Footprints in Marquette County, Michigan

Hello , my name is shawn age 26 . I just heard about the BFRO today from my mother who told me right away about this bigfoot investigation team coming to marquette and this subject is something im very passionate about especially after an encounter my bestfriend erik and i had a couple years ago , the only people i ever told was some family and ofcouse discussing with my buddy over the years since . So the night it happend was i believe in 2004 and sometime in late january . we were driving on the back road just past Acocks Sanitarium on a dirt road that goes up to the right and heads back to some railroad tracks and LOTS of woodland . well it was between 9 and 10 and we very board and trying to find new places where we could snowboard so we decided to pull over there and walk up the road and see if we could find some good size hills back there . we got a couple flashlights out of my buddys car and started walking up the road past the gate . not even about 300 feet away from the gate we heard a strange sound but didnt think anything of it so we kept walking . i noticed what looked like very large prints in the snow to my right and right away thought it was from someone on snowshoes but even though it was late at night there was quite a bit of light out so even with the flashlights not on the prints you could see clearly they were to far apart in stride so this struck erik and i . we shined our lights closer on them and realized they were NOT from a snowshoer but there was clearly shaped FOOT prints , toes and all . it was very warm that day and even that night was pretty nice so i kept telling myself there is no way that its a bigfoot print and was telling myself that maybe the snow had melted a bit and made a footprint look larger but then i realized ok thats silly because its an actual FOOT print , clear as day and why would someone walk around the snow in bare feet and who would have feet that are that big . my flashlight was 12 inches long and i put it alongside it and the print was still quite larger than that and very wide . erik had a disposible camera in his car so i ran down and grabbed it and i even took a picture of the print . the stride on it also was very far apart , i walked in the snow next to it and i had to seriously spread my legs out far just to come close to the stride of these prints . i would almost have to run and leap to make those strides . so that really got me thinking and so erik and i were standing there discussing this whole thing not beliveing that it was real and not even 5 minutes after talking a huge tree across the road and down a little bank about 20 feet from us started shaking violently and the snow was falling off it and branches breaking so erik started running back towards the car and i followed . we sat in the car for a minute to just gather ourselfs of what it could have been and till this day we swear by what we saw . this is the first time ive ever wrote of this . and i just gotta say i think your BFRO is a great thing and i know someday bigfoot will be proven true .