Smitten Bigfooters keep making tracks into the Blue Mountains

by Richard Cockle

Believers keep the focus of their relentless hunt for the legendary Northwest hominid on the wild backwoods east of Walla Walla

Walla Walla — You'll see them leaving town in mud-spattered four-wheel-drives and loaded down with cameras, binoculars and bags of white plaster for casting footprints.

In the Blue Mountains that straddle the Oregon-Washington border, they're part of a rite of spring: Bigfooters, as they call themselves, on the chase of the elusive hairy hominid.

Dar Addington's life changed forever about 15 years ago after coming upon just one set of substantial tracks near the Mill Creek Watershed boundary.

"I was hooked. I swallowed the big, pink shrimp," she joked, likening her obsession to a fish grabbing an angler's bait. "People who haven't seen the tracks just don't get it."

Since 1966, when a Walla Walla cyclist named Pete Luther found a series of 19-inch-long footprints along Tiger Creek Canyon Road east of Walla Walla, the Blues have been a recognized hot spot for Bigfoot hunters.

Orthodoxy among the trackers has it that a tribe of as many as 12 of the creatures inhabits the 21,700-acre watershed and the adjoining Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness near Walla Walla.

Some locally famous and colorful Bigfoot pursuers no doubt have contributed to the legend. The late Wes Sumerlin took to naming the various creatures he met while riding the mountain trails on horseback, and leaving candy and sandwiches for them. The late Paul Freeman made national headlines in 1982 with his description of an encounter with a huge primate while working as a horseback patrolman in the watershed.

"It was big enough to tear the head right off your shoulders," Freeman said.

Earlier this month, Dar Addington and her husband, Mark, drove into the mountains with a friend, Brian Smith, churning up mud and snow as their truck rolled through a shadowy corridor of pines to the road's end.

They hiked to a promontory at 4,500 feet overlooking the watershed and studied the steep, forested canyons where Bigfoot is reputed to lurk.

"It's like a drug, a bad addictive drug," Smith said of the chase. "It is consuming to an unhealthy point for a lot of us."

Smith said he had a face-to-face encounter with two creatures not far from the spot when he was 19. He saw a male and female, 7 to 8 feet tall. They walked across the road and into the forest 30 yards in front of his car at dusk, he said.

Smith jumped out and got a good look at their glossy fur and well-defined muscles, he said. "There was no smell," he said. "I didn't look for tracks."

He's been pursuing Bigfoot ever since. Now 34, he estimates that he's spent thousands of dollars on motion-activated cameras and thermal-imaging equipment.

"What I saw was something more than human," Smith said. "Something in their faces told me they were almost superior to me, if that makes any sense . . . . You can look at an ape in a zoo, and these things were way more than that — I almost felt they were way more than we are."

Many believe the search for Bigfoot should have ended in November 2002 with the death of an 84-year- old prankster named Ray L. Wallace of Centralia, Wash. His son announced that Wallace began using strap-on wooden feet to make tracks in 1958 to inaugurate the legend of the Northwest forests.

But maybe Bigfoot is having the last laugh. The hunters continue to find footprints and, they say, even a glimpse of the monster itself from time to time.

Vance Orchard, a Walla Walla writer, has written two books, "Bigfoot of the Blues" and "The Walla Walla Bigfoot," about the creature and the people who look for it.

Orchard, 87, has yet to see Bigfoot himself, but he came close once driving along a mountain road above Walla Walla, he said. He saw footprints so fresh that particles of dirt were falling into them. Had he arrived seconds earlier, he would have seen the creature, he believes.

The Addingtons, too, have found only tracks in their 15-year search. Once they followed the footprints of three barefooted creatures that appeared to be a family: a mother, father and baby, Mark Addington said.

The group paused to do what appeared to be a dance at an old homestead, then proceeded on with the smaller tracks disappearing from time to time, suggesting the baby was hoisted onto the parents' shoulders, he said.

"Dar and I have never seen him, but I think we have been pretty close," he said.

Such stories bewilder Mike McAllister, a La Grande naturalist. In decades of prowling the forests of Oregon, Idaho, California, Washington and Alaska, he's never seen any sign of such creatures.

McAllister has a degree in wildlife resources from the University of Idaho. He spends 200 days a year in the Northwest's forests doing plant and animal inventories for the U.S. Forest Service and other government and private agencies.

"I just feel very strongly if such animals existed, I would have crossed their path at some point," McAllister said. "I think it is highly unlikely such an animal exists."

The Forest Service doesn't know what to make of all this, admitted Joani Bosworth, spokeswoman for the Umatilla National Forest in Pendleton, which oversees the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness and the Mill Creek Watershed.

"We don't have any solid proof Bigfoot is out there," she said. "It has been in the folklore for many years in the area."

But Mark Addington is untroubled. "It's just kind of like a religion," he said. "You've got to have faith that one day you'll see one when you least expect it."

"The fun," put in Dar Addington, "is in the looking. Even as a little kid, I liked walking in the woods, looking for things."

From: The Oregonian, 20 March 2005.