Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  When I approached the big flat rock on the shore of Deep Lake, I found an impression remarkably like a big footprint clearly engraved in the lithified ash. This was just a quarter mile from Cultus Lake (cultus means “bad” in Chinook), so named by the Klickitats because of the legendary abundance of Bigfeet in the area.

  As I stood there doing my best to acclimate, a ten-inch cutthroat trout swam up to my toes, nosed around, and worried something prismatic on the bottom. I saw its blunt bill, the pink stripe down its side like a streak from the huckleberry meadows. Then it departed with a flick and, later, a mild leap. I dove to fetch the rainbow thing, thinking it might be a lure I could recycle. It was a fish head. I returned it and knew where I would come fishing later on.

  I took home a plaster cast of the curious impression I found at Deep Lake.

  (Photograph courtesy of T. L. Pyle)

  Airplanes contrived a constant caravan overhead. I’d naively thought that wilderness-area overflights were banned, but a low fighter (passing below me for a change, over the brink to the east) disabused me of that fairy tale. A small, low-flying plane made a hell of a racket, but mostly I heard the dull roar of jetliners. I thought of all the times I’d been in them, looking down at the wilderness, wishing I were there instead . . . and this time I was. I basked nude in the sun, alone on the level that mattered.

  In the shallows of Deep Lake baby cutthroats probed the now-settled silt. A chartreuse-spotted darner dragonfly with tears and holes in her wings haunted a wet, rotted log, apparently ovipositing. Then a blue male came, grasped her thorax with his claspers, and forcibly hauled her off with a great rustle of wings. Entomologists try to avoid anthropomorphizing insect behavior, and the word “rape” is not one to be taken lightly in any context. But this was the most dramatic ravishment of a mate that I’d ever observed among insects, exceeding even the summary couplings of monarch and parnassian butterflies. A white-faced hornet gave me very close attention—it was hard to be still—and moved on.

  A Clark’s nutcracker split the sky with its raucous caws and swooped over the lake to the top of a tall dead fir, a pearly flash. A shiny amphibian jumped into shallow water, and I lunged for it. My eyes fooled by the refraction of the water-lens, I touched it but didn’t go far enough. Later it swam near my feet, and I caught it with my net. Four to five inches long, it was fat like a toad, olive on the back with black spots and warts, a yellow belly, yellow spots along olive sides, a yellow mustache over and behind the broad froggy mouth, and a prominent gland behind the gape. It had a very long second toe and was a fairly slow frog, with a soft croak when struggling in my net. Upon release it floated in the water with its nostrils out, then sunned on a rock.

  Circumnavigating the lake, I tried to sneak up on the ten ducks, which had drifted into a shaded bay, but the fishermen’s trail was too exposed, and they moved off again. Four paddled across sunlit green water reflecting red bushes, then returned to the other six in the northwest cove. I thought I saw blue bars on a stretched wing; gray heads, maybe some green. Stocky ducks, some white in the uncurly tails, some reddish on the breasts, the biggish yellow bills held down.

  These are the kinds of details a naturalist automatically records while admiring the creature on a different level entirely. I was able to pin down the first animal as a Cascades yellow-legged frog, the ducks as shovelers. When you can attach details to a creature, you can name it; with a name, it becomes someone you know and can recognize again.

  Going through the process of field identification, almost a daily practice wherever I am, I thought of the “footprint” across the lake. If Bigfoot is ever to appear in the field guides, it’s going to take a lot more knowledge than we have now: more field marks, more spoor than equivocal coprolites or a muddy mark in a rock. And that, of course, is why others are intent on catching it, just as I caught the frog. But this is no slow amphibian. It is not at all clear to me that they will ever succeed.

  Back at my little lake, as dinner was cooking, I tried to improve the food cache. I got it up to almost eight feet with the granny pole balanced on rocks and wondered if it would last the night. Hearing a folderol, I discovered that the sounds came from two sources: gray jays swiping crackers I’d put out and pocket gophers working subterranean heather roots. I couldn’t see the rodents, but from seeing their mounds and watching the ground ripple from this underground industry, I deduced what they must be. The ruckus stopped at my footfall. Bigfoot is said to dig up gophers for dinner, which seems at least as plausible as catching a Sasquatch in the clear, above ground.

  After dinner I read Peter Byrne’s vivid tales of campfires, tigers, black panthers, and Bigfoot in The Search for Bigfoot, by firelight. I almost felt Byrne was there to share my own campfire and go over the events of the day. A pale blaze lit up the western sky, mares’ tails flicked over the east, as my fire licked away at long-dead timber and I turned the pages.

  Rarely can one enjoy a high-country campfire legally or in good conscience anymore. But here there was no shortage of fuel, no near fire danger, no oversmirch of smoke. Crackling t.p. and lichens had spread the fire in no time to the dried fir. It gave me hot tea, light to read by, and the same comfort in the night that everyone who has ever huddled around a fire circle knows.

  Reading about monsters, however insubstantial or benign you feel they are, one can appreciate that comfort. I next took out Mel Hansen’s valuable little book Indian Heaven Back Country: Trails, Lakes, and Indian Lore. On the morrow I would need his advice on trails and lakes, but for now I looked to the lore. Hansen described the Ape Canyon incident of 1924, the famous Skamania County Commissioners’ 1969 ordinance, which would fine anyone who killed a Bigfoot, and a possible encounter of his own when hiking near Darlene Lake. In the course of his research for the book, he found that Cultus Lake translates from Chinook, the widespread trade jargon, as “bad lake.” “I questioned why the Indians considered Cultus Lake to be bad,” he wrote. “Was the water unfit to drink? Was the lake devoid of fish? Was the area avoided by the Indians and, if so, why?”

  Seeking answers, Hansen asked Myrtle Overbaugh of White Salmon to interview her friend Bessie Quaempts, an eighty-four-year-old Klickitat Indian, on the subject. Ms. Quaempts said that her people often saw and spoke of Bigfoot, or Sehlatiks. “Did the Indians camp and fish at Cultus Lake?” Hansen asked through Mrs. Overbaugh.

  “No,” replied Ms. Quaempts, “many Sehlatiks people there. Indians afraid of Sehlatiks people.”

  Hansen wrote that the Yakamas considered the Sehlatiks to be wild outcasts of the mountain tribes—“evil spirits to be avoided.” Perhaps that was a reason for the designation of this splendid place as “cultus.” Another Chinook jargon word connected with Bigfoot is “Skookum.” Originally it referred to a place inhabited by “an evil god of the woods,” according to

  L. L. MacArthur’s Oregon Geographic Names. Though the word has come to mean “strong” or “stout,” the many Skookum Creeks and Skookum Lakes in the region might refer to malign giants as much as to any other quality. There were many places where the native inhabitants felt uncomfortable, judging from the distribution of “cultus” and “skookum” over the landscape and from the many dark tales emerging from shaded groves and hidden valleys. If just a fraction were inspired by Sehlatiks, it could indicate a presence that once was widespread.

  With the moon winking through the firs, its ecliptic low to the south, I could scarcely connect the gentle pallor of the night with anything evil. The fire ebbed; I poked it alive. The red coals of carbon brought to mind the crimson amanitas so abundant here. Various cultures have employed the alkaloids of the Amanita muscaria mushroom—toxic, but highly mind-altering if you survive ingestion—in shamanic or religious rituals. Mythologist Robert Graves suggests that Greek satyrs and centaurs were inspired by pantheistic or Dionysian humans who ingested A. muscaria to enhance their sybaritic lifestyle with heightened sensations, strength, and sexual pow
ers. I don’t know whether the fly agaric was used by Cascades Indians, but if it gave a connection to Pan, why not to Sehlatiks? Just as the ancestors of the Klickitats surely exploited the succulent king boletes that abound here, they might have at least tried the hallucinogenic red toadstool. A bad amanita trip could turn the loveliest place “cultus,” could perhaps, even, call forth giants in the night.

  −−

  The next day I was out of camp with the waking jays after fresh huckleberry granola, coffee, biscuits, and honey, fuel for a long day’s hike. It was a heavenly day to explore the middle reaches of Indian Heaven—clear, blue, warm in the meadows, cool in the woods. As I set out, golden-crowned sparrows hopped about in the trailside vegetation. The touch of gold at their foreheads matched my terry-cloth sweatband, already seeing service on the uphill stretches.

  The trail was a real thoroughfare, a raised bed lined with logs in places, with deep drainage trenches on either side. A trail repair order at the Cultus Creek trailhead, signed by Ranger James Bull, referred to a stretch called “the Turnpikes,” and I figured this was it. Hardly wilderness, but I suppose necessary.

  I heard a sharp “Geek!” as I came upon what Mel Hansen had called the “massive rock slide” at one end of Clear Lake, a much more suitable habitat for pikas than a slash pile. Clear Lake stretched away southerly toward a perfect rounded forested hill, which it reflected just as perfectly. The boulder bunny’s head poked up from behind a boulder; it had a whiskered gray muzzle like mine, big ears, button eyes. Nuthatches tooted their plastic horns all around. The beepers and geekers together composed a comedy chorus that would break up the most jaded audience.

  For only the second time in my current foot travels, I hit the Pacific Crest Trail, which bore no sign, in accord with USFS policy in the wilderness. Skirting little round Deer Lake, I passed beneath some giant noble firs. Long papery white bracts and purple-edged seed scales with pink stripes, from different parts of the cone, lay scattered all over the trail. I took one apart to see how it worked and ate two or three fir seeds—sweet and terpy-tarry, about as substantial as a sunflower seed. A grape-, pink-, and straw-colored squirrel midden on top of a log, a heap of nearly whole blueberries and leaves in the trail, likely deposited by a small bear. If you didn’t know where they came from, the berries could almost go on your granola, they were so close to fresh. Others had noted Ursus in the area, for soon I came to Bear Lake, wooded, with isolated coves. On a long, alluring peninsula a purple towel hung in the sun, and blue tents peeked from the trees, but I got away without seeing anyone.

  The white flowers; red, winy berries; and pawlike leaves of dwarf bramble crept over the forest floor. Rush Creek’s bed, dry and full of vesiculated basalt cobbles, made a way through the broken forest as I left Trail No. 2000. I wanted to get down to the meadowlands and out of the forest that the new Pacific Crest Trail adhered to. Rush Creek quickly brought me to the old Crest Trail, which led northerly to tiny Acker Lake. Hikers on the new forest trail miss this lake and much of the meadows. I understood the management objective, but (selfishly) wasn’t prepared to be bound by it. The meadows were, after all, what I’d come for; cruising through on the hikers’ turnpike had nothing to do with me. And this was how I’d pictured Indian Heaven: beautiful blue lochs bounded by high firs and paint-box meadows, silent but for the breeze and the pipers and rustlers in the brush.

  I traveled south into what has long been known as the Grand Meadow. Golden grasses and sedges filled a dried lakebed where grasshoppers sawed their last days away. A beargrass mound bore a dense mass of marsh violets with little rounded heart-shaped leaves and still one purple-blue flower. In a dry streambed two tawny California tortoiseshell butterflies, their tongues out, basked and puddled on dry basalt cobbles—for what reward? One left and returned, and they tussled, as if there weren’t enough rocks for all. Then I made out that the “cobble” was a purple coyote scat. Fresh nymphalid butterflies often visit droppings for nutrients. They were joined by a faun anglewing, rich rust above, brown and jade beneath. They pumped their wings, fresh and bright, ready for hibernation. On a perfect fall day these brilliant russet butterflies are dazzling even with their wings closed, showing soft, striated browns, grays, greens, and blues. Spring side, autumn side, butterflies of the equinox. Later, when I arrayed my cheese, apples, and crackers on a log “table” left by horsemen, I was surprised to find a tortoiseshell immured in my raisins. This irruptive species had been all over the Northwest for two or three seasons, and this one had somehow found its way into the raisins, a fossil in the making.

  Another bright fall butterfly, a male orange sulphur, flew up the meadow mimicking the old markers of the disused trail, which I now abandoned in favor of map and compass. The grassland reminded me of the Monarca Llanos of Michoacán, in Mexico—the high clearings where the migratory monarchs fly on sunny winter days—and the various orange butterflies gliding through completed the illusion. Water boatmen with inch-long oars worked the edge of a small lake, along with whirligig beetles and water striders; the aquatics alone could occupy you forever, I thought. The water’s acidity must still be low to allow so many insects.

  Huckleberry and heather hedged the trail. The meadows were dry until I came to an oxbow enclosing a saturated chartreuse mat of sphagnum studded with alpine wintergreen. In an elbow of the oxbow, an old purple bottle neck protruded from the moss, sign of former medicine, not of the Klickitat kind. The medicine worked for me when I lost a favorite mechanical pencil and, backtracking up and down grade, found it. The same purple as the bottle and the marsh violets, the pencil stood out in the hoof-ground mud.

  Arriving in the late afternoon at Rock Lake, a boulder field with water, I was just three miles from a trailhead on the western side of the wilderness. I’d crossed Indian Heaven, from Cultus on the eastern edge to Rock on the west, in a day, meaning that the wilderness area is none too large. Fabled Blue Lake was too far for the remaining daylight, so I turned back on an old closed trail to Lake Umtux. This splendid route was granted me by Mel Hansen’s blessed book. Since my three sets of backup maps—USFS, USGS topographic quadrangles, and Green Trails—differed in almost every respect, I could never have covered the ground I did without the late author’s assistance.

  Water, reflections, sharp and soft shapes and hues made up the fading day. Rabbit mounds, pronounced by red huckleberries, rose above the meadow grass. The lowest hucks were more purple, the higher bushes more orange; backlit by the dropping sun, both turned neon. A pea-green pond was backed by the entire red end of the spectrum. When I struck Lemei Lake after six, the sun still lit the harvest-hay meadows. At sunset six mallards flew off the last lake before my own. An old, vague route crossed a vast meadow below Clear Lake. I arrived at my camp in the dark after nine hours of hiking in heaven.

  The night was almost balmy; I lingered up with the moon. A screech owl called, and bats flittered over camp. I closed my eyes behind a mental shade of reds, taxed by an overload of brilliance. As one often sees at night the images of the day in the mind, I saw a mosaic of scarlet bushes, blue lakes, and tawny meadows stretching away forever. I saw deeply rutted paths but no roads, no clear-cuts. And across the vague meadows, I saw forms that could have been elk, deer, or firs; could have been bears or bushes or Klickitat people, carrying baskets of olallie back to the race-track encampment; could have been hairy monsters on parade. Might have been any of these, then changed into another. Such things happen in heaven, which as Thoreau says, is “under our feet as well as over our heads.”

  −−

  I spent my last day in Indian Heaven close to camp. First business was gathering mushrooms. I don’t know how anyone gets along in the woods without a stout butterfly net. I’d already employed Marsha as walking staff, retriever, plant vasculum, and yoke for carrying heavy water vessels. Now she carried a peck of king bolete mushrooms and a quart of huckleberries, gathered along the Lemei Trail close to camp. The boletes w
ent into an omelet, and the berries into pancakes; I made hash browns with red and green peppers in case that wasn’t enough. Of course I planned to share with the gray jays. By the time I finished off one of the best meals I’ve ever had with a mocha java, even the whiskey jacks were sated.

  Then I returned to Deep Lake to cast the print and try for a fish for dinner. A shorebird was perched atop the flat rock as I approached it. It flew to a black pebbled beach, and I saw to my surprise that it was a snipe, a bird I associate with wet lowlands. I thought of all the times I’d heard the search for Bigfoot called a “snipe hunt,” usually by people who had no idea that snipe are real birds. Now here was the snipe itself, smack dab where some might say Bigfoot once walked.

  I mixed plaster of Paris and poured it into the impression on the flat rock. While it set, I tried to catch a cutthroat. I am no angler. I have not experienced the fly-fishing bliss that informs so much contemporary nature writing. When my father took me fishing, I always drifted off with my butterfly net. But pan-fried trout and fresh boletes sounded fine. I’d foraged in my father’s old creel and brought along some line, hooks, sinkers, a red-and-white Dardevle spinner (my boyhood favorite), and a lure with fake salmon eggs. With duct tape I rigged up the pole of my butterfly net as a rod and cast out . . . time after time. My father would have been amused, or disgusted. On the first cast I caught an unfortunate Cascades frog by the foot-web and released it. Then nothing. It would be leftovers for dinner, but at least I’d tried. The “track” cast came out rather better than the other kind, so I took back a nice footlike chunk of plaster, if no fish.

  That night I was enjoying my last campfire in Indian Heaven when I heard a human call. I went up the trail to see if someone needed help. There I found a pair of night-bound hikers, a mother and her son. Karen wanted to go on and try to find her uncle’s party, perhaps at Clear Lake. Max, tired and unnerved by the dark and the eerie calls of very near coyotes, wanted to stay by my fire. Offering to share the site and the blaze, I found, curiously, that I almost wanted them to stay. They went on, but a little later another group bumbled into my camp, thinking I might be Karen and Max. When the silence returned I was glad I didn’t have them all as guests: just me, the fire, and the moon.