IMAGES: GETTY; ALAMY
BIGFOOT
W
alking into Mount Hood National Forest, treading almost silently over the ground, Lance Olander was 90-minutes deep into the wilderness, and yet in the
right place at the wrong time. Foam-lipped rapids from a nearby creek were
besieging the riverbed with a wailful rush, their eddies like glossy paint in a mixer. But Lance paid no attention to its flow as he reached its banks, only to what he saw morph from shadow to life across the water in the lee of the mountain. The blood-red eye sockets seemed to erupt in rage.
The howl was terrifying. It sucked the air out of his chest. And no sooner had he seen the 7ft-tall figure, he imagined death, or worse still, then scrambled, breathless, back into the woods, where the darkness crowded in further. The danger felt real. Lance first met Bigfoot aged 23, when the
legendary creature of the Pacific Northwest appeared in silhouette, hair matted and chest- beating. It arrived with a rampant battle cry, like a forest hallucination. Years later, he found himself in a similar predicament on a camping trip with his wife, the pair racing screaming from another male that was staring down at them from a tree strangled with moss. “It was close enough that I could feel its breath,”
he says, as we pick our way over gnarled roots on a hiking trail in the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness, some 55 miles east of Portland and within Mount Hood National Forest. He stops, jerking out his phone to show photos of footprints he’s gathered over the years. “I’m scared to death of Bigfoot and I don’t go looking for them. Rocks have been thrown at me, trees smashed, I’ve stared one right in the face — all scary as hell.” That roar, that rage — that unexplained terror — is something he still carries with him to this day. Once could be considered a hoax. Two times
a bad joke. But over the past five decades, Lance claims to have had a multitude of close Bigfoot encounters. Considering that Clackamas County, where Lance lives in Oregon’s Cascades, reports more sightings than almost anywhere else in North America, that doesn’t seem so strange. It is, I come to understand over several days in the region, the defining mystery of this swathe of the ungraspable Pacific Northwest interior. And there’s a sense that everyone has some sort of unusual story to tell about the ape-like cryptid, sceptic or not. When we first meet, I study Lance’s tufty-
bearded face for signs of recurring bad dreams. It’s a late afternoon of splintering clouds and we park at the trailhead where his first encounter happened,
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near to Route 224, a road now nicknamed the Bigfoot Highway. On the path ahead is a tangle of trees — a woodland choked with cedar and old-growth hemlock where twilight cuts through, gathering figure-like shadows and hinting at unexplained life beyond our gaze. We walk in a bubble of strained silence. Perhaps understandably, Lance approaches
the forests surrounding his home today with genuine anxiety. From Clackamas County, unruly thickets of evergreens stretch more than 100 miles between the Columbia River Gorge and the exposed shoulders of the Mount Hood stratovolcano and its abrupt, perfect cone. It’s a backdrop stacked with drama: cliffs and ridges suggest that anything could be hiding out here, while the whispering forest is so dank, dense and dark, it’s a horror show for anyone with a fear of things that go bump in the night. Lance doesn’t have to explain the difficulties he faces in making people believe in him — it’s writ large in the surrounding terrain. This is a landscape so laden with natural disorder, it’s never yet been truly mapped. Around us, the trees groan and the air itself feels
intense. A measure is Lance’s eyes — they twitch as we walk. We pause, now and fairly frequently, and he stays vigilant. As do I.
The misnamed town of Boring How Bigfoot came to be hiding out in some of America’s wildest places, alongside black bear, mountain lion and coyote, no one really knows. This mythical creature — commonly known as Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest — doesn’t exist in the minds of most people. But backcountry searches for the overgrown ape are increasingly a rite of passage across the US and, thanks to commercial operations like the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (more on that later), expeditions in potential Bigfoot habitat zones from Arizona to Washington are now common currency. In Oregon alone, in fact, there have been nearly
4,000 reported sightings over the last century, while the state’s Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest is the only place in the world with a monitored Sasquatch trap. And there’s nothing crankish in this. The hope — believe it or not — is that the legend will be captured on film or phone walking out of a forest, out of the pages of a novel and into the realms of observable science. The gateway to Oregon’s Bigfoot Country is the
incongrously named town of Boring, and it’s here that I meet seasoned researcher and Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization alumni Cliff Barackman, who founded the North American Bigfoot Center, the following day. Paying homage to Bigfoots’ pride
Clockwise from top left: Trekking in the foothills near Mount Hood; Visitors picnicking a Trillium Lake; the temperate rainforest of the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness Previous pages: Trillium Lake at sunset
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