filter, and you’re always more receptive to those sorts of things. Which brings me to Bigfoot. 

My wife and I like to go hiking on the weekends. We usually try to find state parks to go to within a 2-3 hour radius from us that we haven’t explored before. We mostly just just hike. We usually don’t even think of Bigfoot, other than to make statements like “what if there are Bigfoot here?”, or just make jokes to each other about it in general. But our fascination is there, and we continually watch documentaries or read articles about it with a lot of interest. At this point we know a little about the things to look for, but since we are just now starting to learn about Bigfoot, those things still aren’t “top of mind” when we’re out in the woods. 

However, last weekend we decided to drive down near Trenton, GA to visit Cloudland Canyon State Park. We had never been there and just wanted to hike, view scenery, and explore. We arrived there at about 2pm. We quickly found out signage is terrible there. Even with a map, we spent about an hour walking around trying to get our bearings about where we wanted to hike. We ended up on Bear Creek Backcountry trail. See map. 

Possibly because it was already after 3pm, there didn’t seem to be a lot of people on the trails. Most were having picnics and that sort of thing on the main grounds. We started hiking and ran into people only twice the entire time, once at the beginning and once at the end.

After we were deep in the forest and completely alone, we started noticing how quiet it was. You really couldn’t even hear animals (squirrels, etc) that much. We were just walking along, talking and suddenly to our left we heard a distant sound of what sounded like a tree knock. Like I said, it was distant but had that unmistakable sound of something solid striking a tree. We paused for a second and I said something to my wife half jokingly like “that actually sounded like a tree knock”. As usual, we sort of chuckled it off and kept going. About 20 minutes later down the trail, again to our left, we heard something that sounded almost like something jumping down from a tree. Whatever it was sounded heavy. All we heard was something hitting the leaves and ground pretty hard.

This was harder to explain to ourselves. It was more like “What the hell was that?”. If it was an animal, it was a pretty big one. The only other thing we agreed it might have been was a large, heavy limb from a tree falling or something like that. It might not have been something falling at all. But it made a crashing sound in the leaves and branches on the ground. It really startled us and made us both jump. It was a lot closer to us also. Just off the trail in the woods. Maybe 20ft away. We stood there and looked around to see if we could see anything for a couple of minutes, but we couldn’t. It scared us. Even after that, the topic of Bigfoot really didn’t come up in our conversation, because we just kind of got quieter and stopped talking. 

Further ahead, we passed an intersection point with another trail and were getting about as far as we felt we had time for. We kept walking because there was a pond about a quarter mile or more up ahead that we wanted to see. A few minutes into this next stretch we hit a pocket of what smelled like straight sulfur. We both immediately said “Do you smell that?”, “It smells like rotten eggs.”. It was very strong. What’s weird about it, is that we couldn’t find any source around us of what would make that smell. We stopped and looked for a couple of minutes. Didn’t see any springs, etc. Nothing. Just trail and woods. Because of the spookiness of what had happened to us on the trail already, (and my background mentioned above), as we began walking again, I said to my wife “That’s what demons smell like”. I was being half serious at this point because we were completely alone and I was starting to feel a little uneasy to be honest. We noticed that just as quickly as the smell arrived it disappeared, and we kept going. 

We reached the pond later down the trail. Took a break and talked briefly about what happened. We hiked back the exact same way we came. It wasn’t until the end of the hike when we were back in the car that we realized that we didn’t smell the sulfur smell at all on the way back.

On the 3 hour ride back home, it hit us that the smell and the sounds we heard sort of fit with Bigfoot sightings we had heard of before, except that I always thought the smell was described as something different than just a really bad sulfur smell. 

Anyway, all of that was a really long way to say, “Do you think all of this was just coincidence”? We really don’t want to jump straight into saying that we were getting close to a Bigfoot. We honestly don’t know. Does anyone have any opinions or experiences in that location to share? 

Are there Bigfoot in Cloudland Canyon State Park?