All those tracks in the woods lead to enduring mystery

By Anne Marie Distefano

The Portland Tribune, Jun 2, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Pattie’s Home Plate in St. Johns is an old-fashioned soda fountain, a place where you can get a burger, fries and a malt, and eat them sitting at the curving luncheonette counter. Neighborhood folks gather here regularly to discuss the weather, local events and, on the last Saturday of every month, Bigfoot.

Ray Crowe founded the Western Bigfoot Society in 1991, and later renamed it the International Bigfoot Society after members signed up from France, Switzerland, England and other countries.

Crowe, who used to own a bookstore just down the street from Pattie’s, became a Bigfoot believer as an adult. In the course of doing research for a short story he was writing, he accompanied a group of Native American Bigfoot hunters on an expedition near Mount St. Helens.

The youthful, beer-drinking search party was too raucous for Crowe, so when they took off on a Jeep ride, he stayed behind. “They weren’t gone 10 minutes,” he recalls, “when I found tracks going down the side of the road.” He felt like the object of a prank. “They told me to watch for hair on the trees,” he says, “and sure enough, there was a hair.” They’d also said to look for broken tree boughs, high up, and he quickly noticed some of those as well. His thought at the time was, “I’m being set up.”

He was intrigued enough to return to the woods three or four more times, though, and eventually became convinced that something really was out there. He began holding monthly meetings; publishing a newsletter, “The Track Record”; and getting in touch with other Bigfoot aficionados.

Tonight’s meeting has attracted about 15 believers. There’s an elk hunter who one day stepped right into a Bigfoot track. There’s Pattie Deitz, the owner of the cafe, whose camper was rocked by something in the middle of the night when she went out bow hunting with her husband near the Trask River. There’s a soft-spoken woman named Laura, who saw a creature while camping with her parents when she was 13 or 14 years old. She’s thinking of going back to the same area, near Silver Lake, this summer to see if she can find anything.

One of the other attendees advises Laura not to give her last name. Those who believe in Bigfoot, he says, are often discriminated against. His first name is Neal, and he tells me, “Bigfoot is not like anything else on this Earth, other than the Little Foot.” There are more Little Feet in the United States, he says, than humans.

“How come I’ve never heard of them before?” I ask.

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