Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Ken’s Indian girlfriend in Alaska had seen a Sasquatch at Iliamna when she was five. He’d been up there, spending eighty dollars a day at a lodge, going broke and weary. He figured that by following leads he could find it; had just returned from a fruitless look around Mount St Helens; hoped I could give him some tips. I wanted to shake him and tell him to get a life, or a job. I did the next best thing: I told him to go see Ray Wallace. I wasn’t sure if it was unkind, and if so, to which one? But I figured they’d have fun, and if Ken was lucky maybe Ray would give him the same advice he’d given me.

  −−

  So what is it, finally, that drives this compulsion to associate with monsters? To give up jobs, homes, sometimes wife and family (as René chose to do after his wife gave him an ultimatum), for a date with frustration? Is this passionate pursuit mainly a matter of looking for the main chance? Clearly fortune is an important lure, as is true for Ken. For others, notoriety: René told me he would have liked to play the Sasquatch hunter in Harry and the Hendersons, and he didn’t mind a bit if the character was modeled on him. One of the other speakers at Harrison, Cliff Crook, had been humiliated as a boy by his father for telling about an ape encounter; his hangdog demeanor and hurt tone, as well as his words, suggested he’d been trying to vindicate himself in his father’s eyes ever since, even though Dad was no longer around to prove it to. Cliff uses the bitter memory to fuel his Bigfoot Central, an investigation center in Bothell, Washington.

  Danny Perez said he got a kick out of the search, and this motivation may be closer to the mark than most excuses. Almost all the hunters recall a time, often in their adolescence while reading Sanderson or Green or watching the Patterson film or some hokey Yeti movie on TV, when they were “grabbed” by Bigfoot—like the unhappy camper snatched by the beast from his fireside in Teddy Roosevelt’s gruesome tale. Whatever the root cause, hundreds and maybe thousands of men have chosen to gamble family and livelihood, respect and reputation, even their very sanity, in pursuit of a prize that might not even exist.

  If there is one common trait among this odd bunch, it is that they all belong to the species Roger Patterson called “the eternal individualist.” And if they share a single urge, I think I discovered it during another talk at the forum in Harrison Hot Springs. The speaker was Jim Hewkin, a retired fish and game professional from Oregon. He spoke about Sasquatch as a real animal with real needs and traits. In his camel sweater, dress shirt, and pressed slacks, Hewkin looked the part of the genial grandpa. But his voice was that of a man who has spent much of his time out of doors in rugged situations—the same kinds of places that Bigfoot loves. His talk took on an incantatory tone, and the account became a beguiling litany of beasthood:

  “He’s a monster, he’ll eat anything, alive, dead, fresh, rotten . . . He’s a survivor . . . mobile, quick, fast, and strong . . . Anybody who sees a slow Sasquatch is not in the ball park . . . He’s got no limits, climbs any mountain, swims any river. He’s got no barriers . . . Not an endangered species, that’s us . . . He can pull down big game on the run or by stealth, like a cougar . . .

  He can lay down a light track or spring like a deer . . . Has a lot of humor, yet restraint . . . Rocks cars and cabins, but lets folks go . . . We agonize, he couldn’t care less . . . An opportunist at the top of the food chain, in great shape—he’s got it made! Adapted to the cutover lands, lives a good rugged existence . . . He’s got no need for wages, lives off the fat of the land, and pays no taxes!”

  The room was hypnotized.

  And suddenly I realized: these guys don’t want to find Bigfoot—they want to be Bigfoot.

  15

  Back to Earth

  Giants seem to have originated as a way of giving human form to all that is titanic and inchoate in nature.

  —David Rains Wallace, The Klamath Knot

  After Indian Heaven I tried—and failed—to remember another time in my life when I’d gone so long alone. My extended backpacks have all been with mates or friends. When I lived alone, I never stayed in by myself for that long. And even if I had, it’s not the same as being alone in the wild, where you cannot pick up a telephone or walk to a neighbor’s. Yet in some ways you are not as alone in the woods as you can be in a city. There are the nuthatches, the pikas, the ravens, the fat slow frogs, and the trees. They might not give much back, and they don’t care about you; except for pets, other species seldom reciprocate our ardor. If anything, they’d probably just as soon you weren’t there. But if you’re aware of them, you know that you are a member of a community that makes a crowded suburb look vacant. Knowing this, you never feel lonely.

  Dropping off the berry-lands plateau of Indian Heaven toward the lavalands below, I had miles and hours to think. What came sharply to mind was another journey into a solitude of a very different kind. The previous January I had traveled south by rail to visit the Hoopa Indian country in northern California, the location of the notorious Bluff Creek encounter, which resulted in Roger Patterson’s film of 1967. I wanted to see the country that had generated the best-known piece of Bigfoot “evidence,” where so many of the Bigfoot heavies had teethed; and I wanted to speak with the people who had hosted generations of giant-hunters.

  After taking the Coast Starlight to Redding, I spent the night in the Shasta Lodge. In the morning I rented a weathered Tempo from Rent-a-Wreck and set off westerly into clouds of blue manzanita, then into snow at Buckhorn Pass. Dropping down and out of the falling flurry I wound among pines and oaks of many stripes clothing the thirsty, drinking hills. Weaverville was all Gold Rush brick and doodads, with a pub in an old brewery that was not one now and served no good beer and a Forest Service office where I gathered maps of the Trinity Alps. Over Oregon Summit, then down the wild, green Trinity River canyon. From mossy knolls sprang live oaks of darker green and digger pines with long, droopy blue needles. A snow-peppered forest lay behind and above the greens, and wet red madrones sprang from moss pads down canyon. The redbuds for which the route is noted were not yet in bloom, but a yellow swarm of willow tips and hazel catkins glowed against the black oaks and dark rock. Where the canyon deepened into a dog-legged chasm, ancient rusted cable cars were poised where they’d once crossed over to camps on the wild side.

  Eventually I came down to Willow Creek, a.k.a. Sasquatch City, and checked into a cottage at the Willow Inn in the fern woods outside town. Large humanoids were encountered between here and Happy Camp in the 1890s. Bigfoot prints were again reported near Willow Creek in 1938, then again twenty years later by Ray Wallace’s road crew, and sporadically ever since.

  After dinner I spoke with the resident family: a young mom, her mother with a bouffant, a loquacious ten-year-old boy. They told me all about recent local sightings and tracks, giving no clue that they did not believe in earnest. The local attitude was apparently one of acceptance. The boy said he had seen one track when he was with a group. “I’d love to see one . . .

  it . . . him, her—them?” said his mother. They mixed up the names of Bigfoot and a local striped wolf-beast the Hoopas are said to believe in (“The Indians believe in a lot,” said the older mother), and the boy further conflated both with werewolves. I decided not to consider these folks my primary informants.

  I spent the evening driving the upper reaches of the Hoopa Reservation and visiting the Bluff Creek area, since my time was short and I would be less likely to encounter others at that hour. Foggy curves took me up to the confluence of the Trinity and Klamath rivers on the road to Happy Camp. I crossed Bluff Creek, a roaring torrent below a concrete high bridge. When I hit snow at a little above two thousand feet, slid, and skidded to a stop, I got out, smelled the snow, and spoke to the perpetrator of the local mania: “Hello, Sasquatch, Dzonoqua, Omah. I come in peace and mean no harm. Zuki, zuki.” I recalled Ray Wallace’s peaceful password, debunking the Patterson film: “I know just which Yakama man was in that monkey suit.” Whether he knew any such thing,
there is a lovely irony to it: it was Ray’s reports of Bigfoot ravaging his road-building operation in these hills back in the late fifties that helped bring the Bigfoot rodeo to Bluff Creek.

  Among the pilgrims were two men from near Yakima Washington, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin. Patterson, a slight but handsome horse breeder, sometime rodeo cowboy, inventor, showman, and small-time promoter, had been captivated by Bigfoot since reading an article by zoologist Ivan Sanderson in a 1959 True magazine. Part Indian, he was encouraged by the beliefs of older Yakama Indians who were his neighbors and began to search widely for evidence of Bigfoot. A number of what he called “pre-expeditions” produced impressive and consistent plaster casts of tracks from Bluff Creek and from Woodland, Washington. When hunts at Ape Canyon on Mount St. Helens proved fruitless, he recruited the assistance of Gimlin, an experienced tracker. Part Apache, Gimlin was a cattleman skilled at tracking from horseback. In 1966 Patterson’s Trailblazer Research, Inc., published a little book documenting his progress to date and reprinting newspaper clippings of reports from throughout the Pacific Northwest, illustrated by his drawings of the reconstructed events.

  In the fall of 1967 Patterson, then thirty-four years old, and Gimlin took their search back to the Trinity River country in Del Norte County, California, the origin of so many tracks and sightings. After days and nights of nothing, their big break came in the early afternoon of October 20. Approaching Bluff Creek, they spotted a female Bigfoot on the other side, squatting by the bank. When the horses saw her, they bucked in fear, and Patterson fell with his horse. He grabbed his rented movie camera from a saddlebag and ran after the retreating ape. While slipping on the rocks of the stream, he captured 952 frames of jumpy sixteen-millimeter film, which, if genuine, is of stunning importance: the soundest evidence yet for the existence of what Patterson himself called a “ghost from a long-dead day.”

  The film, part of which settles down into reasonable focus, shows the subject walking away, turning around with a swing of her massive breasts and a rippling of muscles in shoulders and thighs, and retreating into the far forest. Afterward Patterson exploited the film for modest gain while continuing the search, until he became ill with Hodgkin’s disease. Convinced he could be cured if he had enough money, he made a last attempt to fund an expedition to Thailand to obtain a manlike ape that was supposedly being held captive in a monastery. He died at thirty-nine, remembered mostly by Bigfoot buffs and doubted by most scientists who have seen his film.

  In October 1967 Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin surprised a female Bigfoot bending over a stream in northern California’s remote Trinity Alps. Patterson’s horse shied and fell, and by the time he recovered and grabbed his movie camera, he had to run after the Sasquatch to film her. This is frame 352 from his film, which has never been convincingly debunked.

  In the nearly three decades since its making, the Patterson-Gimlin film has been viewed by millions on television and in lectures and cinemas. The subject of vituperous rights battles, it has been denigrated and mocked, and held up by advocates as the best evidence for the animal’s existence. John Napier, Peter Byrne, John Green, Danny Perez, British and Russian experts, and (most recently and thoroughly) Grover Krantz have all analyzed the filmstrip. Byrne gives it an 85 percent chance of being real, and Krantz concludes strongly in its favor. I have watched a first-generation copy many times, and I find it highly intriguing: not definite proof but also not dismissible. In all the scrutiny, it has never been definitively debunked. Universal Studios said that its production as a hoax would be almost impossible, and the Disney folks said no one could have manufactured it except them—and they had not. In these days of Photoshop and CMG, no one would think twice about the ease of faking such a shot. But remember that the Patterson-Gimlin film was taken with a sixteen-millimeter home movie camera rented from a drugstore.

  −−

  Now I was near the spot on the road where Patterson and Gimlin had had their dramatic encounter with whatever it was. The light snow on the road was ideal for tracks, but I saw none of any species. Hundreds of footprints have been recovered in the Bluff Creek drainage since Patterson’s film was shot. I was not looking for tracks but rather for the spoor of the beast on the breath of the night: a sense of the place that spawned this particular case of mass delusion or rich encounter. At the moment I didn’t particularly care which it was.

  I drove a number of other roads in the vicinity, most of which did not exist when Patterson and Gimlin traveled in on horseback; they have been built since for logging access. At one point, mildly stuck in the snow in the reliable but decidedly not off-road Tempo, I sat and listened to the night. Suddenly I heard a long, falsetto moan followed by yips, both far off and not at all like coyotes. Then it sounded nearer, as I listened intently. I shifted, it stopped; I shifted again, it called. As I moved back and forth, it yipped rapidly. It was the air escaping from the foam back of my seat! I felt like an idiot, but this confirmed how little it takes to make suggestions to the suggestible. I remembered Idaho writer Clay Morgan’s account of hearing horrible shrieks he was sure belonged to Bigfoot but that turned out to be lake ice cracking in the sun. That made me feel better.

  Rolling back down through the reservation, I saw a raccoon, an opossum, a cat, and three deer and had a good look at the valentine visage of a barn owl as it flew to and from a telephone wire. I could easily see how that particular face had spawned a thousand ghost stories. The rest of the eyeshine in the night came from the new geology—bits of broken yellow center-line cat’s-eyes, roadside reflectors, and bottles—except for one silver-green gleam at about six or seven feet that I caught in a corner of the brush before it disappeared. (Bigfoot is always reported to have red eyeshine.)

  No Indian bars were open on the reservation, so I went to Bub’s Place in Willow Creek. I was glad to have a red, billed feed cap with me, recently received as a bonus for buying a pair of Redwing boots. Every man in the tavern, save the cowboy-hatted bartender, wore a red feed cap. Midwestern seed-and-feed companies were among the first to give out these hats as promotions to drivers and farmers. They have since hybridized with baseball caps to become the national headwear of the rural American male. This form reached its apotheosis in 2015 in the red cap emblazoned with the slogan make america great again—a major prop in the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. Instead of cotton duck, like baseball caps, feed caps are made of polyester in front and sweat-net in back. The forehead panel is always padded with foam to make it stand up aggressively, or maybe to mask the absence of anything behind it. At the back is a plastic snap-tab closure. There is almost always a company logo, a sports motif, or a crass aphorism on the inflated pate. In this bar almost every red feed cap read “49ers.”

  I’d hoped to pick up on some loose talk about my beast, but I heard none. There was pool, shuffleboard, and swearing over country music interlarded with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, a fair amount of drunkenness, but no Bigfoot in evidence. Most of the patrons were white, though a few Indians sat off to the side. Finally I mentioned the subject offhandedly to the bartender (“Anybody seein’ that Bigfoot lately?”), but he scarcely seemed to know what I was talking about (“I don’t know nuthin’ about that”). The Indians heard but looked uncooperative.

  I was about to leave when an attractive Indian woman down the bar caught my eye, smiled, and walked over. I thought, Great, an informant! (Then, wryly, Right—me and Franz Boas.) But I never had a chance to ask the woman what she thought of her giant hairy neighbors. As she approached, her smile faded into a distinct frown and then a full-blown smirk. “Redwing shoes!” she spat, and everyone at the bar looked my way. I might as well have had on earrings and a T-shirt saying “I love spotted owls.” A red feed cap by itself just wasn’t good enough. There, in the midst of wannabe cowboys and real Indians, I felt more alone than I could ever be as a solitary interloper in the wilderness.

  −−


  The next morning the leaning, hollow Douglas fir outside my cabin, thickly upholstered on its north side with mosses, lichens, fungi, and licorice fern, dripped in the light rain. The general feel of the area was that of a semi-arid land, but this was a rain-forest tree. I could see why these northern Californian hills are considered a borderland between two bioregions.

  I breakfasted on a fry of chicken chunks, onions, peppers, and cheese, along with biscuits, honey, and coffee, at a place called Mountain Annie’s Skillet. Only mildly piqued by the coincidence of the proprietor’s handle with that of a character in the novel I was writing, I didn’t let it spoil the great breakfast. As I finished my biscuits and coffee I could see out the window, some twenty yards away, the posterior of the famous Willow Creek Bigfoot, carved from a sequoia stump by Jim McLarin: neckless, hulking, ape-faced, long-limbed, furred in the furrows of gouged and weathered redwood. Two ladies in the next booth read a paper called the Kourier, which had a Bigfoot with tracks across the masthead next to an American flag—the apotheosis of myth in small-town USA? I asked the waitress, youngish, prettyish, heavyish, with brown longish hair, dressed like Mountain Annie in a plaid shirt and jeans skirt, if local people generally believed. “Yes, oh yes,” she said. “Around here, lots of people believe there’s something definitely out there.” She steered me to Hodgson’s store, across the street, for postcards and info.