Bigfoot is real.

At least, the fabled, ape-like creature is a reality for many of the roughly 90 people who made the trek to Hot Springs over the weekend for the Big Sky Bigfoot Conference — the first of its kind in the Treasure State.

Bigfoot believers from as far as away as Wyoming and Idaho arrived to share their stories of sightings, meet the experts, learn about others’ experiences and find kindred spirits in the tiny resort town.

Brian Sullivan, a 40-year veteran of the “Bigfooting world,” runs the Montana Bigfoot Project out of Missoula and said the Big Sky state contains an especially hospitable environment for the legendary beasts.

“They’re going to want to be out in the middle of nowhere, and we’ve got a lot of middle-of-nowhere,” Sullivan said. “The last thing they want to do is run into humans, because that just causes problems for them.”

By his count, there have been well over 100 documented sightings of Sasquatch in Montana — mainly in the Western part of the state.

Sullivan hails from Minnesota, where he had his first Bigfoot sighting while sledding in the snow as a 10-year-old. The creature was so terrifying, he said, it left him with hysterical amnesia, unable to remember the encounter until two years later when his sledding buddy reminded him of it.

“I don’t care who finds Bigfoot, I just want it to be proved,” he said. “It’s a safety issue. My motivation is safety, because I was nearly killed by one of these things.”

Sullivan said he believes that his first encounter was with a dangerous derivation of Sasquatch: the Wendigo. While Montana doesn’t appear to have any of those creatures, “I can almost guarantee we have Mountain Giants, which are the most dangerous,” he said, noting that they’re also the rarest to encounter.

From the southern boundary of the Scapegoat and Bob Marshall wildernesses up to the Canadian border, just two roads interrupt more than 2.5 million acres of rugged, forested mountains. That’s where Sullivan expects most of Montana’s Sasquatch would likely live, but the remoteness could also explain why more people haven’t encountered the creatures.

“I’ve met three people who — just off the cuff — talked about having scary experiences in the Bob Marshall and won’t go back in there,” he said.

In the case of James Fisher, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes who attended the conference from Ronan, Bigfoot-like creatures are very much present on the Flathead Indian Reservation.

Growing up in the foothills of the Mission Mountains, he remembered them coming to his house and peering in the windows at night or shaking the massive pine trees around campsites in the woods.

“We were hearing muddled voices, where you couldn’t hear what they were saying,” Fisher recalled, adding that he guessed the giant creatures were about 15 feet away. “It would be miles away when you first heard the scream, and then within minutes it would be at the treeline” outside the camp.

And Glacier National Park’s Lake McDonald, he said, has a reputation for Bigfoot presence.

“When it gets dark, the old story from the old people is during the day, you can go in and swim but when it’s the night, that’s their time. When it gets dark it’s best to get out of there and get out of the water.”

Serious Bigfoot believers aren’t typically aggressive with their convictions. They won’t come knocking on your front door to attack your skepticism and they aren’t prone to holding pro-”believer” demonstrations at busy intersections.

They understand this particular hobby falls well outside the mainstream, and their earnestness still leaves room for some fun. Outside the Symes Hot Springs Hotel meeting room, several themed T-shirts were on sale bearing light-hearted slogans such as “Bigfoot doesn’t believe in you either.”

The conference logo featured a cartoonish Sasquatch reclining in a pine forest, peering good-naturedly into the starry Big Sky overhead.

A “Bigfoot Look-alike Contest” slated as the conference’s final event was canceled for lack of participants. As it turned out, the festivities concluded with the cutting of a large cake in the likeness of a Bigfoot’s foot, courtesy of Missoula’s Black Cat Bakery. There was even hair on the toes.

The Bigfoot experience is frequently difficult for believers to come to grips with.

Arriving at the point of being willing to drive hours across your home state to investigate a sighting (that will likely as not be so clearly fabricated so it does not warrant even a quick casting of the “print” by a serious investigator) doesn’t happen overnight.

Ridicule can be a powerful deterrent from any passion.

“I didn’t want it,” said Mike Cook, one of the conference speakers who runs the Kentucky Sasquatch Team. “I didn’t want to be crazy, like I thought everyone was who had seen these things. Was I going to end up like all these people with no other choice than to let it consume me?”

Cook had his first sighting in 2000. Before that, Sasquatch wasn’t remotely on his radar.

“Fifteen years ago, Bigfoot didn’t exist to me,” he said. “It was an illusion, a delusion people had.”

Cook said it took him a year before he could work up the courage to return to the site. During that time, he questioned his sanity and tried to convince himself he hadn’t seen it. A year later, he realized it wasn’t working.

“I remember I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I started crying,” he said. “That last year was filled with, everytime I’d close my eyes, I’d see the creature. All of a sudden it popped into my head — it was Bigfoot.”

It was a life-changing realization.

Since then, it has become an obsession. Cook frequently uses the word “consuming” to describe his unpaid hobby, which he estimates takes up about 40 percent of his time. Dedicated as he is, he doesn’t quite consider his experience a blessing.

“Sometimes I wish I had never had a sighting,” he admitted. He’s not alone.

Sullivan said his first two experiences have left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, for which he still sees a therapist. During his presentation, Cook quoted a statistic that as many as 70 percent of Bigfoot sightings go unreported. Sullivan said he believes that figure is closer to 90 percent because of the ridicule factor.

“People would post sightings on my site, and immediately people post comments insulting them,” he said. “I didn’t talk about my experience for eight years.”

But ultimately, he sees it as his duty to warn people of the potential danger that a state — or a country — full of Bigfoot and related creatures poses.

“If you had a state full of grizzly bears and no one was admitting there were any, wouldn’t you see a problem with that?” he asked.

With the hazy skies of Hot Springs darkening overhead, the conference ended with a panel discussion featuring four guest speakers and master of ceremonies Ed Brown, who hosts the online TV show “Sasquatch Encounters.” Brown asked if any attendees would like to share their experiences.

First, one hand slowly went up, then another.

Chad Hendrickson, who had driven to Hot Springs from his home in Arlee, stepped forward to tell his tale, which took place years ago in the Valley Creek area south of Ravalli. He and some friends had gone fishing, and on their way back to the car, he said he saw something unexplainable.

“I remember coming down the road, and I saw some cut-up rags on the fence, and as soon as I noticed that I noticed it, something’s running,” he said. “And when I looked at it, I knew what it was — whatever it was.”

During a full moon last year, he had another encounter near his home, although he didn’t see it that time.

“We could hear something coming down the creek. It sounded like it was in one place for a long time and finally it just went away.”

Minutes later, what sounded like a giant rock crashed into the stream. And about 20 minutes after that, a piercing scream.

“It just echoed through the whole valley,” he said. “What was weird, was everything was just dead quiet. You didn’t hear any coyotes, nothing.”

For some, Sasquatch is something of a gentle giant, a wayward creature that just wants to be left alone in the forest. For others, it’s a supernatural being, equipped for interdimensional transport and the ability to “bend energy.”

Others such as Sullivan consider them known killers and a flesh-and-blood threat to human safety.

At the end of the day, you can say what you will about the Bigfoot believers — but there’s no denying they know how to spin a good yarn.

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.