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| You can get information from the horse's mouth at the Harrison Hot Springs Sasquatch Museum |
Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go? What Are You Thinking, Steely-eyed Joe?
Wild tales of hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates have persisted for centuries in coastal Canada and the northwestern United States, but the evidence is feeble. Somewhat akin to UFO photographs, rare pictures of the creatures are fuzzy and amateurish, even with the explosion of Apple cell phone cameras to aid in the hunt.
North of the border, from a lookout above the Harrison River Valley in southwestern British Columbia, dense forest stretches all the way to the snow-capped Coast Mountains on the Pacific shore. Thick with towering western red cedars, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, the wilderness continues almost uninterrupted all the way north to Alaska. Beyond the roads and hiking trails, the terrain soon becomes impossible, punctuated by steep mountains that plunge into glacier-carved lakes. This remote valley 81 miles east of Vancouver conjures up an ancient land filled with mystery and possibility and many call it the home of the world’s most famous cryptid---Sasquatch.
Bhima Gauthier, who leads tours to spots in the region where sightings have been reported, is on the fence. “I can’t say for sure that they are real, but I have a gut feeling that there has to be some truth behind it. There are too many testimonies to ignore…especially around here, where we have a very rich mythology.”
There have been 37 notable Sasquatch sightings near the town of Harrison Hot Springs since 1990. Most often called Bigfoot in the U.S. and Yeti or metoh kandmi (wild man of the snows) in the Himalayas, Sasquatch is always described as very tall, extremely hairy and inevitably reluctant to be approached. The creature is considered sacred to West Coast First Nations, particularly the Sts’ailes (sta-hay-lis) who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for at least 10,000 years. The word “Sasquatch” is the anglicized version of sasq’ets, which means “hairy man” in Halq’emeylem, the Sts’ailes upriver dialect. “The word comes from a mountain called Sasq’ets Tel, the place where Sasquatch gather,” according to local official Kelsey Charlie.
To sate a growing curiosity and perhaps make a buck from tourists, Harrison Hot Springs opened a Sasquatch Museum inside its visitor center in 2017 and worked with Sts’ailes member Boyd Peters, who provided input on the original tribe acquisitions, including a drum and replica wood mask of Sasquatch. One museum display explains the Sts’ailes belief in Sasquatch as a caretaker of the land and totem for their nation (he’s even on their flag if you’d like to buy one). The exhibits are juxtaposed with casts of Sasquatch footprints, news clippings about sightings that date to 1884 and a logbook of reported local encounters. Since the museum opened, tourist numbers to the visitor center have doubled to 20,000 annually and the resort community received a CAD $1 million government grant to build a greatly expanded museum and visitor center. So who says Sasquatch doesn’t exist?
In addition to visiting the museum, visitors can take a tour with Gauthier’s Harrison Lake Nature Adventures or walk the Sasquatch Trail or even show up for Sasquatch Days, which have been held in town since 1938. The area has become, perhaps, the world’s primary magnet for those seeking answers, including the 26% of all Canadians who believe cryptids are real. “I realize I have a financial bias,” says Bhima Gauthier, “but if you heard some of the compelling stories I have, you would certainly reassess your thinking. These people are not crazy fools, they’re just ordinary folks with nothing to gain by making stuff up. And they’re positive they’ve seen a Sasquatch. So who am I to argue?”
Kelsey Charlie personally witnessed two Sasquatch drinking water from Harrison Lake in 2002. “It made my hair stand on end,” he swears. “My grandpa used to say the slollicum is a shapeshifter and can walk in the two realms, the spiritual and the physical. And that’s why you’ll never catch him---when you get too close, he disappears.”
Good one, Kelsey’s father. That cleverly negates any requirement for evidence. “No, officer, that was definitely not me. I was walking in the spiritual realm when the crime occurred.”
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| Canadian author/researcher Thomas Steenberg with his trophy |
Whoomp! There It Is!
The FBI has had a file on Sasquatch since 1976. Director Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Oregon, sent the FBI “about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin” that year, hoping the Feds might analyze it. Byrne was one of the more prominent Bigfoot researchers at the time, according to Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “In the 1970s, Bigfoot was extremely popular,” claims Radford. “That was when the Six Million Dollar Man ran a cameo of Bigfoot.”
That was also after Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin released their famous 1967 video footage of a Bigfoot in Northern California, which launched the craze. Many observers thought the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film was a costumed prankster but Byrne was certain the footage was real.
Jay Cochrane, Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services division, sent the hair sample back to Byrne in 1977, telling him “The hairs are of deer family origin.” The mere fact that the FBI was analyzing possible Bigfoot DNA was enough for believers, however. Radford says “The Bigfoot contingent loves the idea that there’s a smoking gun in FBI files. ‘See, look, Bigfoot must be real, otherwise the FBI wouldn’t have taken it seriously.’ No, the FBI didn’t send out a team of investigators to look for Bigfoot, they merely agreed to analyze 15 hairs.”
Nonetheless, thousands of people claim to have seen the hairy hominoid, including a small but vociferous number of scientists. “Given the scientific evidence I have examined,” says one of them, professor of anatomy and anthropology Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University in Pocatello, “I’m convinced there’s a creature out there that is yet to be identified.”
Investigator Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department in Texas specializes in fingerprints and footprints. He has analyzed the more than 150 casts of bigfoot prints that Meldrum keeps in a laboratory. Chilcutt says that one particular footprint found in 1987 in Walla Walla, Washington has convinced him that Bigfoot is real. “The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I’ve ever seen. It certainly wasn’t human and of no known primate that I’ve examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.”
Meanwhile, Meldrum says a 400-pound block of plaster known as the Skookum Cast provides further evidence of Bigfoot’s existence. The cast was made in September of 2000 from an impression of a large animal that had apparently laid on its side to retrieve some fruit next to a mudhole in the Gifford Pinchon National Forest in Washington State. Meldrum contends that the cast contains recognizable impressions of a forearm, a thigh, buttocks, an Achilles tendon and heel. “It’s 40 to 50% bigger than a normal human,” he says, “and the anatomy doesn’t jibe with any known animal.”
There are a surprising number of academics and certifiably sane observers who believe Meldrum is right. Prominent among them is renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who last year surprised an interviewer from National Public Radio when she said she was sure that large, undiscovered primates such as the Yeti or Sasquatch do exist. Oh. Well, then.
“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull that mask off that old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jane.”
Close Encounters
Matt Moneymaker, a lawyer who runs his own marketing agency in Dana Point, California, once came eye-to-eye with a Sasquatch. “It was 2 o’clock in the morning and the moon was a quarter full,” he recalled. “Suddenly, there he was, an eight-foot-tall creature standing fifteen feet away, growling at me. He wanted to let me know I was in the wrong place.”
There are a surprising number of academics and educated observers who allege they’ve been up close and personal with Sasquatch. Teacher Steve Pavlik got a double-shot of his Bigfoot love. The first incident took place on September 23, 2009 in Bellingham, Washington as he was loading his truck for an early morning trip out of Seatac International Airport. “It was pitch dark outside, a cold, crisp, beautiful and almost cloudless morning. I was carrying my travel bags when I heard it, a sudden piercing cry that was so loud and clear it literally shattered the stillness of the morning. It came from the woods behind my house, maybe 50 yards away. It was one long, flowing sound that lasted about five seconds, paused for two or three seconds and repeated itself a second time. It woke up every dog in the neighborhood, and they all began barking like crazy. I waited to see if there would be another howl, but whatever made that sound was now quiet. Instinctively, I new it was a primate but I didn’t think of Bigfoot right away.”
On the following Saturday, September 27, Pavlik went hunting at nearby Lake Terrell. He returned with some birds he’d shot and set about to cleaning them between his house and the woods. “Then, all hell broke loose in the woods less than 20 feet in front of me. A large tree began to swing violently from side to side. I would estimate the trunk of the tree was about ten inches in diameter and something was shaking it like it was a sapling. Branches and leaves began falling from the tree and others around it. I could hear a loud cracking of wood, as if someone was breaking branches over their knee or beating the ground with them. I grabbed my knife, not knowing what the hell to expect next, and ran back to the house. I have no doubt at all this was a Bigfoot encounter. There’s no alternative. Most animals shy from humans, but whatever I encountered that evening was definitely not fleeing. I think it was a clear intent to scare me off and it worked.”
One of the most famous Bigfoot sightings occurred on Mica Mountain in British Columbia in 1955 when William Roe claimed he saw “a partly human and partly animal” creature while hiking. He swore an affidavit in 1957 that the critter was about six feet tall and covered in brown, silver-tipped hair, with thick arms reaching down to its knees, broad feet and breasts. “As I watched the creature, I wondered if some movie company was making a film at this place,” Roe wrote in his affidavit. “However, as I continued to watch, it became obvious that it was real. It would be impossible to fake such a specimen.”
The Ape Canyon Incident of 1924 was more of a battle than a sighting. A group of gold prospectors testified they defended their cabin against a number of “gorilla men” in a gorge on the side of Mt. St. Helens in Washington. One of the miners, Fred Beck, shot at a solitary Sasquatch during the skirmish and his target returned the same evening with a few of his hairy brethren for a little payback. The Sasquatch invaders pelted the cabin with rocks and boulders and one of them got close enough to reach an arm inside. The miners survived and the attackers retreated at sunrise, possibly after Beck shot one. This incident was exceptional in Bigfoot lore as most of the other sightings called the creatures “non-confrontational.” If you go to Mt. St. Helens today, you can visit the impressive Ape Caves on the caved-in side of the mountain. If a Sasquatch shows up, exhibit a big smile and hand him a sack containing several small mammals, a couple dozen mushrooms and some needles from coniferous trees, then try to get a selfie for the Harrison Hot Springs Sasquatch Museum. You’ll earn great fame, enjoy the eternal gratitude of Bigfoot fans everywhere and get free admission for life. Just throw away those letters written in crayon.
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| Now they're moving in next door |
That’s all, folks….
