even consumer products.* You couldn’t avoid them if you tried.
One popular 1970s TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man, featured the most memorable fictional cameo involving the Sasquatch. In a two-part episode, the show’s protagonist, a bell-bottomed cyborg secret agent named Steve Austin, fought a scraggly-looking, cave-dwelling Sasquatch (played by the seven-foot-four-inch-tall wrestler André the Giant). That bearded, white-eyed, feral beast, who turned out to be a robot created by space aliens, and whose image, I’m certain, bore into the consciousness of millions of young people like me, derived its spellbinding horror from the fact that it looked and acted more like a human than an ape. It was cognizant, a “wild man” in the truest sense of the term.
Steve Austin’s Bigfoot may have set the stage for my obsession, but it was the real-life accounts I read about in the emerging Sasquatch literature that hooked me. The most memorable tales were set in the mountainous and exotic Pacific Northwest. The region’s wildly picturesque expanse made it a kind of fantasy world where anything seemed possible.
The Sasquatch books I read were not innocuous bedtime stories for entertainment’s sake. They were frightening catalogs of alleged real-life monsters encountered by traumatized people. The accounts were interwoven with compelling arguments for the existence of the animals. The books pushed an agenda. The authors sought converts for their worldview, and my young, malleable mind, thirsty for the possibility of some expanded reality, took the bait. The books convinced me to believe in the creatures, even though I had no objective, experiential knowledge of whether they existed or not.
We know from studies involving conditioning that high emotional arousal makes us susceptible to the ideas and opinions of others. Fear, anger, sadness, and excitement function as trance states that focus and lock our attention. When we’re overtaken by these emotions, we’re unable to discern subtleties or think rationally. Emotion puts the gatekeeper of our thoughts, our devil’s advocate, to sleep, opening the door for messages to imprint onto our minds. When the same messages repeat over and over, the risk of thought engineering is especially high.*
My belief in these creatures seemed reasonable at the time. How else could one explain the sheer number of sightings? And the huge, deep tracks? Could thousands of people claiming to see the same thing actually be wrong? Was this all a great hoax spanning centuries and distant corners of the continent? Surely not. There had to be something to it.
But as time passed, no definitive answer emerged. As with all things cyclical, Bigfoot’s popularity ebbed. For a long stretch of time, coinciding with my transition into adulthood, Sasquatch fell from the public eye. I remained intrigued by the subject but didn’t give it much more thought. But a trip to British Columbia in 1998 brought it all back.
In 1998, I visited the town of Nelson in the Kootenay region of British Columbia’s southern interior. It was my first trip to the province. Nelson, a historical silver-mining town nestled in the heart of the Selkirk Mountains, is a sort of promised land. Life in the isolated community is tranquil and unhurried. The mountains guarding it have a rugged, ageless disposition, bristling with lush forests and peppered with crystal deposits and hot springs.
This also happens to be serious Sasquatch country, though a lot of people don’t know it. Unlike some places with more obvious Bigfoot tie-ins, Nelson doesn’t have a widespread reputation for being a wild-man hub. But its Bigfoot bona fides are merely less conspicuous. This I learned later—I was simply there to visit a friend who had recently made Nelson his new home. It was the middle of winter. The town was covered in a blanket of freshly fallen snow, the kind that floats down in clumps the size of silver dollars, muffling all sound and rendering everything inert. It was a lazy kind of week; we had no real plans other than lounging around, drinking beer, and frequenting the town’s sushi restaurant and vegetarian cafés.
Then one day we decided to go for a hike.
The trail we chose began at the top of my friend’s street on the edge of town and curved its way around the slopes of Silver King Mountain. We stepped out in the crisp, pine-scented air and made our way up the snowy road to the trailhead. Above us, the forested mountain grew ever more deeply white until, alabaster and heaving with snow, the high slopes vanished behind voracious clouds. The farther we went, the whiter