Blue Creek Mountain

by John Green

On the last Sunday in August, 1967, I returned from a trip to northern California with Harold McCullough and Dale Moffit from North American Guard Dog Service. I had seen a few poor tracks in two sizes, 15" and 13", the first tracks I had seen for four years. Purpose of the trip had been to try a tracking dog on the tracks, but they proved to be too old and trampled on. While there I talked to Mrs. Bud Ryerson, who had seen the tracks when they were new, and I gave her my phone number with a request that she call me if more tracks were seen. I also stressed that it was important that they be uncontaminated by human scent.

On Monday morning at seven the telephone woke me. It was Bud Ryerson. whom I had not met, and all he said was that what I was looking for was there. He was calling on a radio phone, and he never mentioned "Bigfoot" or tracks. I asked him when, and he said during the preceding evening. That sounded very promising, so I started phoning around to try to round up dogs, scientists and money.

I drew a blank on the scientists, but to my surprise was able to get $500 from the Vancouver Sun to help pay for an airplane. There were difficulties and delays but shortly after 1 p.m. Dale, Rene, the dog and I were packed into a Cessna 185, heading south.

We arrived at Orleans, near Bluff Cleek, at dusk, and it was fully dark by the time we got to where the tracks were. The dog showed great interest, but none of us wanted to follow those tracks into the bush in the dark.

Mr. Ryerson showed us where the tracks had been noticed first, at a place where a few metal parts of a tractor and some smaller items in boxes had been left near the road. These had been scattered out onto the road during the preceding night, which had quickly drawn attention to the big prints in the deep dust.

Mr. Ryerson said there were three sets of the big tracks wandering along the road, a large set and two smaller sets. We studied a few prints closely by flashlight. They were familiar to me — the same 15-inch print with a split in the ball of the foot that I had first seen nine years earlier, but I had never seen such sharp detail. The prints had been made while a thin layer on top of the dust was damp from a brief rain, and this had dried so that the impression did not crumble.

It even appeared to show the texture of the skin on tne bottom of the foot, grooved in tiny lines running the length of the print.

Mr. Ryerson had done all he could to keep the tracks undisturbed — even interfering with his own road-building operation, but he could not stop all traffic. Cars had already wiped out the tracks on the travelled part of the road, and every vehicle that passed stirred up a heavy cloud of dust, so that the tracks would obviously lose detail quite quickly.

By this time we were beginning to realize that there were an awful lot of tracks. The following day we counted 590, and there must have been well over 1,000 in the beginning. They were on the road in two sections totalling about 600 yards, and with a gap of several hundred yards between.

The tracks were right at the summit of Blue Creek Mountain, which was actually just the high point on a fairly level ridge, but was close to 5,000 feet in altitude. Mr. Ryerson was contractor for a new access road being built along the ridge, replacing an old jeep road. The previous tracks had been about five miles farther south, on the same road.

We were back with the dog at daybreak, taking up the track where the 15" foot left the new road and turned down an old jeep road baked too hard to show a track. Immediately we were disappointed, for the dog showed none of the interest of the night before. Told to track, she wandered erratically, sniffing under the small bushes beside the road, and Dale told us that was the last place where a trace of scent would hang.

Eventually she took us a few hundred yards down the old road and then came back.

That finished the primary object of the trip, but in the meantime we learned that the B. C. Museum was sending an anthropologist down to study the tracks, so we decided to wait until ne arrived. We took a lot of photographs and counted and studied tracks, but as the day wore on the heat went over 100 degrees. We had had almost no sleep, having driven back to Orleans in the middle of the night to telephone, and we probably didn't accomplish half what we should have in studying the tracks. Nor did we make any systematic search for hair.

With two wide strips of road showing only tire marks we were no longer able to confirm that there had been two smaller tracks with the big one. There were many places where there were two sets of tracks, one on each side of the road and sometimes both on one side or one in the middle, but at the only place where there were three, two of them were the large size. It appeared that the larger individual had wandered into the bush and then returned to the road farther back, covering the same ground twice.

The smaller track left the road a considerable distance before the larger one, stepping up onto a bank about two feet high. Off the road the ground was rocky and overgrown with low, stiff brush, conditions where none of us could follow a trail.

Don Abbott, B. C. Provincial Anthropologist, arrived the following night. In the meantime we had made a few casts, but we were saving the clearest tracks for him to see, and we had checked the same two tracks on a sandbar down in Bluff Creek, about 10 miles away and several thousand feet lower down. They had been made the same night as the tracks on the ridge, but we did not learn of them until two days later. There were few tracks left, as they had circled some trailers where loggers were living, and the loggers had later removed the trailers, leaving ittle but tire tracks behind. There were a few good prints however, showing the extreme depth that is always obvious in damp sand, where human prints hardly sink in at all.

Don Abbott's approach to the matter of preserving tracks was a new one to me. He proposed to use glue and sacking to reinforce the ground itself and lift the actual track instead of casting it. We spent much of one day working on two or three prints in this way.

Next day he contacted Humboldt State University at Arcata and persuaded several zoologists to come to see the tracks — this did not prove easy, he said, even though they were only eighty miles away. They gave him crackpot treatment until he happened to impress them with his language — saying they were the tracks of a "bipedal primate."

The delay in waiting for those men proved costly. We did not get back up the hill until mid-afternoon, and in the meantime a grader operator had wiped out almost all the tracks, including those we had so painstakingly glued the day before.

The Humboldt State men did not see enough to base an opinion on. We cast what few tracks were left, and Don cancelled a trip by Charles Guiguet, the Curator of Mammals at the B. C. Museum, who was to have come down next day.

None of us, including Don Abbott, had any real doubts, while the tracks were there to look at, that they were indeed tracks, and not a hoax. However Don is a cultural anthropologist, not a zoologist, and the zoologists lost no time in presenting arguments to persuade him to revise his opinion.

This was the first time, as far as I know, that a representative of any scientific institution was ever sent to study the big tracks anywhere in North America. It resulted in the museum director. Dr. Clifford Carl, and Hon W.K. Kiernan, Minister of Recreation and Conservation, publicly requesting more information about the Sasquatch. The response was not heavy, but it did add a few new reports to the file, one of them an exceptionally interesting one, and the knowledge that the museum is interested may well result in future incidents being brought to the attention of investigators while there is still time to do something about them.

From: On the Track of the Sasquatch (John Green, 1668. B.C.: Cheam Publishing)