Where Bigfoot Walks

by Robert Michael Pyle

  More roads soon followed, fragmenting the area almost beyond hope for future designation as wilderness, which many believe was the federal intent. By 1990, when the Gifford Pinchot Forest Plan came out (a cumbrous document of which one reviewer said, “I speak seven languages, and this is not one of them”), the roadless area stood at 51,500 acres, down from 56,560 in 1963 and 55,000 in 1985. The plan’s preferred alternative called for reducing this to 36,060 acres during the next decade.

  The Washington Trails Association, seeking to protect at least the heart of the high country and its lowland approaches from roads and off-road vehicles (ORVs), proposed a “national hiking area.” This would have sustained the essentially roadless core of the remains, with trails designated for hikers and horses, motors excluded, and protection from logging. The Forest Service responded, as I had discovered on Juniper Ridge, by keeping virtually all trails open to motorcycles.

  Later the Randle District applied for funds from the Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation (IAC) to upgrade the Juniper-Langille Ridge loop to meet motorcycle standards. The application was rejected, and the Gifford Pinchot chastised for submitting such a controversial project. But when the forest supervisor and regional forester backed up District Ranger Harry Cody, the IAC changed its tune. A lawsuit seemed imminent when a coalition of conservation groups weighed in with a bold proposal: would the motorized recreationists relinquish use of trails in the Dark Divide Roadless Area in exchange for a much longer loop trail to be built around and outside the roadless area? In early 1995 a formal proposal was tendered the Northwest Motorcycle Association by the Washington Trails Association, the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, and eleven other organizations. The cyclists would gain a 132-mile ORV loop trail and forgo the use of eighty miles of trails, including Juniper and Langille ridges and Boundary Trail No. 1.

  WTA vice president and volunteer lawyer Karl Forsgaard engineered the deal along with noted landscape photographer Ira Spring and many others from both user groups. If the initiative is accepted and the Forest Service and IAC both go along, a historic compromise will have been reached in an age when bitter confrontation rules most land-use disputes.

  If cooperation won the day on the trails issue, dialogue failed in the matter of timber extraction. Only the courts brought logging to a temporary halt, giving the Dark Divide some breathing space. Gifford Pinchot managers were doing their best to “get the cut out,” as Congress demanded. They planned to get a lot more out, much of it in the McCoy Planning Unit of the northern Dark Divide. Then Judge William Dwyer shut down the woods on behalf of the northern spotted owl and its old-growth community in 1992, finding the Forest Service not in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act. The trucks slowed and mills went still as the Northwest awaited President Clinton’s forest plan and Judge Dwyer’s response. By the time Dwyer lifted his injunction on new timber sales at the end of 1994, complex new operating procedures were in place, involving such landscape categories as Late Successional Reserve, Adaptive Management Areas, Matrix (multiple use), and watershed planning units. Logging, which never really stopped altogether, will intensify, but unless the Republican Congress throws out Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan wholesale, Gifford Pinchot forestry will at least look somewhat subdued compared to the feeding frenzy of earlier decades.

  Improvements in the trail and logging situations in the Dark Divide will beef up the momentum to finally protect the Gifford Pinchot’s greatest remaining roadless area. It might be chopped up around the edges and up the middle, but a viable wilderness can be reassembled. As I wrote in response to the McCoy Creek draft environmental impact statement, “Planning should begin for the abandonment and removal of the McCoy Creek road and its spurs, in order to restore the wilderness character of the core of the Dark Divide.” Establishment of a wilderness area here will be an uphill slog in slick motorcycle ruts, especially with a hostile Congress in power. But at least the effort will not have to labor under the name—the Amoeba Roadless Area—originally applied to the area by Forest Service planners during the RARE II roadless area survey of 1977.

  Susan Saul, an award-winning and dedicated conservationist, shared this history with me. She wrote:

  Sometime in late 1978, Charlie Raines, an activist with the Sierra Club Cascade Chapter, called me and suggested that we needed a better name than “Amoeba” for the roadless area if we were going to build public support for its protection. We discussed using geographic features that were distinctive and would identify the area in an attractive and memorable way. Charlie suggested “Dark Divide”—Dark for Dark Mountain, Dark Meadows, and Dark Creek at the center of the roadless area, and Divide because it draped the hydrographic divide between the Lewis and Cispus river basins. I liked the somewhat mysterious images that the name invoked and approved his suggestion.

  When Susan wrote the Forest Service on behalf of the Willapa Hills Audubon Society, commenting on an inadequate USFS proposal for a mere 6,960 acres to be protected in a Shark Rock Scenic Area, she stated the group’s support for a “Dark Divide Roadless Area”—the first time the name was used in a formal communication with the agency. Later Charlie Raines drafted a “Dark Divide Wilderness Act of 1979,” but no sponsors arose from the state’s congressional delegation. The Forest Service continued to refer to the area as Amoeba as late as 1985. “I have been told that the Forest Service agonized over what to call the roadless area in the draft Forest Plan,” Susan wrote. “Some advocated sticking with the RARE II name while others pointed out the public had been consistently calling the area ‘Dark Divide’ for more than five years. It was hotly debated, but the public won.” And so a Dark Divide Wilderness Area might someday appear on the maps of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Were its name still Amoeba, such an outcome seems unlikely.

  All of these developments in the legal history of a landscape took place before anyone who wanted to watch. The onlookers were many and varied—conservationists, bikers, loggers and their families, everyone who cared about the future of the forest. And in the forest itself, perhaps watchers with beetling brows, narrow eyes, no neck, and huge feet stood by. None came to the hearings, scoping sessions, timber summits, or demonstrations. They offered no input to the Forest Plan but kept their peace, kept their distance, kept their counsel, and watched . . . as their land contracted around them.

  −−

  Just what has been said about Bigfoot on the Dark Divide? Unlike the chapter and verse of Mount St. Helens lore or the detailed interviews recorded by Peter Byrne in Carson and The Dalles, the fabric of Bigfoot in the Dark Divide seems woven of gossamer flecked with vague intimations. Measured rumors and murmurs around campfires, mutters and brags in taverns, cafés, and kitchens. Reluctant reports from the field, sighs under the breath. Whispered dispatches from travelers, leaks from workers on condition of anonymity. Legends and traditions passed on in dance, art, smoky stories by the fireside. No one seems to know the beast, yet few seem willing to discount it altogether—at least among those who have had anything to do with the countryside.

  There is the Indian abandonment of sites rendered taboo by Bigfoot. There is the nervousness of Indian children on the berry fields on Potato Hill. Just scary stories, or an atavistic sense of caution, like the fear of snakes? And there is the sheer common sense that if hairy giants survive anywhere, then the largest remaining roadless area in the heart of their storied ancient range should be where they live today.

  Distilling the many fragmentary stories I’ve overheard around the edges of the territory, from Potato Hill to the Little White Salmon, from the Big Lava Bed to Spirit Lake, I like to imagine that John Dark himself was not without views on the subject of Bigfoot. The land was alive with legend when Dark and the McCoy boys took to their gold-holes beneath Snagtooth Mountain. There is little chance that they had not heard of the Indians’ cohabitant of the hills. Like the miners a couple of decades later who claimed to have encountered a band
of rock-throwing apes on the side of St. Helens, these young prospectors went into the wilderness with a tickle of interest in all things unknown and perhaps with a tincture of fear.

  You can see them, the McCoys, huddled around a tin stove in their simple cabin as snow falls on the last night of the century. In comes John Dark, looking paler than the cold would account for. He’s been hunting off to the east, along the old Indian trail. His eyes are strange, and he stammers as he takes off his snow-stiff coat and elkhide gloves. He isn’t sure he wants to tell his partners what he’s seen out there, where the black mountain meets the boggy tableland.

  What will the others think? That he went snow-blind or has been too long away from people? But he gets the story out: a line of tracks, longer and broader than his winter boots and farther apart than he could easily leap, let alone step, and, strangest of all, barefoot. When he tells it, the McCoys admit they have seen similar tracks but haven’t mentioned them for fear of derision. Encouraged, Dark says he followed the impressions for half a mile, then lost them in a creek. What does he think it was, asks a McCoy. The Indians talk about a beast—a giant hairy devil or wild man. They say it takes women and children. Dark throws another log on the fire, and the men crowd nearer as the night draws in. They raise a cup to the twentieth century and try to forget their fears. But they all retire with a shiver the whiskey fails to dispel.

  When spring comes, they search the far side of the black mountain, and one day all three find a track in sphagnum mud by a meadow sinkhole. The mud is as black as the basalt above, the track as big as two of theirs. And there is a stink so bad they cannot linger. On the way back, Dark, in the rear, sees a muddy streak between two great blue firs. Something big, but no elk slinks like that. He says nothing, for it has already gone. And when he returns to the lowlands that summer, he stays.

  Something was up there in the mountains, something dark, and it wasn’t his name: he has no idea the countryside will one day be peppered with Dark this, Dark that. He marries into the Underwood family and has a family of his own in the valley. Within a very few years both John and Will McCoy die as the result of accidents. Others take up the mines, but they don’t last long. For a time both the miners and the Indians, by then much depleted, leave the Divide to the track-makers.

  If John Dark ever did imagine such a thing, he was not wrong. Something of a dark nature imbues that land. But it isn’t Bigfoot; everything we know about the American Yeti tells us that if it exists, it is infinitely more peaceful and nonviolent than the other great ape occupying the continent. Perhaps Bigfoot is something to fear in the abstract, because of our very nature and because we know the Indians feared Tselatiks. Not evil, however; not deserving of the epithet “dark,” in the sense of malicious.

  No, the shady chapters in the Dark Divide lay decades ahead of John Dark, when the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve was carved apart; when Congress skipped over such an obvious candidate for protection; when the Forest Service, driven by Congress and the timber lobby, axed the great noble firs, thrust roads into the valleys to get at still more trees, and opened the country so quiet in Dark’s day to howling cycles, breaking the soil and trenching the fragile ridges.

  If there is indeed anything shady about the Dark Divide, besides the eponymous pioneer and the color of the rock, it lies not in the haunting of the bogs and the groves behind Shark Rock and Craggy Peak. It may be found instead in the folly of the fragmented forest, in the dark history of the dismantled land.

  9

  Yellowjacket Pass

  The other, misshapen,

  stalked marshy wastes

  in the tracks of an exile,

  except that he was larger

  than any other man.

  In earlier days

  the people of the region

  named him Grendel.

  —Beowulf

  The Dark Divide Roadless Area has been described as an octopus, with arms of wild country separated by roads and logged-off zones. But as I viewed the land, from north to south, it more closely resembled a short-torsoed primate. Two lumpy legs run down from the Divide toward the Cispus and the Cowlitz, straddling the narrow incursion of McCoy Creek’s road, which reaches the crotch. Off to the east extends the left arm, if the beast is facing away, across Summit Prairie, with Council Bluff clutched in the left hand like a throwing stone. The arm on the west encompasses the sinew of the divide proper. Wildly mixing similes, I can see our model’s sleeves studded like Elvis’s jacket with black rhinestones (Hat, Snagtooth, Shark, Craggy, Kirk, and Badger), while his right hand lofts a great knobby club like that of the naked and erect Cerne Giant, an English monster carved into the chalk downs of Dorset. The cudgel is the Clear Creek corridor. Quartz Creek is the carotid artery, running from the heart at Dark Mountain up to the neck and the large head, which is capped by the green fuzz of the Lewis River forest. The beast doesn’t have much of a middle and no neck at all. As for his feet, they’re enormous.

  Outline of the Dark Divide Roadless Area. Note that south is at the top.

  (Map courtesy of the Wilderness Society)

  The roadless area can also be likened to a maple leaf with deep lobes and a thick stem; or to an amoeba trying to cover a sea star; or to an octopus after all, missing a couple of legs, straddling the rough uses of the human landscape. Call it what you will, it comes to this: the Dark Divide has been chopped, logged, bulldozed, mined, biked, trodden, and tracked until it is only a skeleton of its former self. And yet the job has not been entirely completed. Something in the heart of this particular darkness, however fractured and imaginary, remains whole, wild, and very real indeed.

  −−

  I’d come down from Dark Creek in the dark and camped tentless at Chain of Lakes below Mount Adams, north of big Takhlakh Lake. I was betting on no rain, and I won. The stars were like my Mountain Moo packet turned out into the sky. I awoke at seven thirty with gray jays landing on my head in a cold fog fragrant with the terps and esters of high-elevation evergreens. Later I got up to a crisp blue sky, had crisp blueberries with my granola and Mountain Moo, and watched the jays—grays on the table, chary Steller’s in a noble fir a few feet away. A frog croaked; kinglets tinkled; a red-shafted flicker hammered and yaffled.

  About nine a truck drove in, and its occupants set up a racket of bangs, shouts, barking dog. The world is full of yahoos who (like flickers) seem to exist chiefly to make noise in national forests and parks. The gray jays, bored with me, moved off to where the action was, by the truck. The Steller’s, more reticent and less enamored of the fuss, stayed behind in the forest fringe; when I went to the car, they moved in on some spilled granola. Kingfisher clattered; raven clamored.

  Chain of Lakes was a golden meadowland of dried-up lakelets surrounded by candle-spire firs, green and blue, dead and alive, lichened and bare, with a willow-spiraea fringe. Juba skippers nectared on asters at the edge of the dried lakebed, while out in its sandy bottom a faun anglewing puddled. In spite of a sign that read closed to motor vehicles: the area back of this sign is classified under regulations of the secretary of agriculture to preserve its primitive environment / travel by motor vehicle is prohibited and violators will be prosecuted, someone had taken motorcycles out into the lakebed and torn it up.

  The yahoos by the lake turned out to be a tough, hard-working USFS trail crew. They had a right to make some noise. One of the crew, a sturdy, young, permed reddish blonde wearing jeans, a red knit short-sleeved shirt, and a gold cross, came over to replenish the toilet paper in the john. She said they were building a trail around the campground to keep the bikers out. I mentioned that they had gotten into the meadow in spite of the sign. She said, “Yeah, we’re not around to catch ’em, and they’re cutting us seasonals off in two weeks, so they can do what they like.” She told me that the biggest pond still had water and that Takhtakh and Muddy meadows were wonderful for plants. “Y’all have a nice time.”<
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  I lingered to see the pond, with firs reflected. A big blue darner worked the shore, hawking for smaller insects, which were scarce. As I watched it, one of the dirt bikers stopped to chat about lakes and fish and camps, and of course he was a perfectly nice guy. He nodded his red feed cap bearing the insignia of some airborne military unit and went on his way. An evening grosbeak called, and a ruffed grouse drummed, avoiding his pursuers in hunting season by existing

  on a Monday.

  The sun was warm, though it felt as if autumn had arrived since I’d come down from Juniper Ridge, perhaps on the very storm that had caught me unawares there. Broken, unthreatening clouds sailed over the shoulder of Mount Adams. The gray jays, back with me, made weird, bell-like chortlings, as a Steller’s glided down to flycatch in the sun over everlasting, saw me, and arrested, missing its prey.

  From Takhlakh I detoured to Council Lake, lung-shaped, deep blue-green, deserted. I imagined the clinks from the Indian quarry and point-knapping site that had been here. No finished points have been found, just bifacial flakes of flint, chert, chalcedony. But the site was abandoned after the Smith Creek eruption of Loo Wit thirty-nine hundred years ago. Why it was never resettled is the secret of ghosts, but in some stories, Bigfoot is implicated. Tah-Tah-Klé-ah is the Yakama Owl Woman Monster, another scary figure related to the giants and perhaps to nearby Takhtakh Meadow. A hermit thrush worked the chalcedony berries of a mountain ash; juncos probed the cherty perimeter of the lake.