Sturgis Bigfoot

On the evening of June 23, 2025, a woman driving through the Black Hills near Sturgis, South Dakota, reported a close-range encounter with a large bipedal creature on Boulder Canyon Highway (Highway 14A), a winding road between Deadwood and Rapid City. The BFRO report lists the witness as Medeline Kuntz, while the investigator’s notes spell it Madeline. She described an animal-like figure standing fully upright that easily cleared the top of her Ford Explorer, at least 7ft tall by her estimate, with dark reddish brown fur.

Kuntz, a 25-year-old graduate student living in Rapid City, was driving home after dinner with her parents in Deadwood. The reports differ slightly on the time: her BFRO report gives about 9:45 p.m. in one field and around 10 p.m. in another, the investigator says she left Deadwood around 9:35, and the NAWAC report says 22:00. She was driving approximately 30 to 35 mph with her high beams on along the switchbacks of Boulder Canyon Hwy, a speed she maintained because the road is known for wildlife encounters. About two and a half miles west of the Aurora place turnoff, she said the creature stepped over a guardrail onto the roadway just as her vehicle passed. Her car and the creature were approximately two feet apart at their closest point.

“The animal would have had to walk up a very steep slope to get over the railing,” noted BFRO Investigator Ontario Richardson in a follow-up report. “On the other side of the road there is an even steeper slope up to pine forest.” The BFRO report says she could see the creature’s shoulders, chest, and legs, but in her own account she wrote that its shoulders were not visible because they were taller than her Ford Explorer. The fur was dark brown with reddish undertones, too dark for a deer or elk and moving too quickly over the barricade to be a bear, she told investigators. She compared its bulk to a very large upright grizzly bear.

The timing of the encounter was remarkable: Kuntz said the creature crossed the railing at the exact second her headlights swept past it, avoiding full illumination. She pivoted quickly and saw its legs behind her before it vanished in the darkness. Too frightened to stop or turn around, she told her fiancé right away what she had seen; by then she had driven roughly 2.5 miles and reached the Aurora Pl sign. Her father believed her account.

Kuntz returned to the location the next day to get the GPS coordinates (44.40194 N, 103.57773 W) and to photograph the location. She filed a report with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), which classified it as Class A, indicating a clear visual encounter. Two BFRO investigators, Richardson and Matt Moneymaker, separately interviewed her by phone and both found her credible. Kuntz was studying occupational therapy at South Dakota State University at the time. She also reported the sighting to the NAWAC, whose WoodApe.org database lists it as a Class 3a case and places it in Meade County, while the BFRO files it under Lawrence County. NAWAC investigator Ed Duprey had a phone interview with her and found her credible. Duprey wrote that the night was clear with a waning moon, but that canyon road is very dark with high cliff sides.

The NAWAC report’s physical evidence is her photos of the location and a measurement of the barricade, about 3 feet high, and it lists hand and foot prints and sounds as “N/a.” Richardson added a note on mountain goats: around this time of year, South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks releases them ahead of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and non-native goats were first introduced to the area in 1924 after a small herd escaped Custer State Park. He wrote that it may be coincidental the sighting happened near where the goats are released, and that he thinks the local sasquatch could be preying on them along with the native elk and deer.

The spot is close to the boundary of the Black Hills National Forest, 1.25 million acres of mountainous terrain, and Richardson noted that there have been many sightings in the Black Hills over the years.