Day 1: Dogs on a bus, a little howling and lots of driving, but no (real) signs of Bigfoot. JOHN MARSHALL begins his quest in the wooded wilds of Oregon.
TILLAMOOK, Ore.
Expedition leader Matt Moneymaker calls out for Bigfoot. (AP Photo/John Marshall)
Moneymaker reacts after getting a response to his Bigfoot call. (AP Photo/John Marshall)
The long caravan was bouncing along the potholed-filled, backwoods road when the lead car nearly slammed on the brakes.
"What is that? Is that a school bus?" someone asked over the radio.
A reply: "What's that doing up here? There aren't any routes back in here."
Then we saw it: a yellow bus passing us in the other direction, only instead of school children, it was full of dogs, nearly every breed imaginable, hanging out the windows and barking at us. At the wheel was a dirty-faced man with a gray beard, a trucking hat and black-toothed grin that can only be described as evil.
It was like a scene out of a Stephen King horror movie, but then I guess we should have expected it. We were, after all, searching for Bigfoot.
Yes, you heard it right. A Bigfoot hunt.
Now, let me get this out of the way: When it comes to Bigfoot, I'm an undoubted skeptic, figuring I'm more likely to see Jimmy Hoffa at a 7-Eleven than the 7-foot primate.
That said, I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to traipse around the woods looking for this creature -- just saying the words "I went on a Bigfoot hunt" were worth it. Now, I don't know the first thing about tracking a Sasquatch, so I decided to join up with a group called the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization for a three-day trip to find the big fella in western Oregon.
I wasn't going to do it alone. You think about what kind of people might be out there searching for Bigfoot, and you get a little concerned (though they actually ended up being quite nice), so I invited buddies Eric Gruber and Mike Packard to tag along on what I figured to be a snipe hunt.
I wasn't that far off.
The first step was locating the camp, which proved to be nearly as hard as finding Bigfoot himself.
Because of poorly marked signs -- shouldn't they be before the fork in the road instead of after? -- it took us 90 minutes to travel the 9.8 miles to base camp.
Along the way, Gruber and I drove through vegetation that felt like a Venus flytrap closing around us, and past a farmhouse that looked like the one in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." We weren't sure if we really heard someone say "Go upstairs and get grandpa," and we didn't stick around to find out.
Then there were the two Deliverance-looking characters in a beat-up pickup that passed us during a bathroom break. We jumped back in the car before you can say "That one sure has a purty mouth."
Once at camp, our first task was to scout places to search for these hairy bipeds. That meant a wild ride along rain-soaked roads, trying to keep up with expedition leader Matt Moneymaker -- first cousin of poker star Chris Moneymaker -- who raced around like it was the Dakar Rally.
With a big squish of mud and a "whew!" we arrived at the top of a ridge and waited for the second scout team to get into place across a huge canyon. We stood around for about 30 minutes when I was startled by a whoop that sounded like a cross between a fire engine and a constipated owl.
"What the @&%#? was that?" I asked Gruber.
"He's calling Bigfoot," he said.
"You've got to be kidding."
He was right. Apparently Bigfoot is attracted to the sound of an owl in need of bran.
Moneymaker hooted several times, checking on the radio to see if the second team could hear. They could hear us, but we couldn't hear them, until a sound came echoing across.
"Wait, wait, wait! Everybody quiet!" Moneymaker said before checking with the second team to see if they did it.
Yep, you guessed it, a false alarm.
The yelling didn't work, so they went to Plan B: knocking on trees with ax handles. This, apparently, is the way Bigfoot communicates when he doesn't want to vocalize.
Gruber and I felt like knocking their heads together like Moe.
This method didn't produce any results either, in part because the trees were too wet. That's no surprise considering the area looked like something from King Kong's island -- ground covered in ferns and moss growing on all sides of the trees.
"What a bummer -- no Squatchies today," Moneymaker said. "They'd have answered if they heard it. They wouldn't be able to resist."
It was hard for me and Gruber to resist laughing.
Next was another I-can't-believe-we-didn't-slide-off-a-cliff race to another ridge. This time, the whoops got a response.
After Moneymaker did his best fire engine impression, a group of coyotes let loose a howl to the north, then another pack did the same to the south. Then came a sustained howl-like sound from the group to the south.
"F#&%@ A!" Moneymaker yelled out, followed by a "Yes!" as he raised his arms in the air.
"You just heard a Sasquatch," one of the BFRO guys said to Gruber.
The two skeptics exchanged smirks as the rest of the group stood with looks of amazement before gathering to listen recordings of the sounds.
"That's just too throaty to be a coyote," someone said after listening to the tape. "It's got to be a Squatch."
Uh, OK. Gruber and I certainly aren't experts, but it sounded an awful lot like coyotes to us. But what did we know?
After the initial euphoria, Moneymaker acknowledged that the sounds weren't conclusive, so he decided to lure Bigfoot with different sounds.
Positioning members of the team along the ridge in case a squatch came up through the bushes, Moneymaker let out a series of groans that sounded like a ghost from Scooby Doo. Then came more tree knocking.
Nothing.
Gruber and I stood off to the side, wondering why he didn't do the backed-up owl howl again, but we figured he was the Bigfoot expert and knew what he was doing.
Back at camp, news of the calls spread quickly. Gruber and I heard the story told at least a half-dozen times as groups of people gathered around the tape recorder, nearly everyone agreeing it HAD to be a Squatch.
Trying to sleep in the uneven back of an SUV, Gruber and I wondered what we had gotten ourselves into. But, hey, at least we heard something, and there were still two days left in the trip.
If we had only known what was coming, we might have left right then.
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PART II: Bigfooted blunder
PART III: Missing Bigfoot
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John Marshall is asap's sports writer, based in Denver.
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