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?

The Brush Picker

 Thinking back on some of the colorful characters that lived in Orleans, in northwestern California where I worked for the Forest Service from 1971-77, there is one that stands out by the name of Fred Starnes.  He lived across the highway from where I lived, next to the brush shed in a small camp trailer.   The brush shed was operated by Evergreen Flora, based in Washington State.    It was a long old building with a covered deck, where trucks backed up to for loading or unloading their bundles of huckleberry.  No fancy landscaping around the shed, just some oak trees and dry grass.  The Evergreen truck would arrive once a month to collect the huckleberry to be used in floral decorations.   Fred was a brush picker, a timber faller and a security guard during the night at the brush shed, which provided him a place to park his trailer free of rent.  He was a tall skinny man in his 40’s and drove a VW bug with big tires for better traction on some rough forest roads.   Fred had a family living in Willow Creek, about 40 miles south on Highway 96, where it intersect with Highway 299.    Brush picking on the National Forest required a permit, and permittees were assigned an area exclusive to them.  There were other brush pickers in the community and some acted as graders, working in the brush shed for Evergreen.  Huckleberry had to be picked in a way that passed the grade and pickers were paid by the pound.   It was hard work walking through the woods, searching for the perfect branches to pick and pack it on your back, usually up steep mountains slopes back to your vehicle.    At the end of the day pickers would unload their bundles at the brush shed for grading and weighing.   There were a few times when I saw Fred walking along a forest road with his pack frame so loaded down with huckleberry you hardly see him under it all.   Whenever Fred had a timber falling job, he always worked by himself.   He had a couple of power saws and timber jacks.  He worked on some of the timber sales I had to oversee.   After a day of cutting timber he would walk back up hill to his VW bug with a load of huckleberry on his back.   This was not his permit area, but who really cared since it was going to be a clearcut eventually.    Like many timber fallers, Fred would take some empty plastic jugs with him in the morning to place next to freshly cut sumps to collect the tree sap, which was sold to pharmaceutical companies.     

On a few summer evenings a couple of us would gather around Fred’s campfire by his trailer and listen to his wild stories, while sitting on log rounds he provided for chairs as we all contributed to his pile of empty beer cans.   Some of his stories were a little on the far side, such as sightings of Bigfoot or a man he called Garlic Man, that lived in the woods and survived by eating garlic.  The thought occurred to me at times that maybe Fred had spent too much time alone in the brush.   There were a few times I could hear Fred talking to himself when I was at my place across the highway.  Looking back maybe we all spent too much time working in the brush while living in Orleans.