In Search of Bigfoot

 The Orleans Ranger District of the Six Rivers National Forest was the center of Big- foot country.   It was here where the Patterson-Grimlin film was made in 1967 of a female Bigfoot in the upper portion of Bluff Creek.   A frame from this film was made into a popular post card, sold in many tourist traps and gift shops, showing the Bigfoot walking and looking at the camera.  The Indian name for Bigfoot is Sasquatch and there has been a few stories passed down through generations of local Indians about their sightings of Bigfoot. 

From 1971-74, I worked on the Orleans District timber sale preparation crew, doing harvest unit layout, mapping and timber cruising.   Most of our work was on the northern portion of the District where it was mostly a roadless area.    Due to the daily driving time and the distance it took to walk into the proposed sale areas, we were required to live in camp trailers during the work week to save on travel time.  These trailers were set up at the end of the existing road.   At the end of the week we would drive back to the ranger station in Orleans, about a distance of 30 miles.   On one of our return trips we encountered a man wearing a black hat, no shirt, ammo belts strapped over his shoulders, a revolver and a big knife walking along the Lonesome Ridge Road.    It was a hot day and he flagged us down asking for a ride back to Orleans and a drink of water.    Feeling a little sorry for the man not having any water or even a pack with him we let him ride with us, plus he looked like a man not to argue with.   He informed us he was a Bigfoot hunter employed by the University of British Columbia and needed to get back to town to pick up his paycheck at the post office, buy supplies and return to his camp somewhere in the upper Bluff Creek watershed.    The previous winter a plane flying over that portion of Bluff Creek reported smoke coming from a large washed out culvert on a snow covered gravel bar and this could have been his camp.  We dropped him off at the Post Office and returned to the station.   We told other Forest Service people of our encounter upon our return.  The foreman of the silviculture crew informed us that they encountered the same man one evening while eating dinner at their camp, where they had been doing plantation surveys in the upper Bluff Creek area.  They invited him to have dinner with them around the camp fire.   During the dinner he suddenly dropped his plate, stood up and said that he smelled Bigfoot and had to go in search of it.   The crew came to the conclusion he had been smoking too much “Humboldt tobacco.”

Other sightings our crew saw were foot prints in the snow on the Camp Creek Road.  They looked like large human prints, but could have been bear.  We reported this and as the word got out the San Francisco Chronicle sent reporters to interview us and our names appeared in the article.   On another occasion, two of us were mapping a harvest unit off Lonesome Ridge when we came across a large nest where rhododendron branches had been broken off and bear grass was used to line the nest.   The Forest wildlife biologist was called to analyze the hairs and his conclusion was they were bear hairs.  

The scariest episode for me was when I was working alone locating a harvest unit boundary in the East Fork of Bluff Creek.  I was a mile from my work truck down a slope flagging the boundary when I stopped to look at the aerial photo showing the proposed unit location.   This was when I heard something tearing up a log down in the ravine below me.  At first I thought it was a bear, then I could hear heavy breathing as it was coming up slope toward me.   As it got closer I got behind a large fir tree to hide myself and soon it sounded like it was too close for comfort, so in a panic I ran uphill.    After running up to the ridge as fast as possible through the dense brush, I stopped to look back, there was nothing.   I figured it must have been scared when hearing me and took off in a different direction.   After telling my story in the office a timber sale administrator said a logging crew near that location had seen a bear whose breathing was abnormal due to an old head wound, probably caused by a hunter.

Who knows what is fact or fiction on the existence of Bigfoot?