On a clear day, look south from Seattle and you'll see the snow-covered volcanic cone of Mount Rainier reaching 14,000 feet into the sky. Shift your gaze ninety degrees to the west and at the same distance of fifty miles a range of snowy mountains appears on the horizon. These are the mountains of the Olympic Peninsula. Unlike the comparatively isolated Rainier, the Olympic Range is a wilderness of high peaks and ridges separated by thickly forested, steep-sided valleys. There are roads around the edges, but none that penetrate the interior. Ideal sasquatch habitat, one might imagine.
I was eager to meet Derek Randles, who knows this area as well as anybody – not just because of the high regard in which he is held in the Bigfoot world, but also because he is someone whose whole life was changed in an instant by what he saw in the woods.
‘It all started for me in August of 1985. Myself and two friends of mine were hiking up to the Olympic National Park up by Lake Kushman. We had gotten a late start that day and were about six miles up trail. We were all in our twenties, all in top shape and hiking fast. It was getting a little late in the day and we got to the finger ridge we wanted to explore. We were losing light and we wanted to get up at least to a level place to make camp so that the following morning we could get up and do some exploring, maybe a little rock climbing, something of that nature.
‘We found a level meadow area with a timber line about forty yards over from us. I had this habit of carrying pruning shears in my backpack and I would go around to some of the trees and lower branches and prune off some of the limbs and make myself a bit of a mattress under my tent. So I'm in the process of doing that while Mike and Jim are taking off their backpacks and we're just settling down.
‘We just got started when we hear this crash. And it stopped us in our tracks. We're literally in the middle of nowhere, and heard this big thunk. We all looked up to our left and I thought that, okay, maybe it's an elk taking off or something. Mountain goat, something. And as we're looking up in this area suddenly this rock comes arching out of the timberline and it's probably between a softball and volleyball sized. It's not falling off a cliff because we're on top of this finger ridge, and there's no cliff above us. The rock was thrown and it actually arched, came down and landed to our left. You can't wrap your mind that fast around something like that, especially given where we were. This rock hits the ground and we all look at each other like “What in the world?” and it was very scary because it was a good-sized rock.
‘All of a sudden a second rock comes and that's when we started getting very scared. The second rock landed very close to the first one, 15 feet off to the left of us. A resounding thud on the ground and we said, “We're out of here.” We start picking up our gear, and another rock comes in. Now we're extremely panicked and it's just about dark and that's adding to the fear. As we're about to get going, another rock lands about ten feet to our right.
‘Now we're just scared, and we're gathering our gear up as fast as we can. As a matter of fact we didn't even take time to put our backpacks on. We just grabbed them off the ground and started running down this ridge. And as we're going I got about ten steps into it and remembered I had a 357 in my backpack (a .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum – a very powerful sidearm). I stopped quickly and my two buddies kept going down, didn't even realise I'd stopped, and I reached in my backpack real quick to get the gun.
‘I looked back up the hill and there it was. It had come out of the timber line and was just standing there in the middle of this meadow looking down at us. It was terrifying. Here's this thing that's probably eight feet tall covered in hair and standing there swaying. And my mind just went berserk. There's a sasquatch standing there looking at me. It just stepped from myth right into reality. It seriously changed my life forever. It altered the course of my life and honestly within four or five days of that event I went into research. That was twenty-eight years ago and I've been in Bigfoot research ever since.’
Of course, I wanted to know what the Bigfoot looked like.
‘I got a very clear silhouette, a very clear one because it was standing out in the open at this point. The light had faded to a point where I couldn't make out facial features, maybe a little bit, not really but the silhouette was very clear. And it looked like your classic sasquatch standing there. I would guess somewhere around eight feet tall, I'd guess somewhere from eight hundred to a thousand pounds. It's very big, its arms were very long, it had muscles. It looked like a bodybuilder. Not like Arnold Schwarzenegger but you could just tell it was well defined and cut and ripped and big. I saw the silhouette really well and I could see the outline of the hair. There was no mistaking what it was. It wasn't a bear, and it wasn't a person. It was very large, standing up on two legs, standing there swaying looking at me.’
Jeff immediately discounted the suggestion that it might have been a big grizzly standing on its hind legs, or maybe a person in a costume.
‘No, it wasn't a grizzly; there are no grizzlies down here in the Olympic National Park. To say there's a sasquatch and no grizzlies sounds kinda crazy but no it wasn't a bear. I've been around wildlife – bears, deer, elk and so on – my entire life and I've encountered probably close to a hundred bears along the trail. I am a wilderness guide here in Washington State and I encounter bears very frequently. I know exactly what they do and this was not a bear. It was more ape-like, very big and the shape of a human, but very muscled up, very large, incredibly thick and just incredibly big and heavy.
‘Could it have been a person? I highly doubt it. If this was a person they would have been massive. Also this person would have to have used extrasensory perception to know where we were gonna be. We didn't even know where we were gonna be that day. There's no way somebody would already be pre-positioned up there in this incredible outfit, eight feet tall, very heavy, just waiting for us to come to the spot we didn't even know we were gonna go to ourselves. So there's just no way. Absolutely no way. I know what I was looking at.’
Eventually Derek and his friends, running through the dark, reached an established campsite. Even so, Derek had the distinct impression that the creature was following them, not on the trail but parallel to it, inside the forest. Derek was the only one of the three to have actually seen the Bigfoot. The others only heard the crash and saw the rocks being thrown. As very often happens, Derek did not own up to the sighting straightaway for fear that his friends would think he was crazy, even though they had been close by. The next day they hiked back down to a Ranger Station and Randles told the ranger about the events of the previous night. He just got a funny look and was told someone would contact him in a week or so. They never did.
Derek went back up to the finger ridge meadow a month later, by which time the snow had started to fall. He didn't see or hear the Bigfoot but he did find a set of tracks in the snow and measured the prints at sixteen and half inches, extra-large even by Bigfoot standards. The whole experience did indeed change Derek's life. He quit his job and set up in business as a landscape gardener so that when he got the business established he would have the time and would be in the right place to indulge his passion for these creatures.
Nearly thirty years later he has lost none of his enthusiasm for Bigfoot, despite never having seen one again. He has found eighteen sets of tracks and felt that he was in the presence of a Bigfoot at least a dozen times, but he has not seen one.
As well as running training camps, where clients learn about the practical aspects of Bigfoot research, such as casting footprints in plaster of Paris, Derek also runs the ‘Olympic Project’ which has the declared aim of providing both proof of existence and a species identification for the Bigfoot in his area. His main weapon is an array of trail cameras, fifty-six in all, and his intention is to saturate a small ‘hotspot’ area until he gets a good image on film. The trouble, he admits, is that nowadays photographic images are so easily manipulated and there have been so many hoaxes that he suspects that even if he succeeded in getting a good image of a Bigfoot, many people would still refuse to believe it was genuine.
As far as DNA goes, he doesn't think it will provide species verification, though he admits he could be wrong about that. Which he is, but only if the study is carried out properly. He had already given away a lot of hair and other material to Dr Ketchum's Sasquatch Genome Project, which I covered in an earlier chapter. However, not all his samples had gone to Texas and he had two left, which he contributed to the Oxford-Lausanne project for DNA analysis.
The first hair sample came from Harstine Island in south Puget Sound, off the southeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula. Back in 2009, around Christmas, a local family had reported a couple of Bigfoot sightings on the island. At the time Randles was working for another Bigfoot organisation which co-ordinated reports of sightings and sent staff to investigate and to interview eyewitnesses. To Randles, the family from Harstine Island seemed pretty reliable, so he stayed in the area hoping to see the Bigfoot for himself. Over the course of the next three days he got some really loud vocalisations and on the fourth day, which was the day after Christmas, he discovered over a hundred prints in the snow only a quarter of a mile from the witnesses' house. He followed the tracks and they led through some blackberry bushes, which in the Northwest are especially thorny, according to Randles. Snagged on thorns seven feet above the ground he found strands of black wavy hair. Randles believed that there was a high probability that they were from the Bigfoot that left the prints. Being found so far above the ground they could not, he argued, belong to a bear. Randles passed these hairs on to Dr Jeff Meldrum, who sent them on to me.
The second sample came from the west side of the Olympic Range at another of Randles' study sites. It was not a habituation area, like Dan Shirley and Garland Fields' from the previous chapter, where baits and so forth are laid over a period in an effort to encourage the Bigfoot within range of a trail-cam, but it was an area where people have had classic sasquatch encounters with vocalisations, sightings, wood knocking, the lot. Here, a couple of investigators with the Olympic Project doing thermal imagery work started finding hair stuck to some of the trees. Why the hair was stuck to the trees they were not really sure. It could have been a scratching post but, in any case, they began to gather the hair. A lot of the hair went to the Ketchum study and she reported back that it passed all of her criteria for sasquatch.
Fortunately, Randles did have a few hairs left which, again through Dr Meldrum, were sent to Oxford.