Legends & Tales Of Mount St. Helens

Bigfoot At Spirit Lake

--Excerpt from Michael McLeod

Chuck Bolsinger wrote an essay about Bigfoot, spurred by his outdoor experiences while working as a forester and plant ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service. Chuck begins his essay with a story about Harry Truman, the character who owned and operated the lodge at the base of Mt. St. Helens for many years until the mountain blew its top and buried him and the lodge under a hundred feet of molten rock and ash in 1980.

A few years before the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, I worked on a timber-cruising crew near that mountain. We stayed in a barn-like 'lodge,' and ate at a nearby diner. During breakfast one morning, Harry R. Truman, who owned Mount St. Helens Lodge on Spirit Lake, came in. He was wearing an ancient raincoat and the same wrinkled cap he wore years later when he told a cameraman, a helicopter pilot, and the world, he'd never leave his mountain, days before it blew.

Nodding to the diner's proprietor, he poured himself some coffee and came to our booth. "You fellas must be the timber cruisers," he said. He'd obviously had his morning whiskey. "There's something you boys should know. A Big Hairy Guy hangs out in these woods. Someday you'll be taping a tree, and a shadow'll fall on you, and there he'll be. He'll know your fixin' to log his forest, and he'll be mad, and you'll be in trouble." He sipped his coffee. "I can show you scratch marks ten feet high where he tried to get in my barn. I know when he's around by the smell. Whew! But my cats warn me before he gets that's close. They go crazy! Eddie, my wife, won't go out at night at all. The Big Hairy Guy's passed up many chances to get me, 'cause he knows I'm on his side. You boys, though..." He shook his head, sipped coffee.

Truman was saying he didn't like our being there (I couldn't blame him), while ostensibly warning us about Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, as some Native Americans call the legendary creature. We considered ourselves duly advised on both counts. In weeks of beating the brush, we saw no sign of the "Big Hairy Guy," though in that mysterious forest of shadowy glens and hulking, mossy trees, believing in such a creature wouldn't have been much of a stretch...

For more than a century, Bigfoot "sightings" have been reported all over the Northwest. In 1890 railroad workers in British Columbia supposedly captured a rock-throwing apelike creature called "Jacko," who escaped before anyone photographed him.

Several "sightings" have been hoaxes, such as those engineered by Ray L. Wallace, who fessed up before he died three years ago. Though his faked footprints and films were amateurish, many believed they were authentic. His biohoax, built on a legend already in place, was not the first involving a cryptid ("hidden animal"), creature of unproven existence. Yeti of the Himalayas and Nessie of Scotland's Loch Ness are examples. They lend themselves to biohoaxes because their existence is physically possible, and for reasons that might be termed romantic or psychological, people want to believe they exist. Former cryptids include gorillas (discovered in 1847), giant pandas (1869), Komodo dragons (1912), and giant geckos (1984).

A rumor had it that a Bigfoot was shot and secretly buried so "enviros" wouldn't find out and demand Bigfoot refuges with connecting BFRs (Bigfoot runways), a mountain myth no less incredible than many. But it's interesting to speculate the ramifications of a confirmed Bigfoot discovery. Personally, I'd like to celebrate by taking the discoverer to breakfast at the diner where I met Harry R. Truman. Of course the eatery is buried under millions of tons of volcanic debris, as is, apparently, Harry, and perhaps—who knows—his "Big Hairy Guy."