In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond

by John Zada

  “Those bears traveled with me to places like Biloxi, Denver, and L.A.,” he said. “Heck, maybe ten thousand people have seen them.”

  Though I knew Leonard was a hunter, it hits me now that he is an outdoorsman par excellence who lives and breathes hunting to the core of his being, and that the qualities engendered by that lifestyle, combined with the commercial aspect of his old hunting business, probably mean that Leonard has more to him than the sugar-and-spice coating of his rugged, backcountry veneer.

  My arrival in the Bella Coola valley, the last stop on my trip, comes a year after I completed my first visit to the area. As such, it feels like the closing of a circle. What I’d forgotten, or perhaps never fully realized, was how immense and dramatic the valley is.

  The Great Bear Rainforest, from top to bottom, left to right, inside and out, is a rare and wholly resplendent place. But for me its mountainous eastern flank exists on some other plane of mesmerizing beauty. As you move away from the lower-lying islands abutting the open ocean, away from places like Bella Bella and Klemtu, and continue east into the channels and inlets—through ever-larger mainland ranges—the scale of things tilts heavily toward grandeur. Bella Coola, the name for both a town and a region of villages, is situated in this prodigious landscape. It is located at one end of a system of channels and inlets extending more than sixty miles inland from the open ocean—one of the deepest interior reaches of the Pacific in the Americas. This places the seaside community of Bella Coola three quarters of the way inside British Columbia’s Coast Mountains. From sea level, the mountains here look colossal, and they become bigger, burlier, and rockier as you ascend the town’s fifty-mile-long namesake river valley. That main rift connects with other alpine valleys, each more mysterious than the last.

  Regions and ecosystems exist along a continuum. The Great Bear’s “outside coast” extends west to the open ocean, while its more mountainous “inside coast” morphs east into the interior. The Bella Coola valley straddles both coastal and interior ecosystems. The area’s first peoples, the Nuxalk, have reigned since before recorded time here. It is the place where Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, traveling the final leg of his cross-continental journey along indigenous grease trails, reached the Pacific in 1793.* Residents in the 1950s, fed up with their isolation and empty government promises to create an overland route, mobilized here to build a dirt road over the mountains to the outside world; almost impossibly steep, with terror-inducing switchbacks, it is known simply as “the Hill.”

  This terrain, sized for giants, is also, appropriately, the chief locus of Sasquatch activity on the British Columbia coast—and perhaps beyond. Access to the ocean, deep impenetrable valleys, and the high alpine zone make the area the best of all worlds for the creatures, some say. Stories of encounters, which are numerous and reach far into the past, have made the town of Bella Coola a byword for Bigfoot activity among aficionados everywhere.

  “This is the epicenter of all things Sasquatch,” claimed a local man on the ferry, repeating what countless others have told me on this trip. “You needn’t have gone anywhere else.”

  Leonard tells me he knows little about Sasquatches when I bring it up. We’re in his living room watching episodes of old cable-TV hunting programs in which he guest stars. The American-produced shows, often scored to generic banjo music, are meant to promote hunting and gun culture. As Leonard digs through a pile of DVDs, I tell him a few of the stories I’ve heard so far on my journey. He is attentive at first but then tells me that in his many decades of traipsing through the bush, he has never come across any Sasquatches. But just as we’re about to change the subject, he remembers something: he’d heard strange vocalizations a few years before in a place called Eucott Bay, a secluded shore about an hour’s boat ride from town. He had been with his girlfriend and three tourists.

  “It howled half a dozen times,” he says. “It was a big, moaning animal with huge lungs. It wasn’t a wolf, and it wasn’t a bear. I just assumed it was somebody, Indians maybe, playing a trick on us. But when we went to look, there was nobody there.”

  When I ask Leonard if he thinks Sasquatches exist, he says he is unsure but that he’s open to it.

  The conversation tapers off. I can tell he’s more interested in talking about hunting. He redirects my attention to yet another DVD he has pulled from the pile.

  “This is my second appearance on The Best and Worst of Tred Barta.“ I nod.

  “You know who Tred Barta is, right?” he asks.

  “To be honest, I’ve never heard of any of these people, Leonard.”

  Barta, he tells me, is a famous Colorado hunter and the host of a reality-TV series on hunting. In each episode, Barta and a local guide go in search of big game: bear, elk, moose, boar, caribou—anything. His weapon of choice is a longbow that shoots homemade wooden arrows.

  “This episode’s special,” Leonard says, as he slides the disc into the player. “Right after my first show, where I helped Tred hunt a grizzly, he got cancer in the spine and was paralyzed from the waist down. Tred later did this special episode where I guided him in his wheelchair to hunt a black bear.”

  “Hunting in a wheelchair?”

  “Yeah,” he says, fiddling with the controls. “And I almost broke my back doing it.”

  The episode, entitled “Bella Coola Black Bear,” shows a verbose, chair-bound Barta (think Gilbert Gottfried), being driven around in a pickup truck through the bush and attended to by a retinue of woodsmen and their dogs. Leading the crew is Leonard, who appears as he does in all the shows: quiet, strong, with that same cherubic grin. He is gentlemanly, a Canadian Crocodile Dundee, with a fat Ottoman-style ginger mustache, a cowboy hat, a red-and-black-checkered bomber jacket, waders over jeans, and an assortment of weaponry. A long stem of grass hangs casually from his mouth.

  “The terrain here was too rough for that wheelchair, so we took him to the Chilcotin. Up to the plateau.”

  The show is both captivating and bizarre. It’s a window onto a culture that is completely alien to me. What fascinates me more is seeing Leonard watch himself in what must have been his golden age as a guide.

  In 1992, Leonard moved from Ocean Falls to Bella Coola to set up a guide outfitting business. His lifelong dream was to become a big-name bear-hunting guide, catering to the growing stream of Americans and Europeans willing to pay top dollar to come to Canada to shoot a bear. Hunters in British Columbia are categorized by residency. Resident hunters (British Columbians) may be awarded a license by lottery to hunt on their own, unguided, in the province. Nonresident hunters (outsiders) have to pay to accompany a guide outfitter, who has his own territory, a kind of hunting jurisdiction. Each territory has an exclusive license, which the outfitter has bought, allowing him to lead nonresident hunters in that area.

  When Leonard began, he acquired the license for one guide area in what would later be part of the Great Bear Rainforest. Over the years he started buying the licenses for the adjacent territories from their aging guides for around $150,000, in Canadian dollars, apiece. The nearly guaranteed business meant that he easily got the bank loans he needed to make those added purchases. Leonard also doled out big money to buy and refurbish a number of boats for his hunting navy. Among them was a seventy-five-foot World War II patrol boat turned highliner fishing seine that Leonard named Pacific Grizzly. It would become the flagship of his flotilla—a live-aboard base camp with room to accommodate six hunters at a time.

  Soon Leonard was in possession of five hunting territories with adjoining borders—an enormous region. Although many guides competed with him for business across British Columbia, Leonard’s area was special, offering hunters a scenic coast, fjords, freshly caught seafood for dinner, and some of the largest bears found anywhere on the planet.

  “We had about ten thousand square miles on the central and north coast—from Cape Caution up past Klemtu,” Leonard recalled nostalgically. “We were allowed to harvest forty-two bears in five years and were
getting $15,000 for the hunt and $10,000 for the kill. It was probably the highest-priced hunt in all of North America.”

  For much of the 1990s, Leonard lived his dream. He found himself running a full-blown bear- and mountain-goat-hunting business, with several employees, in a northern rain forest paradise through which as many as fifty hunters passed each year. In that time he acquired a reputation as a rugged storybook character. His many exploits and brushes with death fueled the folklore surrounding his person. In one well-known yarn, Leonard was running full tilt through the rain-soaked forest in pursuit of a black bear. When he reached a bend in the game trail, he came across one of the largest boar (male) grizzlies he’d ever seen. Leonard hit the brakes to turn tail, but he slipped, sliding feet first right beneath the grizzly—between its front paws. At that moment, Leonard and the grizzly were face-to-face, just inches apart. For a second, the bear just stared at him, perplexed. And then, according to Leonard, “the bear let out the loudest, most horrible growl straight into my face. It was like a hurricane blast of the rankest fish smell you could imagine. I thought I was a goner for sure. But I guess I got the old man on one of his better days.”

  After roaring point-blank at Leonard, the grizzly uninterestedly walked over him and ambled away, out of sight.

  Leonard somehow managed to survive the worst that nature, the land, and the elements threw his way. But ultimately the challenge posed by that other force to reckon with on the planet—humans—brought about his downfall as a bear-hunting guide.

  Though Leonard sat on a hunting mother lode, his business and livelihood also straddled environmental, cultural, and political fault lines that were on the cusp of shifting irrevocably. Although he couldn’t see it, his timing and location couldn’t have been worse.

  “So Leonard’s got the greatest deal going for years,” Ian McAllister said, describing the situation to me earlier. “It’s like the Wild West. Nobody’s up there monitoring. He can do what he wants. It’s a pretty sweet deal. And then we come along.”

  By the turn of the millennium, conservationists like McAllister and Captain Brian Falconer, who were fighting to create the Great Bear, opened up another front in their environmental crusade: the grizzly trophy hunt. Their crosshairs came to rest first on Leonard and his business. They brought heavy domestic and international pressure to bear on the hunt. When the lobbying campaign coincided with a sharp decline in the salmon runs on which the bears depended—including the salmon collapse and bear starvation episode at Owikeno Lake—the government stepped in to drastically reduce the bear-hunting quotas in Leonard’s territory.* By 2002, Leonard was able to hunt only a meager two bears per year. The quota, a pittance, was too low for him to pay off his debt, let alone make a living.

  “It was just a kick in the teeth to be knocked down to two bears a year,” Leonard bitterly recalled, “They may as well have just signed my papers to go bankrupt.”

  Ellis and McAllister each claim it was the other who suggested the sale of Leonard’s guide territory. In either case, the outcome was the same: Leonard decided to give up his operation. Raincoast managed to raise the $3.5 million sale price agreed to by the parties after two years of negotiations. The money allowed Leonard to pay off his remaining debt and keep a small portion, which he used to start his bear-viewing business.

  Since then, life has been a struggle for Leonard. He complains that tourism work provides little more than a hand-to-mouth existence. And as the battle now rages to stop all trophy hunting of grizzlies in the Great Bear, Leonard remains a potent symbol of the hunt. Some people on the coast dislike him and believe that he continues to hunt grizzlies in the shadows, something Leonard vehemently denies.

  I turn my attention back to the Tred Barta video. The hunting posse close in on their black bear, which the barking dogs indicate is up in a tree. I glance back at Leonard, who’s sitting on the edge of his chair and watching with a grin as he and the other guides carry Barta’s wheelchair to the base of the tree. Barta draws in his bow and fires several arrows in succession at the black bear, felling it. Cheers and hugs erupt as music for the closing credits comes up. Barta turns to the camera and declares this experience to be the greatest in his hunting career. He profusely thanks Leonard, who is smiling beside him.

  After a few more words about the valor of hunting and spending time outdoors, the camera zooms in on Barta. The show host locks his gaze to the lens, assumes a celebrity pose, and delivers the signature mantra that closes every episode of his series:

  “If I can do it—you can do it.”

  The next day, I leave my cheap riverside motel in Bella Coola proper and ride up the empty highway on a rented bicycle to the Four Mile reserve—a Nuxalk residential community located that distance up the valley from the main town site. It’s an idyllic day, one of those perfect, temperate end-of-summer afternoons, with swirling horsetail clouds and a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean and filtered through evergreens.

  I turn onto a side road and enter the reserve, riding leisurely past homes situated on spacious, unfenced lots separated by swaths of bushy overgrowth. The placid neighborhood is alive with groups of romping children. From Four Mile, the view looking up the Bella Coola valley is crystal clear. An adjacent side valley, the Thorsen, beckons with the mist-obscured, sugar-icing-coated glacier at its head.

  I’ve reached the supposed ground zero of Bigfoot—the waking version of the lofty wilderness of my daydreams as a kid. It’s hard to downplay the links and associations with Sasquatch here. Because of that, the idea of looking for the physical animal is tough to resist. For, in a real sense, Bella Coola is Bigfoot.* For Sasquatch enthusiasts, the town’s very name, its contours of sound, evokes the creature’s spirit. Whereas Bigfoots are said to appear occasionally in neighboring communities, they are omnipresent here, constantly flitting between hidden recesses and blind spots. Residents allege the animals are bolder here than anywhere else on the coast—so much so that they’ll walk through your front yard if need be.

  Reports span the length of the Bella Coola valley and all adjoining creek and river systems. Ask around and you’ll hear incidents of every variety, involving howls, whoops, screams, loud crashing in the bush, and road crossings; figures standing or crouching in the open at night, peeping into windows, banging on houses, throwing rocks, throwing sticks, and knocking on wood; and putrid lingering odors and tracks in the mud or snow. Some reports are just weeks old. Others have been circulating for more than half a century.

  The majority of encounter sites cluster in and around the town of Bella Coola and Four Mile reserve, as well as on the highway and adjacent river running between the two communities. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians on the two-lane road have reported seeing Sasquatches crossing it in both directions. Fishermen on the river have seen the animals on its shores.

  Nothing strikes me as particularly significant about this—at first. The area around and between the two communities is the busy, more populated stretch of the valley. Residents here are mostly Nuxalk, and Sasquatch awareness runs high (whereas up the road in the non-native community of Hagensborg, as in Ocean Falls and Denny Island, there is far less belief in the creatures—and there are significantly fewer reports). Whether or not Sasquatches exist, it makes sense that there would be more reports in this thoroughfare zone than in the rest of the valley. But when I look at Google Earth to get a better handle on the terrain, I notice something interesting: the entrances to four side valleys are located in the hot zone of reports. Three of those valleys are on the south side of the Bella Coola River, between Four Mile and the ocean. The fourth, the Necleetsconnay valley, faces them all on the north side. Each of these valleys is home to glacier-fed, salmon-bearing creeks and is a world unto itself. Their confluence at the lower reaches of the Bella Coola River is a nutrient-rich crossroads.

  Could the cluster of alleged Sasquatch activity in this area be indicative not just of human demographics—a cluster of belief—but also of the proximity of those v
alleys to one another? In other words, could the higher number of reports be the result of real Bigfoots constantly moving among the valleys, crisscrossing back and forth between habitats and food sources? The Necleetsconnay, a narrow valley hemmed in by steep mountainsides and canyons running ten miles north from Bella Coola, strikes me as the most promising of the bunch. I bushwhacked its lower reaches on my previous visit alongside Clark Hans, who, decades earlier, had seen a Sasquatch on a ridge while duck hunting with his cousins. The Necleetsconnay merges with the Bella Coola River delta about a mile northwest of town, where the remains of old Nuxalk village sites are found. It is an area of numerous reports.

  I share my ideas later that day in Four Mile with Nuxalk Sasquatch investigator Loren Mack. He concurs with my observations, adding that there are “known routes between the valleys” on which the creatures travel. He shares with me his own treasure trove of plaster casts and stories outside his trailer.

  “Keep in mind,” he says afterward, “that we have at least two different creatures here according to our traditions. You have the Sninik. It’s tall and pale-looking, with clammy skin and thin patches of fur. It crouches in the bush with its knees coming up as high as its head. It makes whooping noises. Then you have the Boqs, which are darker and much smaller. Child-size. They’re more tricky and dangerous. They’re the screamers.”