From here Boundary Trail No. 1, a rutty road at the start, runs west all along the Dark Divide. I was bound for the wildlands far to the west, some fifteen miles via the Boundary Trail but closer to fifty miles by road, as I meant to go. Noon had come and gone. Lupines and pearly everlasting, many of them visited by an autumn hatch of orange sulphur butterflies, decorated the forest road as it crossed the eastern shoulder of the divide. In a gravel pit near the low summit of Babyshoe Pass, a patch of tiny, prostrate purple flowers looked out like an amethyst eye in a scarred face. The only vegetation for many yards around, the weedy, alien crucifer covered no more than a square yard, yet a brilliant male sulphur had found it and was nectaring for all it was worth. Just as the pikas of Dark Creek had adapted to bogus rockslides, so this sulphur managed to take advantage of a scarce nectar resource in a wasted habitat. Again my eyes were opened by an animal able to make do with the leftovers of a landscape in flux.
I stopped at Randle as briefly as possible. The loud trucks, one after another, the people . . . After the quiet, they were hard to take. I picked up the essentials—gas, beer, chocolate, stew, granola bars, cheese, Ak-Mak crackers—called Thea, and got out.
My way took me up Yellowjacket Creek, directly west of Juniper Ridge. The creek roared down in a deep canyon. Late sun slanted onto the second growth opposite, onto snaggy old growth above and below. The stream corridor was a beauty, but because of the road, there was human sign: painted trees; ribbons in stripes, polka dots, and solid colors; paper-plate signs tacked onto trees directing one party of hunters to another; a sediment of filter tips at every pullout. Does any other species mark its comings and goings as rudely as we do? What’s wrong with urine and musk?
Marking a spot near Badger Creek, I spotted a banana slug crossing the dirty road, the first mollusk I’d seen on this trek. Battling dryness, it was heading toward the stream’s moist edge. I helped it. I try to resist playing God, but the desiccating slug made me think of myself up on the Saddle, sucking the air and the dust for any spare mote of moisture.
My route away from Yellowjacket, Forest Road No. 2810, became an appalling route. Of the crummy hill roads I’d driven thousands of miles on in a dynasty of Volkswagens and Powdermilk, this was among the worst: strewn with big rocks, riven by dangerous washouts, with big downed trees hanging over the road, leaving just room to pass underneath. Trying to back away from a bad place between two washouts, I got stuck in the ditch on the inside edge of the “road.” The few times I’ve been stuck I’ve picked great places to do it, and this was a doozie. The previous spring, way down a sandy track along the Columbia and many miles from help, Thea and I got out only by fashioning a corduroy road out of bitterbrush and sage. Here I had no such luxury. Remote and lonely, this could have been a hell of a fix, unless some great ape chose to assist me. In the end the ape within was barely great enough. After moving a lot of rocks, I put the hamsters and the front-wheel drive to their greatest test and ground my way out. Then I shook my head, laughed, turned around, had an ale, and camped.
Dinner materialized on the hood: beef stew, applesauce with fresh blueberries, Redhook Extra Special Bitter, and Cadbury’s milk chocolate with almonds. The world was aright. I was perched in the heart of the Dark Divide, just a raven’s mile or two from its toothy jawline. Craggy Peak and Kirk and Shark rocks carved up the southwest horizon with their sooty sawteeth.
Then, standing in a cleft near the broken summit of Craggy, Bigfoot appeared. His proportions were just as I’d imagined him. Big rounded shoulders, no neck, lump of a head on top. But he never moved: he’d been turned to black stone by mortification at what he saw below. Still he watched. Watching back, I saw the sun set over those time-tortured rocks. A great darkness preceded the coming of the stars. Then the Milky Way poured from a spout of black sky into the insatiable gape of the Dark Divide. Later, when the sky turned, that stone monster got up and walked.
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Those who dismiss giant hairy apes from our possible fauna often point to the fact that Bigfoot encounters are never reported by experienced naturalists. It’s true that most of the sightings come from hunters, frequent campers, and forest workers, all of whom may be considered naturalists of a kind. But no one trained in zoology, with a background of comparative and extensive study of animals in their natural surroundings, seems to see the beast. So I was fascinated to hear a first-person account from a good friend of mine who is a first-rate field biologist. Jim Fielder has a degree in biology from Central Washington University, twenty-five years of experience in teaching and nature guiding, and a life list of more than fifteen hundred birds.
I met Jim on the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970), when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington and he a biology teacher at Newport High School in Bellevue. Jim had asked me and Neil Johannsen, a fellow grad student in forest resources (later director of Alaska’s state parks for fourteen years), to address his ecology class. When we arrived at Newport we found a tall, slim man in a black T-shirt, with long wavy chestnut hair and bushy sideburns and mustache to match, playing rock and roll to a clearly contented class. Fielder was one of the most effective teachers I’ve ever known. The field trips he conducted for his devoted students became legendary for their ambitious scope, adventures, and lengthy bird lists. Highly envious of his students, I hitched along whenever I could. In later years, when Fielder left teaching and founded Zig Zag River Trips, we remained friends, exchanging nature notes and sightings from time to time. So I was not surprised when Jim called one night to share some news—at least not until he said what it was.
“Jimmy Field-trip,” I greeted him. “What’s up?”
“Bob,” he said, “I’ve seen Bigfoot.”
One late September night he was driving west on State
Route 12, returning from Mount Rainier to a cabin at Packwood. “I was lucid and sober, Bob,” he said, “under the influence of clear vision.” About seven miles before Packwood, just past the turnoff to Backbone Lake, he was rounding a wide curve when he saw something in the middle of the highway about a hundred yards ahead. The object, down close to the surface of the road, looked dark and hairy. It is common to encounter deer, elk, and other wildlife on Washington roads, and Jim thought at first it might be an elk that had been wounded or struck by another car. He sped up to get a good look.
“At fifty yards,” he told me, “it started to get up. At about twenty-five yards I thought it must be a bear—it was reddish-brown, the right color for that cinnamon-phase black bear you often see around Rainier. I braked and turned the wheel left to get it in my headlights, trying not to roll the jeep.”
The animal stood up on two legs and with a deliberate gait lumbered off into the forest, taking at least ten steps upright, which bears do not do. “I rolled on past at about thirty miles per hour,” Jim went on, “as it disappeared into the woods.” I asked him what else he had been able to see. Used to making careful mental field notes, Fielder had gathered some details, which, he said, he was careful not to embroider. From decades of identifying tricky birds and mammals, he knows how important it is to take note of subtle field marks without embellishing that which is actually visible.
“Whatever it was was no taller than me,” Jim said, “around six or six and a half feet, but a lot bulkier. The arms were long, the hands about halfway from the hips to the knees. Unfortunately it didn’t look toward me, so I got no facial features. Its walk was completely upright and seemed unconcerned. The feet were hairy and big but not massive.”
Struck by the brief but remarkable sighting, Fielder braked and turned back to investigate the spot. He found a steaming wet spot in the road, three to four feet wide, where he assumed the animal had urinated. “I was eager to get a sample,” he said, “but I was dressed lightly and had no equipment with me. I decided to head back to the motel, change, pick up some gear, and come right back.” But at the motel Jim received a message that his moth
er, for whom he was serving as caregiver, had had a medical emergency. He had to rush home to Seattle and wasn’t able to return for nearly two weeks. By then there was nothing to see.
“I’m a cynic and a skeptic, Bob,” he told me, “you know that—the last biologist in Washington who would believe in Bigfoot. But that night I went from a Bigfoot agnostic to a Bigfoot born-again in ten seconds.”
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Four years almost to the day before Fielder’s sighting, I hiked into the heart of the Dark Divide. Two weeks into my month I was to cross Yellowjacket Pass. Full sun and chickadees joined me at a breakfast of broken granola bars and Mountain Moo (replenished, I could have sworn, from the Milky Way as I slept), tea, guava, and apricots. A pearly swoop of band-tailed pigeons circled the valley below. As they traded one island of trees for another, the morning sun picked out the pie-slice pattern of clear-cuts, designed for maximum fragmentation. The stone figure of Bigfoot looked on, stilled with the daylight.
Clear, hot sun rode a light merciful breeze with grasshopper songs on it. Beat fritillaries and bright anglewings nectared on everlasting at the trailhead. It was one mile to Boundary Trail No. 1 on Yellowjacket Trail No. 1A. The trail struck steadily up through the cool greenwood. Raspberry, starflower, twisted stalk lily, vanilla leaf, and bunchberry wove a thick green ground layer. Elk, deer, and coyote tracks churned the earth and pumice, making for pleasant walking. Sunlight spilled through, illuminating the yellow-rimmed black spots—like an eclipse with a corona—that appeared on almost every oval huckleberry leaf, little universes of leaf-mining larvae. Mulling minutiae, I looked up in time to see the brown stir of large animals above me on the slope. From their many tracks and fresh dung, I knew I’d disturbed elk in their bedding place. The previous evening, taking a dusk walk at the end of the road, I’d bothered three deer, a doe and two yearlings, who bounded straight up the steep hillside.
Giant noble fir cones decorated the trail, half in tatters, like purple grenades that had begun to explode and then forgot why. True firs don’t drop their cones intact; they fall apart on the limb. These trail bombs had been clipped off by chickarees, whose middens of seed scales, bracts, and cores showed the results of an abundant cone harvest. The cones were six or seven inches long and extremely pitchy. Their fragrance, like rarefied Pine-Sol, brought back my own brief logging days many years before, when I worked for a power-line clearing crew in the high Rockies. The noble fir bracts have a “tail” like those of Douglas fir, but no “hind legs.” So rather than a mouse escaping under a door (by which Doug-fir cones are remembered), these reminded me of a snapping turtle ducking under a frilly lily pad. More squirrel feed showed in a cluster of small brown mushrooms dug up with their caps nibbled and their stipes tossed about. A small, berry-filled bear scat gooped across the path, and in a sunny clear-cut at the top of the trail I saw the huckleberries it came from.
Here, on a flat shaded saddle, I hit the motorcycle ruts of Boundary Trail No. 1, which I followed south along the ridge. Some massive noble firs climbed up from French Creek. Loggers’ graffiti branded logs with chain-sawed initials beside the trail—MT, MT / DA—and in a living tree, G and M crudely cut, as if removing the trees weren’t enough of a signature upon the land.
A raven werted over toward Dark Mountain. As I faced west toward Holdaway Butte, the south end of Langille Ridge, I stood on the backbone of the Dark Divide. Looking east I could see the cone of Juniper, spiky Sunrise, the Saddle, and Jumbo—still a black molar perhaps, but from here its full mass was visible, like something out of the Beartooths in Montana. Before me too was Forest Road 29, scarring the McCoy Creek valley right up to the Divide, and the Boundary Trail, curving up to where I stood.
Varied thrushes and flickers called as I ate lunch beneath an Alaska yellow cedar, and for a change I couldn’t hear the whistle of a logging show. Afterward, crossing a thicket of mountain azalea, small fir, cedar, huckleberry, and mountain ash, I entered a living oxymoron: a flock of Townsend’s solitaires, which I’d never seen in numbers before. They were part of a huge mixed feeding flock of birds, including chipping sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, hermit thrushes, and cryptic autumn warblers; how many birds there were, the flaps and rustlings and chirps only hinted at. They were into the big fat huckleberries, same as me.
Before rounding Hat Rock I turned and took a mind-picture of the panorama straight across the low point of the Divide to Dumbo, Mounts Rainier and Adams in peripheral view, the entirety of Juniper Ridge from Tongue Rock to Dark Mountain laid out before me. The country looked so big that I could imagine D. B. Cooper, Monty West, or Sehlatiks hiding out here forever.
A deep cleft took the trail through Hat Rock. In the cut I found a steep rock garden. The blossoms were mostly blown, except for lavender asters, orange hawkbit, scarlet gilia, and yellow wallflowers. The incredibly sweet smell of the wallflower was worth a precarious kneel, and I didn’t keel over this time. When I finished, an orange sulphur nectared on the same flower, followed by a hydaspe fritillary. A jay and a hunting wasp, both the blue-black of Superman’s hair, worked the pumice for whatever it offered to eat. I passed a wallflower at nose level on the wall, as it should be, and breathed deep. The dense fragrance lingered like that of my grandmother’s mock orange in the hose spray of a hot Denver day.
I walked the very crest of the Dark Divide, ten feet across, through fir and western red cedar. One of the great black crags of the Dark Divide, Hat Rock raised its spire directly above me. Among caves and clefts, walls of moss and saxifrage and puny trees struggled up toward the bare basalt. In the lee of the north wall, hellebore was still green, the day was summery, and I’d stepped back a season. A nuthatch and a logging hooter both beeped, one near and sharp, one far and soft.
Just then my wild reverie was shattered as a jet fighter overflew the pass at a few tens of feet, shrieking like no voice that ever came out of flesh. Then the coyotes down the slope set up a great howl at midday, something I’d never heard. Did the unholy roar of those arrogant invaders hurt their ears? Or did they simply feel the need to protest, giving voice for us all?
Around the side of Hat, jutting promontories dropped sheer into Yellowjacket’s headwaters. On my belly I approached the edge. Out of a sediment of blue juniper berries, quartz crystals shone from the black rock matrix. The dusky forms of Craggy, Shark, Kirk, and Badger loomed westerly, and Snagtooth was just around the corner to the south. I left the pinnacles and dove into the forest to reach Snagtooth Trail and Yellowjacket Pass.
Beside the trail rose a chiseled white snag like a Greek pillar with its capital missing. Trail No. 1 was indeed a thoroughfare! If the Indian traders were no more, a concatenation of tracks told of another commerce. In the mud by a new log bridge, the pugmarks of bobcat were going against me, coyote tracks my way, both impressed over last weekend’s motorcycle tracks.
Inside the shadows of big Pacific silver firs, the orange fungus called chicken of the woods caught a sunbeam on a fallen fir’s great trunk. Dwarf brambles trailed their triple lobes over the ashen soil among wintergreen seedstalks and leaves, a few late flecks of foamflower, a coral-root orchid, and a Twix wrapper, which I stuffed in my pocket along with yards of discarded pink flagging. Where the trail dropped steeply to the pass, the bikers had again trenched out the switchbacks and, what’s worse, cut across them, exposing and injuring tree roots.
I passed Snagtooth Trail at two, arrived at Yellowjacket Pass a quarter of an hour later. It was not the meadow I had somehow conjured in my mind from the map but a deepwood saddle under mature true firs, hemlocks, and a few big Doug firs. I found the little ponds, promised on the map, along the saddle just south of the pass, and they did lie among meadows wrapped in cedars. The surrounding forest was just open enough to see out of but not into. A pumicy trail, well traveled by animals, led along the side of the glade to the nearest pond. It drained via rushing brook into Straight Creek and thence the Lewis River, while the st
eep slope on the north side of the pass dropped into Yellowjacket Creek, then the Cispus River. At the midpoint of my journey I had crossed the Dark Divide on foot.
The pond, maybe a hundred square feet, was full of lazy skimmers (until my shadow hit them) and lazy efts of salamanders—like stretched-out tadpoles with baby feet. There was no sign of people in here, nor sound, except the occasional high plane. A chickaree, working the bark of a tree by the pond, freaked when it saw me. I settled on a log and took a late lunch of extra-sharp Tillamook cheddar, Thea’s crackers with Ak-Mak reinforcements, and bits of papaya, apricot, apple, orange, raisins, a Swede Park tomato, chocolate, and water. There were no mosquitoes, no yellowjackets. Only a few flies shared my bower of azalea and heather. Then one mosquito appeared and bit me on the temple—one of my least favorite places, like knuckles—but just one was okay; in June I would have been furred with mosquitoes, dive-bombed by deerflies.
Just then a long series of rapid whistles, or hoots, followed by one note, all on one high pitch, broke the stillness. Nuthatches piped in, as ever. Did I hear what I thought I heard? I listened for a long time but heard nothing more.
The air smelled Septembric. The sun lodged just off a blue hole. I didn’t mind the prospect of a cool hike back, just so that big cloud to the west didn’t spawn a rock-knocking, road-sticking storm before I got down.
I dipped my feet, smarting from the cycle ruts, and tried to catch an eft. The pond felt fine, especially the rich, wet moss at the edges. I caught an eft by hand but couldn’t tell much from its mottled greeny skin, primitive eyes, toy hands. Released, it seemed no worse for the experience. One bird cherked, the first call since those whistles. I dried my feet on my headband, slid into the heavy boots, and prepared to walk out of the now-sunny meadow.
I came to a pond the size of a backyard swimming pool, full of both efts and tadpoles, with blue darners skimming the surface. A frog croaked, hoarse and uneven. Then I noticed frogs, minute and larger, in the wet grass, heading for the pondlets. I caught one that was under half an inch—a Pacific tree frog. The bigger ones must have been Cascades frogs. At least here was one place the acid rain hadn’t yet scoured of its amphibious life.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 13
