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Show 7es, Sam, There Really is a Big Foot By Pearl Baker Yes, Sam, there is a Bigfoot, but not on San Rafael, drat the luck! We went out and looked, and there for a time I had great hopes. Joe Baker, Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Stephens, Mr. and Mrs. Al Wadzeckand I went out. Mrs. Wad-zeck Wad-zeck is the one who took the picture I sent you. We turned off the Western West-ern Canyonlands road at the top of the second dugway on the way to the San Rafael ranch owned by Mr. Graham of Texas, and followed an old seismograph seis-mograph road to a break in the north rim of the Box, where the San Rafael Ra-fael flows down a cliff-lined cliff-lined canyon, for six or eight miles just above the Bridge. We pulled out on a gravel point to a ledge and looked off into the bottom, where a sandbar extended across a wide bend of the river. Sure enough, there were five or six of these huge tracks along a little rivulet ri-vulet that trickled across the bar from the river. This was in a charming charm-ing little open valley in the ledges, grassy and with open spaces and cot-tonwoods, cot-tonwoods, as well as some tamarack, mostly in clumps. We jeeped down into the valley, where we ate lunch in the warm sunshine, then the boys went over to look at - the tracks close-up. Joe and Al Wadzeck waded the river and took a closer look, and came back with a report almost as hard for me to believe be-lieve as Bigfoot tracks. Even though the tracks were old, it was plain that a family of beaver had probably settled into the soft mud there for a night. The dents were deep, but examination revealed re-vealed the hind feet doubled under the beaver, the hocks making the "heel" of the track, and the feet under the beaver's belly, his chest and front legs making the "ball of the foot" impression. The .sandy bank is firm to walk on until just at the edge of this trickle of water, when the mud is soft. Apparently a tamiiy oi beaver has Indian-filed down there one evening, settled into the mud for the night, and then stepped step-ped back onto the firm footing and gone on about their beaver business the next morning. There were no drag tracks into the indentations, and not really any other beaver tracks around, although Joe noticed a slide across the river and just above there. There are a great many beaver on both the Green and its tributaries, as we all know. Mrs. Wadzeck sort of questioned the presence of beaver, with no dams around, and Joe told her that these were called lazy beaver by the trappers. trap-pers. Dams could not be build in the strong, swift currents of the river-but river-but Al assured his wife that the beaver had not forgotten how to build dams in irrigation ditches ditch-es on all the ranches. We then drove on down to the bridge, where a few other places were discovered where the beaver had rested right at the water's edge and left these depressions in the soft mud. However, Sam, in my telephone conversations with Alan Berry at Redding, Red-ding, California, I have learned that he has done a tremendous amount of research on Bigfoot families. He followed one up in the Sierras for a month or so last summer, sum-mer, even finding some tracks of immatures, one seven inches and one eleven el-even inches long. He has slides of them, and also tapes of their cries. He tells me that science does not rpnce nize the BigfS thg-are thg-are not scientSc nam'6 for them, and "JS ' many people do not k 1 Heve the actually"0; f He finds them very If esive, nocturnal, veReb . nan and adept at si n" Ping into the shadow trees and disappear? f 1 Berry is writing a . on the Bigfoot, and wil n, have it ready for puff l cation early in the sES'' Tt He states that there fs a skull at one of the co i leges in California, a he plans to visit and ex I amine this find CrlZ J he finishes hisbo & 2 J is planning a trin to the different w"rld0U Utah, and has proWli J to bring his picture I tapes to give us a look , at the Bigfoot in its s. ra habitat. |