so, I was surprised by how polite and deferential he was on the phone. His endearing use of the fading interjections of mid-twentieth-century English, like my goodness, gee whiz, and shucks, only sets him further apart from the pushy gaggle of bounty hunters. But when we shake hands, I catch a flash of stubborn determination and restless agitation rising from beneath the old-fashioned niceties. This is someone questing for a grail.
“I just came back from checking the camera traps,” he says, as we stroll toward his home, referring to the battery-operated digital trail cameras that Sasquatch enthusiasts strap to the trunks of trees in the hope of photographing the creatures by chance. “That’s my latest project. I’ve been getting loads of great images of black bears, deer, and even cougars.”
“No Sasquatches?” I playfully ask.
“They’re a bit more camera shy, as you can imagine,” he says chuckling. “But, gee, you know, we’re just weeks away from the salmon coming in. That’s when the Sasquatch come down from the mountains for that first bit of rich protein after a dry summer.”
We step inside and Bindernagel leads me into his living room, which resembles a flea market. Stacks of books, mounds of paper, and cardboard boxes teeming with knickknacks are heaped on top of retro 1970s furniture. Joan apologizes for the mess, saying they’re in the process of moving.
When I look down, I see assembled neatly on the floor several white plaster-of-Paris casts of gigantic, humanoid footprints—Sasquatch tracks. Most of them are a foot and a half in length, and considerably wide at the sides. Some look very human. Others are more mushroom-like, with splayed toes. They are all unsettling.
Bindernagel takes a step back and gauges my reaction. I pick up a cast, the most intact and symmetrical of the bunch. It’s lean and muscular, with unusually long toes and a slight hourglass shape to it.
“Joan and I came across that one in 1988 during a hike in Strathcona Park, not far from here,” he says. “They’re the only tracks I’ve ever found myself. That one’s sixteen inches.”
I eye the details of the heavy plaster cast as if it were some rare artifact.
“Tracks are the best evidence we have,” he adds, gently taking the cast from my hands and placing it carefully on the ground before I’m finished with it. “People sometimes laugh at us for making these casts. But when it comes to studying other mammals, we biologists depend more on tracks than on sightings.”
“How do you reconcile these tracks with the fact that people have been known to hoax footprints?” I ask.
“I’ll show you,” he says, with confident enthusiasm, picking up another cast, with much shorter toes. “This is one of a series of tracks in which the Sasquatch had a very flexible foot. It would scrunch, or curl, its toes while it walked. You couldn’t fake a track like this.”
I examine the cast. The toes are spread out asymmetrically.
“We have others, similar to this, that show the animal climbing up a steep hill, with its toes moving from track to track—and with little or no heel registering in the soil. In some cases, you’d need to carry hundreds of pounds just to make a deep enough impression in the ground. That’s too big of a job for a hoaxer.”
I’d heard similar arguments. The late Grover S. Krantz, a paleoanthropologist at Washington State University who had researched Sasquatch from the early 1960s until his death in 2002, alleged that some purported Sasquatch tracks revealed a perfect alignment of joints and bones—the same range of anatomical features that reflect the necessary biomechanical redesign of the foot to carry a mass that large. He also showed some tracks that contain dermal ridges: skin patterns on the sole of the foot similar to fingerprints.* Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University and the inheritor of Krantz’s scholarly Sasquatch mantle (including his collection of Bigfoot casts), continues to plug those arguments.
“If this is all so incontrovertible,” I say to Bindernagel, “then why aren’t other scientists looking into this?”
“That’s the $64,000 question,” he says. “The answer: ignorance of the evidence. And it’s also the implication of the evidence—that we’re dealing with an existing mammal. Scientists can’t handle that.”
In full stride Bindernagel picks up another massive plaster cast of the splayed-toe, mushroom-like variety.
“Scientists will look at this track, but then a theoretical problem crops up. How can we have an upright ape in the world? And, of all places, here in