Bigfoot

Bluff Creek drains into the Klamath through Six Rivers National Forest in
Humboldt County, California — logging road, second growth, and gravel bar. The
designation was opened there in 1958, and what still arrives is mostly from
northern California and western Oregon. Accounts give a bipedal animal seven
to eight feet tall, heavy across the shoulder, arms hanging below the knee,
and two details recur: the knee stays bent through the whole stride, and the
animal turns the trunk to look rather than the head.

The casts are the difficulty. Impressions collected since 1958 from drainages
several hundred miles apart share a flexion across the middle of the foot,
where a human foot is rigid. A line of more than a thousand prints crossed
snow near Bossburg, Washington, in December 1969, the right foot in that
series deformed and splayed at the outer edge. Casts filed later from two
other counties reproduce that asymmetry in the same position, taken by people
who had never handled the Bossburg set.

No body has been recovered and no bone. Hair submitted since 1998 has returned
bear, elk, dog, or human contamination, and the film shot at the creek in
October 1967 has been measured for six decades without settling anything. The
road has been logged out and replanted twice, and the site cannot now be fixed
closer than a few hundred meters. Casts are still arriving, and the file stays
open on those alone: three of the 1958 originals have never
been examined outside the family that holds them.