Sasquatch sightings

You meet some interesting people when you are out looking for 8-foot-tall, 800-pound, apelike, hairy creatures.

Recently, I have met several – people, that is – after a series of articles on the evidence for sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot, was published in the Handle Extra last month.

One woman, who asked that her name be withheld due to her concern about ridicule, broke 40 years of silence to relate how her late husband and his hunting buddy had heard and seen a “creature” with a “horrible odor” somewhere in the Silver Valley. They were convinced it was Bigfoot.

I received several e-mail requests to give the writer a call.

One of the area codes was unfamiliar to me; it turned out to be for Hattiesburg in southern Mississippi. The e-mailer, Tim Boone, had become interested in Bigfoot after seeing a movie as a teenager in Louisiana.

Last fall, he fulfilled a lifelong dream and traveled to the Pacific Northwest to run down some leads on sasquatch. He spent part of September in the Blue Mountains near Walla Walla, some of the time with experienced Walla Walla Bigfoot hunter Brian Smith.

Putting together recommendations from Smith, information from his own considerable reading about sasquatch in the Blue Mountains and a tip from a store clerk in Tollgate, Ore., Boone found himself in the backcountry of the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area. He says he managed to find, in three widely scattered locations, a track, a strong odor and an actual creature far across a canyon.

Closer to home, I talked to Dean Burley of Athol.

About 30 years ago, Burley and his family spent two years living in a cabin at a cedar camp in the rugged upper Pack River country on the north side of Schweitzer Mountain.

During their time there, they spotted three creatures that Burley says he cannot perceive as being anything other than sasquatches.

His son saw a typically large, black-coated beast that gave him a pretty good fright. But a female sasquatch they had around their cabin off and on for an extended period of time was not typical, Burley said. “She was small.”

That animal had small Bigfoot feet that Burley’s wife could match with the length of her feet, but they were much wider than hers. The creature was only about 5 feet tall and the “yellow of a cocker spaniel dog,” according to Burley.

He says he saw her a number of times, and she would allow him to get within six feet without showing any aggressive signs.

On one occasion, Burley says, he saw her with what he believed to be a young sasquatch that was a dark brown and also about 5 feet tall. The female was calling to it in what sounded to Burley like “howler monkey” language.

Burley also says his daughter once saw the female beast while on a hiking trip, screamed and knocked her brother flat in her flight.

When asked if I could use his name in this article, Burley said, “Yes you can. I know what I saw.”

The response I received that came as the biggest surprise was from a person I immediately recognized from my research for these articles. Tom Akren was a curator for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization for a dozen or so years, and I have read many of his reports documenting other people’s evidence of sasquatch.

Prior to retirement, Akren was a Los Angeles County sheriff who now lives in Coeur d’Alene.

Aside from his work for the researchers organization, Akren has his own stories to tell.

In the early 1940s, Akren’s father owned an old prospector’s cabin in what was to become the Matazel Wilderness Area in southern Arizona. The original owner had reported seeing a pair of sasquatches on the road to the cabin about 80 or 90 years ago now.

One summer while on an extended stay at the cabin, Akren and two other boys went out to gather firewood, Akren carrying his father’s World War I-era .30-06 Springfield rifle.

From 50 feet away in a dark part of the forest, the boys heard a terrifying scream like nothing they had ever heard. They abandoned the rifle and high-tailed it back to the cabin.

A little later on the same trip, Akren’s father yelled for the kids to follow as he chased after a creature whose head he had seen bobbing along over a high rock wall. No one else saw the sasquatch, but they did find tracks.

Akren showed me a picture of himself, his father and sister and two other boys from that trip. Two of the kids were holding rifles, and one boy’s arm was in a sling.

Vacations were tough affairs in those days.

Akren says he has had another personal encounter, this one right here close by.

While on an elk hunt in the Blue Creek area, he chanced upon that often-reported odor unique to Bigfoot run-ins.

Over the years as a curator for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, Akren says, he has received hundreds of e-mail messages concerning odd things seen and heard. He estimates that more than half of them have not been true.

But that leaves a lot of potentially valid reports of sasquatchlike activity.

Based on similar reports from within a 50-mile area from two or more people who do not know each other, Akren suggests several spots in North Idaho and northeastern Washington are especially promising for sasquatch searching: the west side of Priest Lake over into Washington; the Sheep Creek area north of Colville, Wash.; and the mountain areas south of Cataldo, Idaho.

With Akren’s experience and credibility, that’s where I’d be looking.