Exploring the Bigfoot Mystery Across Oregon
Published October 6th, 2024
Photos by Jennifer Bain
It was the very definition of putrid. Think dog sprayed by skunk rolls in dog poop and hides under urine-soaked wool blanket. Oh, and sprinkle the miserable mutt with asafoetida powder, that sulfurous Indian spice nicknamed devil’s dung.
When I reminisce about jetboating down the Columbia River in Oregon looking for Bigfoot, it’s that funky smell that I fondly remember.
Let’s jump straight to the spoiler alert. The smell didn’t come from the ape-like creature himself, but from a miniscule “Sasquatch pheromone” chip that was made by the Osmic Research Co. in Duluth, Minnesota.
The chip was so pungent that Dennis Corwin, the general manager of Portland Spirit and my Bigfoot Adventure guide, donned blue medical exam gloves before taking the lid off of the jar it was stored in. He offered all my fellow passengers a whiff. Not everyone rose to the challenge.
“How many people here are true Bigfoot believers?” Corwin asked when we started the three-and-a-half-hour cruise. Most hands shot proudly up.
“How many are complete skeptics?” A few naysayers showed themselves.
“You can’t be both,” joked Corwin and everyone laughed
So what’s a Portland tour company known for brunch, lunch and dinner sightseeing cruises doing with a Sasquatch pheromone chip created for researchers?
Five years ago, Portland Spirit decided to have some fun with a Bigfoot-themed jetboat adventure. It reached out to Cliff Barackman, a fellow Oregonian who’s famous for Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot and a member of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. He eagerly recorded narration for the cruise and shared the pheromone chip.
The quirky cruise was an instant hit, which comes as no surprise since Bigfoot — aka Sasquatch — is the region’s unofficial mascot. You can’t go more than a few minutes in this state without spotting merch either for sale or on somebody.
“Gone squatchin’.”
“Live. Laugh. Lurk.”
“Keep it squatchy.”
“I believe.”
Those were some of the slogans on the socks I resisted buying in the gift shop at the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon. Yes, Boring is a real town, not even half an hour outside of Portland.
The centre is the creation of Barackman and his wife Melissa, so I wasn’t surprised to see fellow jetboaters there right after our cruise.
“Stop here. See the giant. Discover the legend. Explore the mystery.”
It must have been challenging to create a museum about a creature whose body has never been found. But Barackman does a fine job of displaying evidence, artifacts and information in the exhibit halls and curating Bigfoot and crypto-themed items for the gift shop.
Besides, you can pose with a giant wooden Sasquatch out front and a hairy one named “Murphy” inside. Murphy is a 7.5-foot-tall model made by Ohio artist Bo Bruns who owns the creature replica workshop Unit 70 Studios and usually does work for high-end haunted houses.
Why Murphy?
“Anyone who has been bigfooting for very long has noticed that luck seems to be against them,” interpretive signage laments. “It seems that anything that can go wrong will go wrong at exactly the wrong time. To do bigfoot research is to invite Murphy’s Law into your life.”
I’ve never done Bigfoot research but did go bigfooting in 2018 around Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia. I explored the Harrison Visitor Information Centre + Sasquatch Museum before travelling in a side-by-side with Sasquatch Country Adventures to the woods around Sasquatch Provincial Park.
We didn’t see Sasquatch but didn’t really expect to. I leafed through a black binder full of pictures, held footprint casings, and really just enjoyed the thrill of the imaginary chase.
That’s exactly what I did on the Portland Spirit cruise, only this time it was with a couple dozen other believers on a jetboat that went from Portland to Multnomah Falls and back. Wearing noise-cancelling headphones, we listened to Corwin’s live commentary interspersed with Barackman’s taped audio about “the squatchiest habitat on earth.”
We learned about hairy bipeds in Indigenous culture and around the world, delved into famous sightings across America, and pondered mysteries like “if Bigfoot is real, why don’t we find their bones?” (The complicated answer has something to do with how we rarely find the bones of apex predators like bears). We learned about Bigfoot’s hair, scat and sounds, passed around footprint and knuckle print casts and got a waft of that pheromone chip.
Barackman left us with the message that “Sasquatches are rare, elusive and intelligent.” He said he hoped the believers felt validated, the disbelievers had their minds opened a little bit and the agnostics enjoyed the ride.
“No matter what you do,” he concluded, “keep it squatchy.”
We left that river trip proudly clutching honorary cryptozoology certificates for “bigfootin’ on a jetboat.” Cryptozoology is a word coined in the late 1940s by a Scottish biologist that’s derived from Greek and translates as “the study of hidden animals.” Some define it as a pseudoscience or subculture that searches for and studies unknown, legendary or extinct animals.
My crypto journey was set to end at the Bigfoot Center where much of what I had just learned was repeated in exhibits. I hit the gift shop “for the weirdos” in my life as Barackman had instructed, resisting the Bigfoot bobblehead and ice cube tray in favour of a tasteful fridge magnet shaped like Oregon with a Bigfoot shape cut out of it.
I’d already scored a Bigfoot pine scent air freshener and a “snalien” figurine from the Freakybuttrue Peculiarium in Portland. They became welcome companions as I road tripped to three national parks expecting to leave Bigfoot behind.
Squatchy was the first thing I saw when I pulled into the Painted Hills Vacation Cottages & Retreat in Mitchell almost four hours southeast of Portland on the dry side of the state.
It’s an artsy compound run by Barbara Jacobi and her daughter Aruna. “Squatchy” is a deliberately rusty and strangely handsome Sasquatch sculpture that keeps watch over the hillside parking lot.
Switching gears, I talked with paleontologists, looked for leaf fossils on hikes and gaped at the colourful painted hills that are the stars of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.
It didn’t feel like Bigfoot country, but at the High Desert Museum in Bend, I realized I was wrong.
I stopped at the museum one morning on my way south to Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument & Preserve. An original exhibit, Sensing Sasquatch, runs to January and explores Sasquatch’s past, present and future in the region through an Indigenous lens.
Sasquatch, after all, is an Anglicized term for the word “sasq’ets” from the Coast Salish people of what’s now B.C. And while American pop culture usually puts Sasquatch in Pacific Northwest rainforests, these “non-human others” also live among the High Desert’s dry canyonlands, pine forests and shrubland.
A sticker-covered Subaru Outback trunk juts out of a wall at the exhibit entrance with instructions to “place your Sasquatch sticker on the car and let your preconceptions drive away.” Inside, five Indigenous artists share works about this “protector, shapeshifter and provider.”
“The world is bigger than we know,” Phillip Cash Cash promised at the entry to the exhibit before presenting Sasquatch’s Rattle. “Not everything has to be explained to be known,” wrote Frank Buffalo Hyde for his installation Enǐgma.
To introduce his carved mask Shapeshifter, Rocky LaRock said Sasquatch is “our world, our provider, our brother” and that it’s an honour to feed and protect him.
From HollyAnna CougarTracks DeCoteau Littlebull’s sculpture The Protector, I learned that she protects the protector of all living things by erasing its footprints and burning its hair “so others cannot hunt them.”
Standing by Charlene “Tillie” Moody’s mixed media offering, Around Us Watching, I got an entirely different take on Sasquatch’s smell than on the jetboat. It reeked of smoked buffalo hide and sweetly mysterious forest.
While You’re in Portland
Using Portland as my gateway to Oregon, I bedded down at the Hotel Zags after a trip to the Freakybuttrue Peculiarium to marvel at its haunted dollhouse. I dined at one of the city’s famous food truck pods — Midtown Beer Garden — on Japanese-style sandwiches from Tokyo Sando. Try the egg salad sando and the Tokyo gyoza scotch egg sando.
At Powell’s Books, which claims to be the world’s largest independent bookstore, I scoped out Sasquatch lit but instead nabbed a book about an extinct seabird called the great auk. I made photo pilgrimages to the iconic White Stag (aka Portland, Oregon) sign and the “Keep Portland Weird” mural on the back of Dante’s live music venue.
And while Voodoo Doughnut is more well-known — and I did line up at its branch across from Dante’s — I much prefer Blue Star Donuts which I found in the airport and not far from my hotel. Using fresh herbs, spices and liquors, Blue Star offers “donuts for grownups” and “delicious and unforgettable mouth moments.” I had a wonderful mouth moment with a chocolate bergamot old-fashioned.
Jennifer Bain
After a career at daily newspapers, Jennifer began travelling the world in search of quirk in 2018. She goes wherever the story is, but has a soft spot for Canada and has been to all 10 provinces and all three territories. Jennifer has won multiple awards and written two cookbooks and three travel books. She lives in Toronto but has a vacation house on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which some cheekily say is one of the four corners of the supposedly flat earth.