In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,16

and lambasting the scientific establishment for its closed-mindedness, would stir debate in a community that Bindernagel described as being “asleep at the wheel.” In The Discovery of the Sasquatch, a philosophical manifesto seven years in the making, Bindernagel threw everything he had at the scientific establishment. He argued that in spite of the lack of formal recognition by science, the Sasquatch had, nonetheless, already been “discovered.” It was a de facto discovery, he insisted, made first by indigenous people and later by colonists and everyone else who followed. It just wasn’t officially sanctioned. He went on to list all the mental impediments and misconceptions that prevented science from seeing what he and others had so easily recognized.

“The proposition put forward here,” Bindernagel writes, “is that the acquisition of a sasquatch specimen will merely be additional corroboration of a discovery which can already be claimed on the basis of published testimonial evidence, evidence which has been corroborated by the archived physical evidence of tracks.”3

But like his first book, The Discovery of the Sasquatch landed with a thud.

Now in the grip of disillusionment, and of his growing sense of mortality, Bindernagel is spending most of his time trying to make available every shred of his findings for when he is no longer alive, by way of the Internet. He says the upsurge in popular interest in the subject, with self-published books, reality-TV shows, and websites, largely by nonscientists, threatens to eclipse his lifework. His fear of being forgotten, postmortem, weighs on him.

“I was recently with a younger researcher from Alberta who didn’t even know who John Green was!” he says. “Imagine that—John Green! This is the guy who literally started Sasquatch studies. I mean, gee whiz, if a guy like Green’s already being forgotten, what’s gonna happen to the rest of us?”

Tomorrow I leave for the Great Bear Rainforest, and in the time left with my host, I want to poke and prod at his arguments a bit more. I suggest to Bindernagel that we abandon his leafy Courtenay subdivision in favor of a place more connected to his work—a place with a bit of an edge and some Sasquatch history. We hop into his car and head to a local haunt known as Medicine Bowls, a stretch of rapids and waterfalls on the Browns River, located ten miles from town.

Medicine Bowls, Bindernagel tells me, is on the edge of a subalpine region called the Forbidden Plateau. The name for the area was coined after an incident in the late 1800s in which three dozen women and children of the K’ómoks First Nation mysteriously vanished from a makeshift camp while the men were on a war raid. No trace of them was ever found. Some in the tribe claimed that they were abducted by a race of alpine giants believed to inhabit the region.

We leave the open fields and thin patches of wood at the edge of town and drive into an ever-thicker coniferous forest. Bindernagel’s demeanor changes. He is suddenly excited, gesturing with flitting, birdlike movements at areas where sightings of the creatures occurred in the past.

“A bunch of reports came in from here,” he says, with a big grin, “and now I’m getting cameras set up in the area. It’s a promising spot, but nothing like where you’re going tomorrow on the central coast.”

We turn onto a bumpy dirt road beneath a canopy of large cedars and continue to a clearing at its far end. We park the car and bushwhack down a hill until we reach the moss-covered banks of the Browns River, which is a mostly dry gash of rock careening through majestic timber. There has been no rain on the British Columbia coast for weeks, but snowmelt from the high peaks of the Vancouver Island Ranges keeps the river at a trickle.

As we scramble down the high banks, Bindernagel warns me that the gully drops precipitously in parts up ahead, creating treacherous whirlpools when the river is higher.

“I got a report some years back of a Sasquatch standing up there beside those trees, looking down at a group of people,” he says, pointing at a tree-lined cliff.

“It wouldn’t be that hard,” I reply, “for a man in a fur suit to get up there and scare people down below.”

Whatever the reality of Bigfoot, hoaxing is an undeniable part of the Sasquatch phenomenon. Shortly before my trip, a forty-four-year-old man, wearing a military-style ghillie camouflage suit, was run over by two cars and killed while crossing a highway