Trekking California’s mysterious Bigfoot trail

They’re out there. Shadowy creatures of the night making mischief, or worse, under the cover of darkness. These magnified legends have wormed their way into the subconscious, propelling legions of seekers to swarm dense North American forests in search of Bigfoot.

Ken Carter of Martinez has never seen one. But he says he has had close encounters — red eyes eerily glowing in the woods that he swears could not have been an animal. He has heard grunting and stomping in his campsite and once found a big handprint where something smacked the camper shell in the wee hours, startling him awake.

These unexplained occurrences took place over the years at a secretive Sierra hunting ground in Stanislaus National Forest. That’s where Carter stood with fellow East Bay searcher Rich Mingus on a recent brisk fall afternoon. Among the camping accoutrements they brought along was “Stenny,” a Bigfoot doll named for fellow searcher Mark Stenberg, whose health no longer allows him to camp with the gang.

The men embody a cabalistic pursuit of the paranormal that, for a sliver of Americans, has morphed into a pastime as addictive as golf.

Carter, 64, has searched for the famed hominid since 2012, when he and a daughter spent their Sundays watching Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” one of the many shows the legendary beast has inspired.

“We can’t say there is something or there isn’t something,” said Carter, who published “Cancer & Bigfoot, My Story” in 2021. “Just different things happen that make you think there is something.”

Carter had to table the search in 2016 after learning he suffered from lymphoma. He thought he’d never return to these forests, while enduring 700 hours of chemotherapy and, in 2018, a 92-day stay at Stanford Hospital for a bone marrow transplant. But the inveterate outdoorsman has made it back to his favorite spot in the past three years to continue the quest.

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Throughout human history, variations of otherworldly creatures have populated folklore. Australia’s Indigenous people told stories of yowies in the Outback; the Himalayan people had Yetis.

Sasquatch — a variation of the Salish name meaning “wild men” —  is an entrenched North American legend that has birthed a community of believers as robust and absolute as anything that came out of Area 51.

We’ve got unsubstantiated reports of furtive, apelike creatures standing 8 feet to 10 feet tall and weighing upward of 500 pounds. The creature is said to release foul-smelling odors and reportedly blasts factory-whistle sounds, all the while evading humans except for those unproven sightings shown on videos and photographs.

It cannot be denied that this narrative serves valuable anthropological purposes. Bigfoot has become the connective tissue between indigenous cultures and Western interlopers. For example, native inhabitants of the Santa Lucia Mountains told stories of giant silhouetted figures appearing at twilight in the surrounding Big Sur backcountry.

Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers and the Mexican settlers that followed turned the tribal tales into California folklore when recounting stories of los Vigilantes Oscuros, or Dark Watchers. John Steinbeck mentioned the mysterious men in his short story “Flight.”

The old tales have grown into a pseudoscience known as cryptozoology, a singular devotion to prove Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other existential crisis-causing creatures do exist.

Carter found the remote Sierra site on the edge of the Emigrant Wilderness during an expedition with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which has tracked and investigated reported encounters with the bipedal primate in question since 1995.

The group has nine expeditions scheduled across North America in 2022. It charges customers $300 to $500 to join the outings, not including food and transportation.

Professional Bigfoot companies have a financial stake in keeping the legend alive. Carter and Mingus, friends from decades of working together at the former Shell Oil Refinery in Martinez, have no such ulterior motive.

Carter camps at this facility-less locale he calls “Frog Meadow” two to three times a year. A grove of aspen stands on the far side of the meadow. A mixed conifer forest of Jeffrey pine, red fir and Lodgepole pine surround the campsite.

Carter plays host to a regular “Squatch on the Rocks” summer camping trip here.

“You go up with a bunch of your friends and see what you come up with,” Mingus said. “If you don’t find anything, you had a good day of hiking.”

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On this particular day, the men walked to a “gifting stump” about 200 yards away to leave apples and a slice of upside-down pineapple cake for any resident Sasquatches.

Carter wore a cap that said “Bigfoot Lives!” and packed a 45 automatic Kimber pistol. Mingus had a “Squatch and Soda” T-shirt and a Citadel 45 gun.

“Self protection if nothing else works,” said Mingus, 64.

Late in the afternoon, the sun dipped behind the tree line as temperatures plummeted. Carter played Tibetan chant recordings to create an eerie atmosphere as nightfall approached, and we sat around the campfire seeking warmth.

Much of Bigfooting involves watching a crackling fire and recounting story after story of potential encounters. But the men could not out-talk Jason Garcia, a Stanislaus National Forest fire prevention officer, who dropped by for the night from his home in nearby Soulsbyville.

He met Carter and Mingus in 2020 at the camp. Garcia, 40, is intrigued by the possibility but doubtful that Bigfoot is real.

“I might just be out here wasting my time,” he said. “At the same time, there’s a lot of stories. Something is going on out there.”

Carter and Mingus followed a ritual others have employed to attract what they refer to as “visitors.” They hung glow sticks from trees just beyond our tents and later took a night walk in groups.

Carter and I skulked along a dirt road on a blissfully dry night deep in November. Carter’s red-lighted headlamp guided us into the blackness as he hoped for the moment of a Bigfoot revelation. Carter banged on two sticks — wood knocks, he called it — and had me do a high-pitched scream from my youth. Nothing responded.

I slept through the sub-freezing night without a disturbance beyond numb toes. The offerings at the “gifting stump” were untouched when we checked in the morning.

It seems the Big Guy is media shy.

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But there might be more to this Bigfoot mania than chasing rainbows. Utah State folklorist Lynne S. McNeil sees Bigfoot adventures in the wild as returning to some primordial time.

“That says something about what we feel in our hearts,” said McNeil, who grew up in Lafayette and graduated from UC Berkeley. “We want that connection to the wilderness. We don’t want to lose that reality.”

As the Abominable Snowman did decades earlier, Bigfoot dug its pudgy toes into modern-day popular culture through questionable eyewitness accounting.

The origin of the Bigfoot name came from a 1958 Humboldt Times’ column about a logging camp finding enormous footprints in eastern Del Norte County. It turned out a logger had pulled a prank on fellow crewmates, which his children acknowledged upon his death in 2002.

The admission did not derail the Bigfoot train. The definitive moment that launched the legend occurred in 1967 along a tributary of the Klamath River near where the logger had conducted his hoax. Washington cowboys Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin rode horses into the Northern California backcountry and captured film of a Bigfoot.

Whatever really happened, the ranchers returned with a grainy, shaky and unreliable film of a subhuman creature strolling near a river bank that believers say is the ultimate proof of Bigfoot’s existence.

Their 16-millimeter work with a rented Cine Kodak camera has been dissected as much as Abraham Zapruder’s cinematic capture of the John F. Kennedy assasination. No one has proven that the cowboys’ film is fake, though strong circumstantial evidence casts doubts on its authenticity.

In the half century since the film surfaced, Bigfoot seekers have produced all sorts of purported evidence, including hairs, footprints, photographs and video clips. They are not deterred when documentation is proven false or pranksters acknowledge they created a hoax.

“Good quality evidence is scarce if nonexistent,” said Benjamin Radford, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. “We don’t have a body, we don’t have teeth. We don’t have a dead one, we don’t have a live one.”

Nothing reliable has been produced, even with the advent of drones, wildlife cams, night vision binoculars and other technology.

Northern Californians are tethered to the legend because of Patterson-Gimlin’s 59.5-second film. In the Sierra just west of Pinecrest, a pedestrian crossing sign on Highway 108 has the added touch of a Bigfoot illustration, a clear signal that this is Sasquatch country.

I’m not sure what it says about the Bay Area, but the region has spawned a number of aficionados. Tom Biscardi of Menlo Park founded Bigfoot Project Investments, Inc., which raises capital to search for the elusive creature. Former San Jose police officer David Paulides created the North America Bigfoot Search in downtown Los Gatos but has since moved operations to western Montana.

And then there’s the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton. Michael Rugg, 75, opened his little roadside attraction in 2004 at a time when he was rummaging around the Santa Cruz Mountains at night in search of Bigfoot.

The museum is stuffed with Rugg’s collection of footprints, photographs, videos and a locator map with pins showing where local “sightings” occurred.

Rugg, a Stanford graduate in fine arts, sat behind a wooden counter at the museum on a recent afternoon looking like Santa Claus without the famous red costume. It didn’t take much to coax Sasquatch tales out of him.

Rugg said he stood 10 yards from a Bigfoot along the Eel River in Humboldt County as a small child.

“Nothing like having a sighting to change your skepticism,” he said.

Then Rugg offered that Bigfoots work with coyotes to hunt deer.

Um….

Rugg said a Bigfoot-coyote hunting party once surrounded his group on a stakeout above Highway 9. At 4 a.m. the coyotes started moving toward the men, Rugg said. At this point, Rugg played a recording of what the group heard. First, the coyotes yip, then birds make a racket and then “right here,” Rugg said, a faraway scream.

“That was the Sasquatch — at least we think it was,” he said.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization lists reported Bay Area sightings in Pleasanton in 1963, in Livermore in 1990 and “unnatural howling sounds” in the Diablo foothills of Walnut Creek in 2000. It also has found evidence of Bigfoot in the Oakland hills, according to founder Matt Moneymaker, one of the stars of Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot.”

I have spent more than 1,000 days traipsing around the Santa Cruz range, logging some 7,000 trail miles along the way. I’ve seen big pumas (cougars) and little ones (bobcats). I’ve crossed paths with king, gopher and rattlesnakes. There have been foxes, racoons, coyotes, squirrels, owls, eagles, wild turkeys, banana slugs, salamanders, newts, pond turtles, treefrogs and the California red-legged frog. Not to forget the tick that once attacked me somewhere along the banks of Waddell Creek.

But not a trace of Bigfoot, black bear scat notwithstanding.