The phenomenon of Bigfoot incidents and has fascinated me for a long time. I don’t recall who first told me about a “real monster” roaming the woods of the Pacific Northwest – I’m pretty sure it was either my Dad or one of my siblings as we were on a family camping trip – always a great time to talk about spooky stuff.

We liked to travel in Northern California. One of our favorite spots was Mt. Lassen National Park – a great place to go, especially with little kids, as I was when I first became aware of Bigfoot. The park features spectacular “live” volcanic features, such as steaming fumaroles, boiling mud pits, and an exquisite sulfur smell around these attractions that would part your hair. I enjoyed this flashy stuff, which is really prevalent along the main road and in the hiking destination known as “Bumpass Hell”. There’s a lot more to the park that I also enjoyed as a youngster – beautiful lakes and meadows, miles of trails through forests, interpretive sites describing the events and effects of Lassen’s eruptions in the 1910’s, and high volcanic peaks, remnants of the ancient volcano, Mt. Tehema.  Mt. Lassen is the largest remnant of Tehema, and is an active volcano. It’s over 10,000 feet high and visible from a long distance. The park is a truly beautiful place. My father and I took a trip up there a couple of years ago to revisit our old camping location, and found it as great a place to be and possibly even more fascinating, given the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in the same mountain range a little over 20 years ago.

The connection with Mt. Lassen and Bigfoot is indirect. As I said, I’m pretty sure it was on one of these camping trips to Lassen that I first heard about it. What really sparked my imagination, though, was the first book that I read about the subject, which my father had purchased for me at the sundry shop at the Lassen Chalet on the south side of the park. It was one of the works of John Green, who was one of the original Bigfoot researchers. I’m not sure which of his books I picked up first. Most likely it was “On the Track of Sasquatch” or “Year of the Sasquatch”.  Mr. Green, formerly the editor of the Agassiz, B.C. Advance, is still around as of this writing. His older books can occasionally be found on eBay, and there’s a newer work out called “Encounters with Bigfoot”, which I believe is a compilation of some of his older works, and possibly some new material.

What I found in the book caught my interest in a big way. Stories of miners having their cabin pelted with rocks in the middle of the night, a family who was paid an unwelcome visit on their homestead while the father was away, even a prospector who claims to have been carried off by a sasquatch and lived with a family of them for several days before escaping. Then there are the stories of members of a road-building crew in the middle of the inland forests of Humboldt County who claim to have had their equipment disturbed in the middle of the night on a number of occasions, returning in the morning to find huge footprints around the machines (It was in response to this that the Editor of the Humboldt Times coined the name “Bigfoot”.).

I suppose that the attraction to me was the locality of the reports (Mt. Lassen is not quite in the main area of “Bigfoot country”, but is fairly close. Often our family camping excursions would take us through the Willow Creek area, on our way to the coast, where we would camp at Patrick’s Point State Park and visit my oldest brother, who lives in Arcata.), the scariness factor, and the possibility that at least some of the reports were real. I sometimes ask myself why I’m still interested in this subject – a grown man who doesn’t live in the woods, has no background in either Zoology nor Anthropology, and has never had any direct experience with a Bigfoot or its spoor. Really, the same reasons play a role in my current interest in the subject. I’ll define exactly what I believe on another page on this site.

I currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, as I did when I was growing up, where I’m only a few hours drive from Humboldt County (I still drive up to visit my brother in Arcata – it can be done in around five hours in optimum traffic conditions.) where a great number of reports continue to come from. In fact, incidents from closer locations are becoming more commonplace, now that the Internet has provided people with a relatively anonymous way of reporting what they’ve seen or experienced. There are reports of bigfoot-related activity coming from Mendocino, Sonoma, and even a report from Napa County. These areas are much less active, Bigfoot-wise, than the north part of the state or the Sierras, where there is also a considerable amount of activity, but they’re easy to get to and there seems to be some evidence that something occasionally goes on.

About the scariness factor, as a kid it was kind of great to have this beast living out in the woods that was frightening but not deadly. One thing that John Green and the other authors I read early in my interest made clear was that there were very few incidents recorded where someone was hurt by a sasquatch – in fact none in the most recent decades. Still, I was pretty scared if I had to get up and walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night while camping. The thought still occurs to me sometimes, but honestly given the choice of seeing a bigfoot or encountering a bear in the middle of the night, I’ll take the bigfoot.

When I was reading John Green’s writings for the first time it all seemed authoritative enough and thorough enough to me that I didn’t really question it so much. I just thought that these were pretty great stories, and there’s something out there in the woods that is mysterious and amazing. It really held my attention back then, and there was a lot of entertainment in all the books and stories I was reading. I looked forward to the family camping trips for the reasons I did before I got interested in Bigfoot, but now I has another piece of intrigue to spice things up. Part of my interest now is that I still hold parts of the Bigfoot mystery to be plausible. I’ll write more on why I’m interested in this.

Over the course of time I let my interest in Bigfoot-related matters drop. There were other things to explore, and since it didn’t seem likely that I’d see a bigfoot any time soon I didn’t do much with it. It wasn’t until several years ago when I first tried getting on the Internet at my local library that I rekindled my interest. I followed the directions and logged on, and they had Yahoo set up as the default page. A search engine…and I needed a subject to search for to try this thing out…”I know – Bigfoot!” - I was pleased to learn that there were several Websites devoted to the subject. Ever since then I’ve stayed at least more-or-less in touch with what’s going on in the field of bigfoot research. I’ve found elements of it that interest me in new ways, and the interest has evolved a good deal beyond where it was when I was nine years old. While I’m not likely to go on many excursions into the woods expecting to find irrefutable evidence that Bigfoot exists, I will continue to look into it and try to learn what I can.

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