Exclusive: Mountain Monsters may have two Bigfoots to find as the A.I.M.S. Team celebrates Trapper’s birthday

The next Mountain Monsters episode on Travel Channel is part celebratory, and part “double-dog dare you” in the A.I.M.S. Bigfoot theories. 

This latest edition will salute the late Trapper Tice, founder of A.I.M.S., and his heavenly birthday, accompanied by a strong beverage in Monsters & Critics’ exclusive preview.

This fifth episode, titled Trapper’s Birthday, also takes an energetic exploration replete with loaded firearms through the Tygart Valley—in search of not one but potentially two Bigfoots. And before the fun and games, an unusually named beverage fuels a “rip-roaring” fistfight that will go down in the woods. 

All of this precedes the group huddle where all of the men—A.I.M.S. team members, Jacob “Buck” Lowe, Alfred “Huckleberry” Lott, Jeff Headlee, Willy McQuillian, and William “Wild Bill” Neff—under the guidance of showrunner Colt Straub and the minimal crew that film them, pay homage to their leader, Trapper. 

Naturally, a party needs some libations, so enter Huckleberry’s famous “Squatch P**s” is what they are drinking. Before long, Appalachia’s most famous hillbilly sons are locked, loaded, and lit.

In the new season of Mountain Monsters, what has happened so far?

As you remember from last week, Huckleberry spun his spooky tale by the fire. As he told it, back in 1968 and on a hunting trip, suddenly his dogs were howling as he and the men with him investigated why the hounds were agitated.  

Huck was dead serious about his close encounter, which he described as an inhuman being. 

He said: “This thing jumped off this rock face and as it was coming down and was breaking the limbs off trees,” as he recalled the event. “I watched the muscles in its chest and its stomach…I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed.” 

The dogs ran past scared to death, according to Huckleberry. “Pure, evil anger in it” was how Huckleberry described this creature as they all took off. This was the moment when he remembered hearing a horrible noise. One of his dogs, Bo, was found ripped apart. 

The entire A.I.M.S. group was hanging on every word as Huck said: “His intestines was found hangin’ in a tree.” Huck concluded that the Grafton Monster was “a force of nature.”

The point of this meeting of the minds over the campfire was to alert them all that a more considerable danger was out there. Huck wanted them to know they were missing clues, and their focus on Bigfoot has made them sloppy in their overall mission to de-monster the Tygart Valley. 

The key discovery? Gus’s dog collar. And no dog grave in Trapper’s backyard. As they rifled through Trapper’s shoebox of keepsakes, it struck them all as odd because Trapper adored all his canines and made proper Christian graves for them. But not Gus.

The big reveal was the pathfinder symbol Huck found under odds and ends and liner paper in Trapper’s box which matched his journal. The team was dazzled, refocused, and loaded for bear or Bigfoot.

Hillbilly Hazmat suits and new theories

That last episode revealed that Wild Bill has no poker face, as the A.I.M.S. team regrouped from the enigmatic Trapper Tice shoebox download. But, unfortunately, it was all too much for Bill with the lace-up military boots who wins the prize as A.I.M.S.’s most expressive hillbilly of the lot.

But at the beginning of this season, the focus was to be more on Bigfoot. 

We now see the shift from the Grafton Monster focus to looking for other clues that Trapper left behind and figuring out what exactly is in the Tygart Valley. 

And according to Buck, it may be two Bigfoots.

Mountain Monsters airs Sunday, January 30 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Travel Channel and streams on discovery+