Braving Bigfoot_world

Braving Bigfoot

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"HOW DO YOU KILL BIGFOOT?" the guy behind the counter at Bucksport Sporting Goods in Eureka, California, repeated my question. "With the truth."

With that, he scratched his grizzled beard and disappeared behind a counter full of knives, arrows, gigs, shotguns, and other weapons of mass destruction. He had vanished, just as our quarry had been known to do in these parts, and I was left to ponder the circumstances which had brought us to such an unlikely destination.

It had been a long night, that drive from Los Angeles up into Northern California\'s Redwood Country. We\'d successfully navigated a series of setbacks and snares which culminated in a massive mudslide outside the tiny village of Leggett.

At first we didn\'t notice the enormous pile of wet soil and rocks which had tumbled down the sharp hillside and covered US 101. In the early morning mist, the only thing visible was the flashing light that indicated Caltrans was at work.

We were the first in line for this traffic jam. We turned off the car, stepped out into the damp morning, and were greeted by Gus, a Caltrans veteran.

"Mornin\', gentlemen," Gus greeted us. He was a skinny, older man, with salt-and-pepper hair and a tiny gap between his front teeth. "What brings you all out at this fine hour?"

"Ah, you know, the usual," I replied. "Sightseeing. Salmon fishing. Bigfoot hunting. You know."

"Bigfoot," Gus said with a nod of his head. "I\'ve got some experience huntin\' Bigfoot myself, actually."

"Really? How\'s that?"

Gus thought for a moment, and wiped the falling rain from his face.

"Well, I was s\'pposed to go up to Idaho on a Bigfoot-hunting expedition with my brother-in-law."

"What happened?"

"Nothin\' happened," Gus said matter-of-factly. "He divorced my sister. The trip got cancelled."

At that moment the Caltrans authorities cleared our passing. Gus wished us well and resumed his duties. We headed north. Bigfoot was waiting.

Timing is everything, they say, and when it comes to adventure, that couldn\'t be more accurate. We - myself, Fox, and the rest of our cadre of college road-trippers, Bill Diedrich and Jim Sinegal - were on our way to the tiny town of Willow Creek, California, on the 31st of October, 1997. It was Halloween, of course, but more importantly, it was the 30th anniversary of a film which rivals the Zapruder film as one of the most notorious pieces of celluloid in history.

Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were an avid pair of Bigfoot-hunters who spent their days searching for clues in and around Willow Creek, a frontier town which sits near the Oregon border, right in the center of the Klamath and Six Rivers National Forests. The thick wooded hillsides, sharp, rocky, unexplored mountaintops, and jungly, unsettling rivers made the area a hotbed for Bigfoot-seekers, and after October 22, 1967, the place would become groundzero.

According to Patterson, on that day he and Gimlin were filming near the banks of Bluff Creek, due north of Willow Creek, when they were thrown off their horses. Sensing a movement on the other side of the river, they pointed their 16mm camera in that direction. Captured on their film, in eerie, scratchy live action, is a loping, almost-supernatural, half-man, half-ape creature. The gorilla-like figure turns to glance at the camera for a moment, then scurries into the woods and disappears forever.

When Patterson returned to town, he contacted Al Hodgson, a fellow Bigfoot-hunter and expert. Then he went public with his findings, setting off a firestorm of controversy and piquing the interest of everyone from National Geographic to National Enquirer. While the legitimacy of the film has never been properly determined, it spawned a whole generation of Bigfoot-hunters and conspiracy theorists: men like the British scientist Peter Byrne and Washington State University professor Grover Krantz, as well as Robert Michael Pyle, the Yale biologist whose Guggenheim Fellowship to study the phenomenon led to the book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide.

Thirty years later, the mystery of Bigfoot was still unsolved. And it was salmon season. We knew we had to go there.

If I were Bigfoot, I probably wouldn\'t wander far from the isolated hamlet of Willow Creek. We crested a series of elevating bends and found ourselves in the town square, looking out at literally miles and miles of unlogged, deeply forested, forbidding terrain.

In the center of town stood a statue of the \'Oh Mah\' Bigfoot, a particular species of Sasquatch which has been sighted time and again by bewildered Willow Creekers. The inscription on the statue read:

\'The range of the Oh Mah apparently extends throughout much of the forested area of North and South America. Due to its nocturnal habits and extreme elusiveness it has gained a legendary status in many areas of its occurrence. This redwood statue, carved by Jim McLarin as a gift to the people of Willow Creek, is a near life-size interpretation of a male Oh Mah based on descriptions of persons claiming to have observed such creatures. Locally many thousands of huge human-like Oh Mah footprints have been found and inspected by large numbers of people. Oh Mah reports published over 100 years ago are essentially the same as those being made today. The Oh Mah is a perplexing historical and modern day zoological mystery."

Unfortunately, Willow Creek consisted of the Oh Mah statue and little else. Hodgson\'s Store, the former Willow Creek storehouse for Bigfoot memorabilia, artifacts, and speculation, had been closed down. In fact, no hominid paraphernalia was to be found. For that matter, no one even wanted to talk about Bigfoot. The town was empty. We stopped a rancher who barreled through town in a pickup truck.

"There ain\'t no Bigfoot around here," the rancher said. "But if I were you, I\'d watch out for them crankster gangsters in Hoopa."

He sped away.

We checked into the Bates-esque Willow Creek Motel and attempted to

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