Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Sometime around midnight I awakened with a stiff hip and saw that I was still intact. I reached out through the tent flap and plucked a bunch of huckleberries for the moisture they afforded my dry throat. I realized that the bears were probably gorging on the abundant fruits and little interested in my ramen. I settled down and allowed my bear-thoughts to change shape.

  Here is a beast at least as unlikely as Bigfoot. But because many people have encountered bears in the wild or semiwild, and almost everyone has seen them on television, in zoos, or in magazines, we believe in them. We are surrounded by bear rugs, stuffed bears, teddy bears, begging bears, zoo bears, and dancing bears; by Yogi Bear, Smokey Bear, and Care Bears. We even hunt bears, kill them, and eat them.

  The practice of chasing bears with hounds ended in Britain back in the fourteenth century, when the last one was killed off. In Washington State, this barbarism survives, along with bear-baiting. Overall, bears have adapted surprisingly well to our insults and haven’t yet dropped out of the American landscape, except where big timber companies and hunters have systematically hounded them out of large tracts in the West or where we have removed every vestige of the sustaining wildness they need, as in much of the East. More and more bears are being killed for their gall bladders to satisfy demand for Asian pharmaceuticals. Yet bears survive, and no one doubts their existence. That is, unless the conventional wisdom says that they are not supposed to occur in a given area.

  Grizzlies, for example, have long been considered extinct in Washington except in the extreme northern Cascades. When people have reported grizzlies outside that zone, the official response has been dismissive. Yet as André Stepankowsky pointed out in the Longview Daily News, more and more grizzly sightings have been reported well down the Cascades, even into Skamania County. When biologists have bothered to follow up, they have found some accounts to be genuine. Yet as grizzly biologist Paul Sullivan told me, interviews he conducts elicit a fairly high proportion of grizzly statements from “civilians”; virtually none are from officials. This has a remarkably strong whiff of Bigfoot about it.

  In bears we have a beast of huge proportions who demands prodigious amounts of food, whose habits are mostly secretive, who is threatening in reputation if seldom in fact, intensely mythologized by our culture and many others, and far more often spoken of than seen. All these things might be said of Bigfoot—except that bears definitely exist. Apart from that minor detail and their very different genealogies, bears and Bigfoot seem to differ in one major respect. Perhaps Pooh put it most delicately when he called himself “a Bear of Very Little Brain.” The fact is, all bears are bears of little brain, at least compared with any large primate.

  So when you think of an animal superbly fitted for its circumstances, able to forage zillions of calories off the rough land, remain mostly hidden, threaten its adversaries, lift boulders, break trees, cover great distances in a hurry, and weather all elements and dangers other than high-powered rifles, traps, and hounds, think bear; then add two or three times the cranial capacity, a grasping hand, and twice the weight, length, and strength—and you have to ask:

  If bears, why not Bigfoot?

  At least, that’s what I asked myself before drifting back to sleep beneath Sunrise Peak, no longer worried about bears.

  5

  The Saddle

  A secret land they guard

  high wolf-country windy cliffs . . .

  where a mountain torrent

  plunges down crags

  under darkness of hills

  the floods under the earth . . .

  —Beowulf

  I awoke to wind. Clouds came out of nowhere and licked away the orangey cream cone of Pahto. In the west another dark cloud hung low over Loo Wit. I didn’t take it for much, but it made me nervous. As soon as I got the tent down, lightning crackled over the Dark Divide. In about the time it took me to recognize the danger, the storm swept toward me across the valley. Heavy rain clouds broke water over Juniper Ridge.

  I threw everything into the pack as quickly as I could, hoping to avoid both a soaking and a shock. I was out on the highest and most open spot for a long way around. The wind hooted like a woofer on all sides, and the rain fell like flams on the drumhead of the day. The summer and fall, the hills, and I had all been so dry, I hadn’t figured on this. Water was all I wanted; now here it came in sheets and I had no way to catch it. I wanted just to stand and soak it up, to drink it from the sky with my mouth open, dumb to the heavens.

  I couldn’t get my pack on, so I dragged it down into a fir copse, pulled garbage bags over it, and humped it onto my back using a rotted stump as a prop. The lightning paid no attention. I’d had it strike closer, near a Colorado aerie on my thirtieth (and nearly my final) birthday, but not by much.

  I hustled as fast as I could, graceful as a gravid tortoise, up and down the ashy trail. The pumice gravel didn’t go to mud the way a finer sediment might have, but it was slickery all the same. Under plastic and Gore-Tex I steamed, for the storm hadn’t brought much cold with it. I exulted at getting beyond the storm unstruck, but I was unnerved by the lightning and my vulnerability to it—something I should have anticipated from Colorado summers.

  Finally I rounded the western flank of Sunrise Peak. I had hoped to take a packless side trip to watch the sunrise from the summit of Sunrise, but I hadn’t gotten up in time—just as well, or the lightning storm might have caught me on top. Now a detour of several hundred feet straight up the rain-slicked trail, without water, seemed pointless. The trail dropped to the flat below through a cycle slot so narrow and deep that I had to place one big foot in front of the other all the way down, my offended toe complaining at the indignity and the pressure. If 330 pounds supported on a human pedestal exerts 3,300 pounds per square inch, that toe was the inch. As I watched the rainwater gutter down the dirt-bike ruts, carrying away what was left of the trail, I took turns cursing my thirst and the bikers.

  When I wasn’t grumbling I was stuffing my mouth with sweet blue beads. Huckleberries are even better wet with rain, which washes off the bike dust. I imagined myself a foraging ape, which I was, nipping out of the brush to snatch sustenance from the shrubbery, then ducking back before the stinking, helmeted hornets-on-wheels appeared. Had I the strength of Bigfoot, who is reputed to toss oil drums about at will, I might have lain in ambush as I gorged and liberated the path from a few noisy invaders. But I could barely heft my own backpack, and as it was midweek, my victims/tormentors never actually appeared.

  I chewed berries and leaves indiscriminately. The moisture was reviving, and under the circumstances the berries were breakfast. The problem was that they had another effect, one whose issue drew more moisture from the body than the berries contributed. The evidence lay along the trail in the form of every sort of purple poop imaginable.

  The shapes of the spoor betrayed the denizens of the ridge. I was right in thinking bears were around, feasting on every bush. Their leavings heaped the trail with scarcely digested, sometimes intact, berries. Coyote scats, normally agouti-gray and bone-shirred, ran to lavender, almost furless, and more formless than the usual tapered links. Many other local mammals had left their deposits, and the birds had swabbed the stones with grapey stains.

  At last I could stretch out my stride on the big, broad Saddle at the junction of Trails 261 and 262 below Sunrise Peak. By now the rain had stopped and the morning was pleasantly cool. There was a chance of finding water at this pass of sorts, where streams might originate from springs at the heads of steep valleys. I offloaded my pack on the thronelike stump of a rotted-out conifer and went in search of water. The Saddle was a plain of cinnabar-leaved shrubs. As I roamed it, I gobbled huckleberries to satiety and beyond. Inexorably, the time came to recycle. Walking past a big purple patty of bear scat, I retreated into the skirts of a fir and kept close watch for bruins. With your pants down around your ankles, a black bear surprised
on its berry grounds might be dangerous.

  Taking part in the cycling of the earth’s goodness is as good a time as any to contemplate weighty matters like “If bears, why not Bigfoot?” One of the most frequent objections to the existence of a large primate in the West is raised by those who wonder what it would eat. Some biologists have doubted the ability of the backcountry to nourish such a big, active animal. Working out energy budgets for a mammal of its proportions, they challenge Bigfoot proponents to fill in the blanks in the menu.

  Such people are probably not foragers. Euell Gibbons, after all, was no anorexic. Several primary plant converters, from Roosevelt elk to mountain goat, attain prodigious size in these hills. Throw in a little red meat, fish, and insects, and bears are possible. Yet the resources are scarcely exhausted in most years. Consider the amount of Vaccinium pulp consumed that season, for example, as evidenced by all the violet piles; yet there were still plenty of berries for me, a large primate. As I was to find in the coming weeks, the amount of nutritious material in the wilderness is greater than most people begin to imagine, and much of it is composted uneaten. This suggests that additional animals might be supported.

  Of course, every species has other limiting factors besides food supply. Population biology consists largely in naming these factors. Bigfoot might be subject to any number of limits. But looking around me as I took part in the great circus of energy’s revolution, I doubted that Sasquatch could be ruled out by food alone.

  The Saddle, largely open due to a great fire in 1923, was good for huckleberries. But all of Juniper Ridge had once been lightly forested with slender candles of noble and subalpine firs before the fires gave it an alpine aspect. Now, decades after the latest blaze, the blueberry bushes were gaining height, and firs were coming up in blue, spiky clumps. I couldn’t see very far on the ground; a bear could easily be hidden by the undergrowth. I considered that as I hung back from a fir branch by one hand. And when I heard sharp sounds nearby, I nearly pulled up my wool pants beforetimes. That would have been a mistake. These were only people, not bears, and a bit too distant to be embarrassed.

  The night before, perched on a scapula of the ridge with ghost moths brushing my beard, I had seen a campfire far down the slope at the head of a logging-road spur. A couple of trucks were nosed up to the blaze, and I could hear the far yodel of voices on the rising warm air. At first I felt intruded on in my “wilderness experience,” and then I summoned a mild sense of companionship with some of the few others spending the night in these remote districts. Now the party I’d seen below me had come to stalk the wild huckleberry on the high Saddle.

  With my binoculars, from the shelter of the fir-bough privy, I ogled the interlopers, as if I were the bear in possession. There was a stout Indian man with a two-year-old astraddle his neck; a five-year-old child excitedly running about; a young mother with stiff auburn hair in a ponytail, carrying two-gallon berry buckets; and a young man with a short black beard and long black hair, intense dark eyes, and a vest with no shirt. The men wore clumsy old wooden pack frames, and one carried a rifle, probably to protect them from bears. When I emerged from the brush, I made lots of noise and coughed as little like a bear as I could.

  We chatted, which is how I learned they were the people from the camp below. “What’s that, a butterfly net?” asked the man with the child on his shoulders. They were interested in Marsha and why I had her, though a butterfly net seemed to me much more normal than a gun. After I explained that I liked to tally the butterflies I saw, he said, “Yeah, sounds like fun. But I don’t think it’ll do ya much good against bears.” Others have said the same thing, substituting “Bigfoot” for “bears,” one of many reasons that I seldom mention the subject. I said he was no doubt right and went off in search of water.

  I found a fairyland of reds and yellows and blues and a menagerie’s worth of mauve manure. I found an indigo and scarlet arrangement of huckleberries and mountain ash, a pastiche worthy of Pat O’Hara or Art Wolfe and their most sensitive films. But I found no water, even at the head of the drainages east and west, where the grass retained a pale green tinge and moisture couldn’t be far beneath the surface.

  I was very thirsty and almost out of water. I showed the early signs of dehydration—light-headedness, heavy-footedness, tingling fingers. I thought hard. The next section involved a long, rugged traverse of Jumbo Peak’s north and west sides to Dark Meadow. There might be springs along the way; there should be ponds at the meadow. But what if there were none? For all I knew there might not be any surface water between here and Quartz Creek, a long, steep two-day hike away. So far, all expectations of replenishment had proved false.

  There was no telling how badly tattered by bikers the steep-pitched Jumbo trail would be, or how thick the dust that worked like fuller’s earth to suck moisture from my mouth, throat, and nostrils. I recalled the high mortality of insects following the Mount St. Helens eruption: populations over a vast area where ash fell had been devastated because of the abrasive nature and absorptiveness of the ash. It would score the insects’ cuticle and then wick them dry of critical body fluids. I remembered watching the slugs cross the road by my house the morning of the eruption, struggling with the desiccating ash. Now I was beginning to feel like that, or like a worm when the pavement dries out after the rain.

  I’d been eager to tackle the grade up Jumbo and down to Dark Meadow, but the lack of water, with no promise of more, the cycle ruts, and the threat of more lightning on the exposed top and sides of Jumbo finally convinced me to change my plan. Not that the decision was easy. Just because I’d aborted long walks in the past didn’t make it routine. But I’d never believed in carrying on for its own sake—that had always seemed a destructive and silly attitude. When my father said, “Don’t be a quitter,” as all the dads did, I shrugged. And when I quit football because of a bad case of mono, he was glad, and shrugged with me. Later, when I quit wrestling (which I didn’t enjoy) in order to lift weights for discus throwing (which I really cared about), the coach was furious. In his favor, I had been less than forthright about it. Mr. McGuire, an Olympic medalist at 138 pounds and still in perfect condition, faced me down in the hall after school and called me a cherry. I felt bad—but not because I’d quit wrestling.

  Plan B has always seemed an honorable alternative if conditions argue for a change of course. Still, I’d planned this trip for so long, talked about it so much, and based so many things on its completion that a detour was not a light matter. A couple of day hikers heading for Jumbo offered me some of their water, but I knew they’d need it themselves. The man urged me on, but the woman, alert to the danger of persisting against prudence, shrugged. Marsha and the Sherpa, lined up on their stumpy perch, said, “We can go either way.” So we turned onto Trail No. 262. I might have resembled Sisyphus, but I was headed downhill.

  −−

  The route down the mountain was as beautiful as it was brief. I stepped as lightly as a small Indian elephant carrying Jackie Gleason. The bikers had evidently not used this side path much, for it had no ruts. The smooth sand trail, the intense reds of the huckleberry leaves and mountain ash berries, the pink of the fireweed, the sweet smells of the rain and the mountain balm bushes made the descent heavenly. My sadness at no longer climbing the skies fled before a firm conviction that flashed like a lighted billboard in my brain: there is more than one way into the Dark Divide.

  I encountered two Indian women berrying on the trail. To the first, after she recovered from her surprise at running into a laden behemoth carrying a butterfly net, I said that the picking was much better up on the Saddle. The second, with one hand in a bandage, had blue teeth already and a nearly full pail. She told me that this was the best huckleberry harvest in years. I realized I was dealing with professionals and that my advice was redundant.

  Before the final descent into the managed forest, I doffed my penance and took a lunch of sharp cheddar and homemade
crackers, soft yellow apples from home, and the last of the water. If nothing else, I could stick my head in the Cispus River within a few miles. My perch was a small prominence over its valley, so only thin air stood between me and the East. Mount Adams sat nearly in my lap. On the other side of the trail a big mixed feeding flock of migratory songbirds thronged a mountain ash hanging from an outcrop. A female warbler on a rowan bough spread her softly yellowed wing, reaching past the brighter yellow leaflets for a fly on a bunch of fire-engine berries; beyond, the blue spire of a young noble fir was decked with juncos and warblers. We take trees and berried greenery indoors once a year and hang dead ornaments on them in honor of the season. Each season honors us the better, if we attend, with living decorations such as these.

  The trailhead for No. 262 was at the end of a rocky logging road, and several vehicles were parked along the road. I took up a post on a log beside a small clear-cut. It was still several miles down that loopy log route to Forest Road 23, the thoroughfare that follows the Cispus River to the Dark Divide and drops down the other side to the Lewis River, and the day had grown hot. I wasn’t eager to tackle those stony switchbacks without water. I decided to wait and ask for a lift from the first returning party of the three I’d met.