'We become more so'
What chasing bigfoot in New Mexico taught me about getting older and not having all the answers.
Bigfoot has been part of my life since I was a kid, watching "Unsolved Mysteries" and "The X Files" and hearing about the Missouri Momo.
I was a library kid who checked out every non-fiction book until I got to the ones on the fringe. First, it was the Guinness Book of World Records and Ripley's Believe It or Not. Then, books about the Loch Ness monster and the abominable snowman fed my curiosity about what is within the realm of possibility.
My dad had this curiosity, too. If there was a documentary on TV about bigfoot or aliens or anything paranormal, we were watching it.
RELATED: A father’s gift: Enduring curiosity
But as I entered high school and started pursuing a career in journalism, my interest waned in news that could not be proven indefinitely. I needed facts and worked in a field that rewarded my need for knowledge.
For 20 years, I didn't think much about bigfoot. If the big guy hadn't been found yet, it's unlikely that my own curiosity about the subject would do much to "answer" the question.
But then, about a year into the pandemic, I went camping with my sister and her family in Idaho. I had recently left my food writing job at the Statesman and knew I was on the cusp of a significant transformation. I just didn't know how I was changing.
We drove three hours north of Boise to Warm Lake, where we set up tents and an RV among the chipmunks running around this busy campground with smoke from nearby wildfire choking the air. One night, while trying to avoid the smoke outside, I chatted with the guys who worked at the bar in the lodge. They started telling their own bigfoot stories. I heard about tree limbs being thrown across trails and rocks hitting cars in the middle of the night. Hearing their stories was fun, but I didn't think any more about it.
But later that night, long after the campground had fallen quiet, I awoke to a massive crash. An enormous tree had fallen within earshot, and it shook me to my bones. My heart was racing. No one else woke up.
That crack in the night and the stories the night before snapped the question of bigfoot back into my mind. I found a podcast called "Wild Thing" by a former NPR reporter named Laura Krantz, who happened to be the grandniece of Grover Krantz, one of the Four Horsemen of bigfoot.
Learning that there were Four Horsemen of bigfoot piqued my interest, but then it was a watershed. Rock throwing. The Sierra Sounds. Area X in Southwest Oklahoma. The stories from life hunters who had daytime encounters and then stopped going out into the woods altogether.
I was hooked all over again. It turns out that the internet and cable TV have fueled significant growth in the bigfoot industry in the past few decades. There are dozens of conferences across the country that draw tens of thousands of people. (I'm attending my first bigfoot conference this weekend: the Texas Bigfoot Conference in Jefferson, where the famed Dr. Jeff Meldrum will speak. He's the Idaho State anatomy professor who specializes in primate foot morphology. No, I did not know what morphology was before picking up this hobby.)
One of the leading organizations is the Bigfoot Research Organization, or BFRO, which collects sighting reports — more than 77,000 in the past 30 years — and hosts camping expeditions in sasquatch hotspots across the country.
I decided last year that I wanted to go on one.
That's how I found myself eating bigfoot-shaped cookies and exploring the wilderness of northern New Mexico with a group of people willing to pay to walk around the woods at night with red headlamps on our heads and listen for tree knocks.
Some of the people on my trip had been to this valley before, but none had more encounters with the creature than our host, an elder on the reservation who no longer counts the sightings and other encounters. He spoke of the black one with the white spot. The small ones with their mothers.
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