In her book Stepping Westward, Sallie Tisdale says she feels sorry for the “true disbelievers” in Sasquatch, who “have lost their own mammalian vigilance about the greater earth.” I agree. Because most of all, Bigfoot shows what could have been and what still could be, if only we treated the land as if it were really there. For the very wildness from which the Bigfoot myth emanates is disappearing fast. The struggle for the leavings—the roadless zones, the old growth—is vigorous and current.
If we manage to hang on to a sizable hunk of Bigfoot habitat, we will at least have a fragment of the greatest green treasure the temperate world has ever known. If we do not, Bigfoot, real or imagined, will vanish; and with its shadow will flee the others who dwell in that world. Looking at that tangled land, one can just about accept that Sasquatch could coexist with towns and loggers and hunters and hikers, all in proportion. But when the topography is finally tamed outright, no one will anymore imagine that giants are abroad on the land.
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I’ve been looking into Bigfoot but not looking for Bigfoot. Plenty of others are doing that—true believers, whose hearts, souls, and wallets are on the line. I am not one of these. Even so, I felt the need to take my research to the hills, to confront the concept of Sasquatch on its own ground. I wanted to get inside the head of Grendel, to watch the fleeing forest from within. Most of all, I wanted a perspective only the mountains would give.
The mountains I chose were Washington’s southern Cascades, a region of intense Bigfoot activity, judging by the density of reports over the years. Specifically, I zeroed in on a range of black peaks running crosswise to the main north–south axis of the Cascade volcanoes. The name Dark Divide applies both to this chain of impressive basalt extrusions and to the roadless area that surrounds it. The divide, which separates the Cispus and Cowlitz river drainages on the north from the Lewis River on the south, lies roughly in the middle of a diamond formed by Mounts Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, and Hood.
My plan was to trek across the Dark Divide from top to bottom. I would enter the northern end of the roadless zone and hike south on trails and cross-country. After reprovisioning at two road-access points, I intended to cross in turn the Indian Heaven Wilderness and the forbidding Big Lava Bed and arrive on the shores of the Columbia River in early October. I gave myself a month for the journey. Early fall made sense because it was after my busy season of fieldwork and teaching but before the autumn rains and mountain snows. I hoped that the mosquitoes would be finished, the huckleberries at their peak.
And so, like another man who courted large subjects a bit beyond his backyard, I went deliberately into the woods. Twenty years and several lives after the night of the wild cries, I pulled into Tower Rock Campground in Gifford Pinchot National Forest. And I went from there.
2
Juniper Ridge
It was there for the first time that she felt that special hallucination peculiar to country people alertly watching for the apparition of some fantastic animal, the passing of the “Great Beast” which nearly all of her companions had seen at least once.
—Emile Caro, George Sand
Our tent leaned into the green shade of sword fern, hemlock, and corydalis foliage. The mosses, ferns, and vine maples, backlit by the late-evening sun, fashioned a chartreuse scrim around the campsite. What looked like a big, flared cedar was a false front—a snag, whole on one side, with a hemlock growing out, giving it a crown. Oxalis sprinkled the floor like shamrocks. And intermingled with the plants and creatures of the wild Cascades were cut logs, asphalt pads, city weeds, and European garden slugs—field marks of the standard U.S. Forest Service in-between land that American car-campers come to know so well.
After supper Thea and I watched the stars recruit campfire sparks for a while, then walked down to the Cispus River, spanned by an old bridge closed to cars. It was paved with pellets that we took for deer droppings but that turned out to be goat. We listened to the sounds of the river trundling round stones along its bed, a kingfisher zipping up the night, and the goats bedding down, then we did the same. As we lay still in our sleeping bags, a pair of fighter jets tore past Tower Rock at a few hundred feet, sounding like Armageddon. Then silence took over until ravens and jays claimed the next day as their own.
Winter wrens attended our breakfast: carrot muffins and good Gray’s River water from home. Soon everything I drank would be filtered or boiled. I wished I could travel as light as that minor fluffball, the wren. Repacking and adjusting my backpack took much of the morning. Pulling out everything I thought I could live without, I reduced its weight to seventy-five pounds. Too much! But I wasn’t willing to omit anything else.
After loading the pack into the Subaru with difficulty, I visited the only small building in sight. I sat in the outhouse with the door open to ferns and fresh air, enjoying the last such perch I expected to have for a month. The day was clear with a light breeze, seventy degrees or so—ideal for setting out. I was ready to let the adventure begin.
Thea drove me up the steep logging road past Tongue Mountain. At noon we hit the trailhead for Trail No. 261 to Juniper Ridge: my way into the Dark Divide. Thea picked huckleberries as the engine cooled down, and a raven cawed our intrusion to all who would hear. Its relative, Clark’s nutcracker, yelled back and made desultory swoops at the butterflies of late summer. The objects of its attention, California tortoiseshells and hydaspe fritillaries, coasted about the road crest and into the trees, flashing their personal shades of orange.
I hauled out my Kelty Sherpa pack and climbed into it like a moth mashing itself back into its earthbound pupa. It was damned heavy, and got more so as Thea tied my water bag to the back. With my tent and Therma-Rest sleeping pad strapped to the sides; my day pack with optics, maps, and trail food hanging from the rear, and gallons of water slung here and there, I looked about as sleek as an avalanche. I weighed as much as a small Bigfoot (close to 330 pounds, all told), but I was far less fit. Old-man’s beard hung from the firs and from my face, and I wondered if I reflected the lichen’s pale green shade. But as I adjusted the weight and breathed the terpenes of the astringent mountain air, I felt fine.
The trail looked steep and beat up by bikers, and the sign had of course been stolen. I clumsily hugged Thea and headed out, taking her kiss with me. “Be careful,” she called as I clumped up and around the first bend. “I love you!” She did not expect to see or hear from me until we made our first resupply rendezvous on the Lewis River in ten days’ time. I was excited to be off, and a little appalled.
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When I decided to walk across the Dark Divide, I should have thought about an earlier outing to a place coincidentally known as the Dark Peak.
The Dark Peak trek took place in March 1972. I was studying in England that year, and I wanted to see something of wilder Britain. My friends Jim Conway and Barry Hayward, biologists with the British Antarctic Survey, suggested a hike on the long and rugged Pennine Way. We began at Edale, a remote outpost in the high Pennines of Derbyshire. Jim, an Aberdonian, wanted to walk all the way to the Scottish Borders. Shortly after we set out, Jim remembered that we’d forgotten matches. Instead of loafing on the steep hillside and schmoozing with the sheep while someone went back for them, we kept on the move: Jim ran back to the inn while Barry carried both their packs up the steep incline.
By the next day we were deep into the bogs and moors of the Pennines. Jim followed his compass one way, Barry another, and I took an averaged route in between. The third day found us cold, wet, and fogbound on a precipitous edge of the Dark Peak itself, besotted with the vapors and oozings of the black bog. We managed to skirt the cliffs without incident. Across a long, Baskervillian moor known as the Moss Castle, the shallow trench of the Pennine Way continued north, perhaps forever.
Eventually we came to a road, which we followed to an imposing Victorian guesthouse. The landlady nearly shut the door on our p
eat-smeared and bearded visages, but Barry thought fast and said, “It’s Doctor Hayward of the British Antarctic Survey,” in his best Cantabrigian accent. That got us in. Before the fire, curled up with hot tea and a bullmastiff that would have given an unwary traveler on the moor a heart attack, we pondered our next move.
I chose to take the road to Glossop, then a bus for Birmingham and a train for Cambridge. Thence to my thatched cottage, where a coal fire, a hot cup of coffee, and chocolate digestive biscuits awaited. I was ashamed but comfortable. Barry and Jim proudly carried on, but only, as it turned out, for another day or so. The Dark Peak in March had chewed us up and spat us out. The Pennine Way would wait.
Two summers later, lulled by Denver’s dry heat into forgetfulness of the aborted hike on the damp moors, I embarked on a walk along the High Line Canal, a century-old irrigation ditch running from the edge of the Rocky Mountains out onto the High Plains. I had held a lifelong fascination for the prairie watercourse and a desire to walk its entire ninety-mile length.
I set out from Waterton with my heavy pack full of roasted soybeans, maps, cameras, plant presses, and other nonessentials. The first ten miles were beautiful, through red hogback foothills, old farmsteads, and cottonwood glades draped with white clematis bunting. But soon I entered the urban fringe. There was nowhere to camp with any peace of mind. The temperature was in the nineties, the mosquitoes were terrific, I was out of water, and there was a nice little log tavern I knew on the Sedalia road . . . My friend Chuck Dudley met me there, and after a few beers I decided to head back into town with him. The next day I got a job in a doughnut shop to pay my way back east. Spring, I decided, or perhaps fall, would be a nice time to walk the canal. And I later did, but in sections, not all at once.
Although walking is one of my primary pleasures, I am not by nature a long-distance trekker. So I should have known better than to think of crossing the Dark Divide to become more intimately acquainted with Bigfoot country and lore. Not that my objectives were terribly impressive. The distance was roughly comparable to that of the Pennine Way or the High Line Canal—something under a hundred miles. Much of it would be on trails, although there were some cross-country legs, and the terrain was a good deal rougher than anything in the Pennines. But dozens of people walk the entire Pacific Crest Trail, all 2,659 miles of it. I knew a singer-songwriter in Montana by the name of Walkin’ Jim Stoltz who has hiked well over eighteen thousand miles in the wilderness, and the meter is still ticking. And I knew a Paiute Indian named Benjamin Bill who had walked more than forty thousand miles on sponsored walks for charities and who hoped to either raise a million dollars or walk a million miles before he quit. A month’s backpack trip over the territory between Mount Rainier and the Columbia River is not that big a deal.
Still, the trek represented a substantial challenge for me as well as a chance to immerse myself in the putative habitat of Bigfoot. And perhaps a way into its mind, or at least into the part of my own mind where Bigfoot dwells. It really didn’t matter how long the route was nor how the miles were covered. What mattered was the time I’d set aside to sort out the findings and ponderings of decades; the solitude; and the Dark Divide itself.
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The day came hot. Mount Adams stood immanent to the southeast. Red-leaved berry bushes slathered the open slopes like coals pouring from an open forge, lending even more heat to the steamy scene. Cool breezes took over as I entered a forest of middle-aged firs with downed giants lying about. One of these had left a section of trunk five feet across, and a five-inch seedling was growing from it. King boletes and coral-root orchids, both blown, studded the needle mat: fat, frowzy yellow caps next to pale pink seed stalks. At a water bar, bug-chewed leaves of false hellebore dangled seed pods like the Jolly Green Giant’s ears from the spent tassels where the corn lilies once bloomed.
My trail mix, specially formulated by Thea, seemed redundant when giant ripe huckleberries and ruby thimbleberries decorated the trailside in every sunny patch. After gorging, I plunged back into the shadowed forest, where scarlet fruits of false Solomon’s seal and deep blue ones of queen cup lilies took over, perched on long stalks. These were not to be eaten, yet they nourished my eyes, already growing jaded with green. In the next sun spot I filled my free hand with the blue globes of huckleberries, then littered the ground as I popped them toward my moving mouth.
My plantigrade tracks beat a dull cadence. To divert my attention from the pain of being a beast of burden, I watched everything I could. Thin, many-browned Zonatrichia shelf mushrooms made somber sunsets on the floor. Some call them turkeytails, and so they look, except for the absence of the amazing iridescence that let us use all the brightest crayons when coloring tom turkeys for Thanksgiving windows in grade school.
The next switchback marked the county line—my first milestone, where I passed from Lewis County to Skamania, known far and wide in the right circles as Bigfoot Country, where a county ordinance actually protects Sasquatch. I hadn’t even thought of Bigfoot until then. Maybe my walk was just a cunning plan to get back into the wilderness I’d too long neglected. Looking back over my right shoulder, I glimpsed a fabulous view of Mount Rainier through the thinning trees. Salmonberries appeared. Even ripe, the orange drupelets are the tartest of the Northwest Rubus berries, making a welcome change from the sweets of all the rest. Their color reminded me of citrus. As the path rose, the Cispus retreated farther and farther below.
One elk track marked the switchback’s westerly elbow; any others that might have been there had been erased by motorcycle tracks. I felt myself sneer—here was a fine scapegoat for my discomfort. The previous morning Thea and I had pulled into the ranger station at Randle to pick up any new maps and register for backcountry hiking. “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” said the young clerk in the Forest Service uniform.
“I was under the impression that wilderness travel required a fire permit,” I said. But this was not a formal wilderness area, so the formality was forgone.
“We don’t worry about you up there,” she said, dismissing me.
“How about trail conditions?” I asked, wanting something to show for my trip to the station. She hadn’t a clue but said the bikers liked it fine. “Mountain bikers?” I asked.
“No, trail bikers—you know, motorcycles.” That was the first I’d known that the Dark Divide was biker country. Earlier I’d heard of a petition to the U.S. Forest Service to make the area, if not wilderness, then a “national hiking area.” Apparently the district ranger had seen fit to do the opposite.
The bike damage was not bad so far, on the better soils and reasonable grades. The bikers’ dust was soft to walk in, but the tracks were an unpleasant presence, like tire marks on a beach. And as the grade increased, so did the damage. The gouging of the steep switchback showed the potential for knobby tires to lacerate the land. A crushed water bar and a shard of red taillight lens emphasized the point.
The trail grew steeper. Sweating hard and grunting, I made slow, steady progress. Keeping my eyes down in the steeper bits showed me a pine siskin’s yellow fluff in the trail, along with the tracks of bobcat and deer, the scat of coyote, a puma-hued Amanita pantherina. Up in a great Douglas-fir snag, six feet in diameter, I beheld a masterwork by woodpeckers.
The wonderful yellows, browns, and off-greens of gracefully decaying leaves of corn lilies, currants, and trilliums massaged my mind but not my aching feet. I finally rested below Juniper Peak. Taking the pack off was a job, but not as bad as the reverse. I adjusted my boots and the infinitely adjustable Sherpa, hoping that I would notice the difference. I had lunch, then scrunched against a bank to get the pack back on.
Up through more steep forest, then, poof! I came into a clear, sandy, subalpine draw, then to a mini-cirque below a mini-rockslide at the foot of Juniper Peak’s pale point. Marmots and pipits briefly shared the rockslide with me and with a parnassian butterfly nectaring on a mauve aster.
After I emerged from the deepwood for the last time, the scene changed. A dry slope of white cinders glanced off to Adams, its summit now wreathed in the lenticular cloud that so often wraps the afternoons of the Cascade volcanoes. Kinnikinnick and prostrate juniper made a kind of heath below Juniper Peak. I carried the sweet smell of fir needles crushed on my boots into the hot open.
Finally topping out, some forty-eight hundred feet above Puget Sound, I gained the spine called Juniper Ridge. A big orange day moth wafted overhead, and a huge nymph of a short-horned grasshopper, about as fast and graceful as I, trundled up the trail. Given the choice, I would be the moth.
Soon I came close to flying like the moth. In the band of my gray felt hat I was wearing a small, mottled gray-and-beige feather. Perhaps it had once belonged to a solitaire. When I reached the ridgeline at last, feeling lightheaded at this little success and the grand views, I stood, legs apart, and gazed east. A plucking breeze licked up the slope from the Cispus far below, took my feather, and dropped it on a rock just over the edge. Thea had made me promise not to chase butterflies in my heavy pack, but this seemed safe, so I inched over, cleverly facing uphill so as to keep my purchase on the slope. I bent, reclaimed the feather, and stood up. Then, having risen to a lighter head than I remembered, I began to fall
over backward.
Swinging at thin air with Marsha, my big butterfly net, I caught enough breeze to tug my higher-than-usual center of gravity back across the fall line and landed on my knees facing uphill. Crawling to the ridge I sat, shook, and looked down the route I’d almost bought. The long, steep slope offered no arrest for hundreds of yards. Rolling over the sharp and lumpy pumice, my joke of a load shoving my face into the cheese-grater slope, I could have been badly injured and stranded far below. I branded be careful, dummy! on my frontal lobe, rose with difficulty, and went on.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 3
