About 12 years ago me Mate and I ended up having to shut down the shop he had owned and ran for a number of years due to bigger companies under cutting so much that we weren't getting enough business to keep it going. So, after we paid off all that was owed and closed the doors for the final time, we took what money we had left, bought an old van, fixed it up on the inside and headed off on what became a 3 year camping adventure.

With what savings we had left after buying the old van, we bought a few items such as a tent and backpacks, some cooking gear and utensils, and a few miscellanious items. We both have always had a love of the outdoors and since we lived in Kentucky, the Daniel Boone National forest offered loads of opportunities for deep woods camping and hiking. We explored a great deal of the forest during these years.

Kentucky is a beautiful, but strange, and sometimes dark and spooky place. The name of the state itself comes from mainly the Cherokee and Shawnee dialects and means "dark and bloody ground". The native American tribes would not live here in the area. They inhabited all of the surrounding areas that would eventually come to be known as Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, etc., but they would not live here because this was the land where strange and fearsome creatures dwelt and where the spirits roamed.  And, during our camping adventures, we learned that the American Indian tribes weren't being foolish or superstitious, but that many of their legends were, indeed, very true.

One of our first encounters with something very strange dwelling in the "Dark and Bloody Ground" was during the first late spring/early summer of our adventures. We were hiking through the forest on a very pleasantly comfortable day exploring the area a little ways away from our campsite. We were looking for some fresh edible morels, colloquially known as 'dry land fish' to add to an afternoon lunch later. (Morels are a type of edible mushroom found only in April and May.) When we came across a very strange set of tracks. These tracks were gigantic hoof prints...the size of a big man's hands.  We followed the tracks for quite a ways through the and noticed that they weren't right for something that was four-legged. Whatever had left these tracks was two legged!  And, it was huge! The tracks went rather deep into the damp soil of the bottom where the stream flowed through, which meant that the creature was very large and heavy.  Both me Mate and I are well educated in the classical mythologies as well as the local tales and lore of Kentucky. We were aware that there were tales of a beast people had reported seeing for a number of generations in the northeastern parts of Kentucky ranging to the southeastern bits and northeastern parts of Tennessee. People have many times described what for all the world sounds like a Satyr.  And, for the life of us we could not find ANY animal that could have made such tracks in any of the manuals we had in our van on the flora and fauna of Kentucky.

Needless to say, we decided that we were going to pack up and move to a different campsite for that night...in fact we decided to go to one of the designated camping sites around Cave Run Lake where there were other people for a change.  We do not know for a fact what made those tracks, but we didn't really want to find out either.