Screaming or howling in Napa County, California

The first occurrence took place in 1978. My father and I had moved into the home to fix it and make it "livable" before my mother and brother moved in. I was 12 years old at the time. The property contained 236 acres of undeveloped land. My father had completed our driveway and was sitting on the porch in the evening when he heard what he thought was me walking around the corner of the house in the freshly laid gravel. Since I'm relaying this story to you, you've probably figured out it wasn't me but something else he was faced with, which quickly turned and ran away when it saw him, leaving behind a "wild", "musty", "skunk-like" smell. Which hung around about 30 minutes (unlike a skunk [ed: odor], which hangs around for days). Over the next ten to twelve years we had other "visits". Sometimes two or three in the same summer, and then we would maybe go two years without one. They ranged from footprints, to "screams", to smells. Needless to say I took up an interest in sasquatch. I was at the same time intrigued and afraid. I had "avoided" actually seeing one with my own eyes for about nine years, and with that, I could somehow write it off as actually existing (pretty dumb in retrospect with the physical evidence and the number of witnesses in Pope Valley, who incidentally didn't want to talk about it either). My meeting came one night when me and a friend of mine were sitting on my parents' porch, "he" came walking over the crest in front the house, spotted us and took off running like a middle-linebacker in the NFL. I kept waiting, (and hoping), for it to get down on all fours but it never did. I turned to my friend and he was as shocked and afraid as I was so I knew I had actually seen this thing. It was about 7' tall with what looked like grayish-brown hair covering it from head to toe. The sighting lasted about 5-10 seconds.