Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  “Oh, we tried,” I replied. “But we couldn’t reach you in Gombe. Did you like it?”

  “Very much,” she said. “Only I don’t know why you were so circumspect. To me, the evidence seems overwhelming.”

  3. The Bigfoot(?) Butt Print. On September 22, 2000, not far south of Elk Pass at Skookum Meadows, members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) conducted a baiting exercise that led to recovery of a complex set of impressions in mud around the bait station. A three-and-a-half-by-five-foot cast (known as the Skookum Body Cast) was taken of what some Bigfoot investigators interpret as a partial body imprint with impressions of hair. According to Wikipedia, the cast is purported to show “the imprint of a forearm, hip, thigh, heel and ankle, and Achilles tendon of a reclining Sasquatch,” presumably lying down and reaching for the bait. “Impressions of hair are evident on the buttocks and thigh surfaces of the cast, as well as much longer fringes of hair on the forearm region. Dermal ridges appear on the heel.” And “On the same expedition of the BFRO there was evidence of 17-inch footprints that may have belonged to a Sasquatch.” However, others in and out of BFRO read the cast quite differently. They say the impressions “can be recognized as the hind legs, hip, chest, and wrists of a reclining elk” in a classic ungulate lie, and that the “dermal ridges” are actually impressions of elk hairs. Clearly, this one is equivocal. But its location deep in the Dark Divide, and the fact that some of the most biologically sophisticated researchers have been won over, make this is an intriguing artifact.

  4. Jeff Meldrum’s Ichnospecies. In September of 2007, the Washington State Capital Museum put on a major exhibition on Bigfoot. The state historian resisted the idea, but his staff prevailed, and it turned out to be their most popular exhibit opening ever. Peter Byrne, Jeff Meldrum, and I were brought in as speakers for an evening event. As a professor of anthropology at Idaho State University, Dr. Meldrum is the intellectual successor (and artifact legatee) of Grover Krantz, the late Washington State University anthropologist who broke trail for academics interested in Bigfoot. For Meldrum, the respected first describer of several species of protohominids, it still can’t be easy. I’d not met Jeff before, but I had read his book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science and found it the best of the bunch for scientific analysis of the evidence. “He does bring more scientific rigor to this question than anyone else in the past, and he does do state-of-the-art footprint analysis,” said David R. Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, quoted in Scientific American (December 1, 2007). As an expert on primate foot morphology, locomotion, and pathology, Meldrum is uniquely qualified to judge the likelihood that tracks are faked or possibly genuine, and he concludes that some are authentic.

  Peter, Jeff, and I met for breakfast the morning after our talks. Meldrum told us about his intention to describe Bigfoot as an ichnospecies, which is a category of taxonomic description applied to “species known only from trace fossils, such as footprints, coprolites, or nests” (Wiktionary). And indeed he did: “Ichnotaxonomy of giant hominoid tracks in North America,” New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 42, was the first Bigfoot paper to be published in a peer-reviewed mainstream journal. It’s an important piece, and it includes a very useful discussion of the Patterson-Gimlin film, since the footprint casts on which he based his description came from that site and event. He named his fossil animal Anthropoidipes ameriborealis, corresponding with his late colleague Grover Krantz’s unaccepted contemporary species, Gigantopithecus canadensis. To me, this paper and its underpinnings are impressive, as is Meldrum’s overall work and good nature in the face of a generally dismissive academy.

  5. The Emergence of Robert Gimlin. Bob Gimlin was Roger Patterson’s partner on the horseback expedition into Hoopa Country that led to the encounter preserved in the famous Patterson-Gimlin film—still undebunked, and the most significant piece of photographic evidence for Bigfoot. Made on October 20, 1967, at Bluff Creek, in the Six Rivers National Forest, California, the Patterson-Gimlin film has left an indelible image in the mind of almost everyone who knows anything about Bigfoot, and most who don’t (see page 254 and cover). The aftermath is murky, but Gimlin didn’t come out very well, either financially or in reputation. Patterson took the film on the road and more or less cut Gimlin out, apologizing only on his way-early deathbed. Gimlin was taunted and harassed, damned as crazy if he said he believed or as a faker if he said he didn’t. So he went underground, vis-à-vis Bigfoot, for nearly forty years, living a quiet if vigorous cowboy’s life.

  But a few years ago, maybe sensing things had changed, Bob came out again, and has been lionized ever since. I met him first at a gathering outside Naches, Washington, in his own territory. Bob was much honored by everyone present, and I felt honored to meet him. Now past eighty-five, he is still lean and handsome in his cowboy hat, bandana, and silver Fu Manchu. I mention him here because, in getting to know him a little, sitting around a campfire with him and Peter Byrne and their acolytes, hearing his unaffected voice and watching his bright rider’s eyes, I cannot believe that he was lying. He could no more have taken part in faking the famous film (even if anyone could figure out how it could have been faked, which they can’t) than to mistreat his horse. Which he could not do.

  6. Further analyses of the Patterson-Gimlin film. There have been several of these, conducted in sophisticated media laboratories. They all agree within a narrow range on the mathematics, kinetics, and dynamics of the film and the subject it depicts, including the superhuman stride length of some seven feet. As an advisory board member of Peter Byrne’s well-funded Bigfoot Research Project, which had U.S. Forest Service cooperation in seeking nonlethal DNA samples, I was able to view the latest and best computer recovery of visual data from a first-generation copy of the film (the whereabouts of the original strip remain a mystery). The fluid movement of the muscles in the thigh, the heft of the breast, and other traits were stunning. In these days of CMG, it will be very difficult to make a case for the authenticity of any fresh photographic evidence. But given the technology of the times, that 16mm motion picture camera rented from a drugstore, Patterson-Gimlin remains for now the Teflon clue in the case.

  7. The many more tracks. A few years ago Peter Byrne and I were crawling through a willow thicket together on our bellies, looking for a favorite Bowie knife of his that he'd lost there on an earlier reconnaissance. Later, over a beer in his local, he told me about a set of tracks that had appeared on a northern Oregon beach nearby. He'd seen the prints just before the incoming tide washed them away. We never found the knife, but I was impressed by Peter's report.

  A year later, from east of there in the Cascades, word came of a long line of tracks seen by several good observers along a mountain shoreline. In all, more than a hundred tracks were present on the muddy shore and lakebed of Cottage Grove Reservoir near London, Oregon. Many of these were cast by Cliff Barackman and his associates. You can read about them and see photos at Cliffbarackman.com.

  The many physical evidences of possible Bigfeet, of which these were just two examples examined by two of the most respected researchers, just keep on appearing. They have always been difficult to ignore or dismiss out of hand, and they are only getting more so. Whether Sasquatch or not, something is making all these tracks upon the land.

  So these are a few of the highlights on the Sasquatch Scene that have helped keep me tuned in. Certainly a great deal more has gone on in Bigfoot World since this book first appeared. There have been many more books published, notably Jeff Meldrum’s, wildlife biologist John Bindernagel’s The Discovery of the Sasquatch, and three more great reads by Peter Byrne: The Monster Trilogy Guidebook, The Hunts for Bigfoot, and Yeti. The bleak landscape of Bigfoot-based fiction has been brilliantly lit up by esteemed author Molly Gloss and her novel Wild Life, by far the best conceived and written narrative of what life among such creatures might be like. Molly has managed in this period novel not only
to evoke the fin de siècle Lower Columbia and create a powerful woman character, but also to imagine and tell the very likely life of a Bigfoot family in a richer, more plausible way than anyone else ever has. (Molly and I were privileged to travel around the region, sponsored by the Oregon State Library, giving joint readings from our two Bigfoot books.)

  And of course there has been the great success of Animal Planet’s popular television series Finding Bigfoot, starring four actual investigators of the phenomenon ranging from dedicated obsessive to skeptical biologist. My friend Cliff Barackman, a science teacher as well as a serious and eminently sensible Sasquatch field researcher, keeps the wilder side of the show on the level. Detractors love to point at the antics and arguments of Cliff’s colleagues, Bobo, Matt, and Ranae, as mere showmanship; but they watch too. Meanwhile, the show has entertained a large and growing audience and encouraged many aspirants in the process of, so far, not finding Bigfoot.

  But it’s that “not finding” part that’s the rub. As time goes on, it gets harder to make the case with the big galoot in absentia. Meanwhile, on the other side, there have been results from scientists analyzing purported evidence that has not panned out. At the same meeting where I met Bob Gimlin and heard Jeff Meldrum’s ichnospecies paper, I was excited to hear retired Navy code breaker Scott Nelson announce that he had discovered phonemes (units of speech) in the well-known Sierra Sounds recordings by Ron Morehead and Al Berry. But since then, more qualified linguists have convincingly criticized Nelson’s methods and conclusions. A much-ballyhooed DNA study and paper known as The Ketchum Project concluded that Bigfoot is an ape-human hybrid species. This work and report, by Texas veterinarian Melba Ketchum, was discussed at length and found to have many disqualifying problems by Sharon Hill in the Skeptical Inquirer (spring 2013). Then the prestigious journal Science announced the results of the Oxford University analysis of mitochondrial DNA in thirty solicited “Bigfoot” hair samples (Sarah C. P. Williams, July 1, 2014). All thirty turned out to be identifiable as known beasts—human, horse, cow, deer, bear, wolf or dog, raccoon, and porcupine. And nothing has come from the god-knows-how-many Ziplocs of putative Bigfoot poop adorning freezers all over the Northwest. So, no help yet from all the hanks o’ hair and steaming heaps hauled home by the hopeful. Still, Bigfooters can no longer complain quite so loudly that scientists never take a close look at the evidence. These scientists did just that, and they encourage enthusiasts to keep trying.

  In the years after the book, the Forest Service persisted with a plan to overlay the high ridges of the Dark Divide with motorcycle thoroughfares. Through a successful lawsuit by the Washington Trails Association and trench resistance by Susan Saul, Karl Forsgaard, and others, that was avoided, but the compromise WTA proposed for a dirt-bike loop outside the wild core failed too. Now there is no money for either plan, and the status quo pertains: ongoing trail degradation from motorcycles. On a backpacking trip of the Washington Native Plant Society, led by consummate field botanist Jim Riley, Thea and I watched Kawasakis tearing up red mountain heather and delicate shooting stars at the edge of a snowfield blocking the trail.

  As for the forest, as long as the Clinton Forest Plan and Roadless Rule maintain, the remaining old growth seems safe. But who knows, under Trump? The long-term solution for both threats, logging and motors, would be establishment of a Dark Divide Wilderness area, and this objective has settled deeply in my heart. But tragically, the opportunity was not taken during Democratic administrations and the reign of Congressman Brian Baird. And now, Washington’s Third District has been so firmly gerrymandered for the Republicans that we may not see a wilderness-friendly legislator in that House seat for decades. This is the main reason I hope for a Big Discovery in the Dark Divide: to furnish incontrovertible persuasion for wilderness protection of the animal’s habitat. Thus far, however, definitive proof is doing a good job of hide-and-seek. I found my own hopes running a little thinner. But then there was this.

  On the whole, I have avoided most Bigfoot revels and congresses. Some invitationals concentrate on biology and hard questions. But such conclaves are likely to be populated by oedipal votaries, PTSD reversionaries, and orb-viewing visionaries. (With all affection for the individual involved, my favorite “Bigfoot-as-Orb” devotee admitted that his videos of vibrating orbs had to be taken out of focus to work. They brought to mind how I like to turn Mexican monarchs into dancing doubloons in the sky by unfocusing my binoculars. His “orbs” were mosquitoes illuminated by his camp lantern.) But I have enjoyed a few gatherings, such as a fun little chamber of commerce caper called Bigfoot Bash, held in Home Valley on the Columbia River east of Carson, featuring a valley-wide scavenger hunt and Bigfoot burgers. I’d give a talk, peddle some books, earn a few bucks, and then get to camp with old Bigfoot pals (though, truth to tell, that’s where I met the orb-weaver).

  Leaving the Bigfoot Bash on August 29, 2010, I was reluctant to drive home on busy Highway 14 and I-5. So I headed up through the hills instead, to Forest Road 25. The afternoon had grown cloudy and cool after hot and sunny in the gorge, with just a couple of sun-glints. I hit Elk Pass at four p.m.; it was forty-five degrees. I climbed out and worked my way around the borrow pit and its surrounds, and I placed an apple on a rock. Five minutes later, looking down from above, I saw it was gone. Raven? The only tracks around were elk and my own. Back in my car, heading south, I noticed Forest Road 2551, just south of Elk Pass, which I had never before investigated.

  Two-tenths of a mile along the road I came to a steep pumice slope, and there I beheld a line of tracks along and across the angle of repose—or rather, two sets of tracks. Ten feet up on the shaly slope, running left to right, there were left footprints, shadowed by shuffles right below. The front half of the first track was crisp, the big toe poking through the crust, a suggestion of the other toes, and a strong pressure ridge in the middle, as the owner rocked back on the foot. These tracks ran all along the slope, then onto moss and rock, and on into forest. Above them, a disconformity in the silt texture showed a system of ground squirrel holes, at least a dozen of them arrayed along and above the trackway. There were marks as of indented balls of the feet, and right above them, what appeared to be plunge-holes of hands at some of the burrows—the marks together suggesting a pounce. (Small-mammal hunting is frequently attributed to Tselatiks by Native Americans around the Cascade volcanoes.) The sharpest of the tracks measured the same size as those I’d found twenty years before, and the one again nine years after that with the film crew: about sixteen inches long, six and a half across the instep, and three and change across the heel. But, this time, there were also much smaller tracks, running below and in parallel with the big ones: eight to ten inches long, two to three inches wide, with a twelve- to eighteen-inch step. Was this the spoor of a parent with young? Was there teaching going on?

  A broken old big fir nearby was all torn up for grubs, just like the one I showed the film crew in 1999. These tracks, suggestive of adult and immature, eleven years later, were less than half a mile from there, and from the borrow pit of the midnight whistles in 1990. And they were all of a size, plus the half-pints this time. I had to admit to the possibility of the same creature having occupied this area and left its tracks for me to see three times over twenty years, and now, having reproduced, teaching its offspring to hunt ground squirrels and grubs. That would certainly be one interpretation, and I could not see a better, simpler, more parsimonious one for what I saw. As I drove home that night, twenty years after Thea and I had found those first Elk Pass tracks, I felt the seams of my brain stretching, as my mind opened even wider.

  −−

  The last time I came down out of the Dark Divide was just yesterday. I had been to the Cispus Center, up where the whole thing began, for my annual “Butterflies & Bigfoot” talk to the sixth graders of the Rainier (Oregon) School District’s Outdoor School. We look at casts and models and talk about how an unnamed primate might not be any weir
der than a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly. They are full of good, smart questions and surprising knowledge and a zillion stories from logger uncles and fisherman dads. We listen to the Sierra Sounds (which they love), and I read them the climax of “Something in the Night” with the lights off. They all look over their shoulders as they walk from the campfire back to their cabins in the dark.

  This time, as I was leaving for the long drive home after pancakes the next morning, I stopped into the Cispus Center office to say hello to old friends. Sue, the office manager, called up a Facebook posting by her son-in-law, Tim, on her computer. And there they were: more tracks, a nice line of them, toes well defined. Eighteen inches, well impressed into the leafy pumice sand. I later talked with Tim. He’d come across them while hunting the late buck season last November, a few miles east of Mossyrock beyond Riffe Lake. There was a big tree break right above them, and they ran maybe fifty feet down to a logging road. Tim told me he’s seen similar tracks near Cispus, just a couple of miles from where I watched his video, less than ten miles from Elk Pass. He said, “There’s all kinds of things out there in the woods, if you just look.”

  Judging from all I’ve heard over the first twenty years of this book’s life, the Dark Divide isn’t the only place where Bigfoot walks, by a long shot. But if it walks anywhere, it walks here.

  Appendix

  A Protocol for Encounter