Expedition 5

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

As in 1997, most if not all of the above evidence and incidents could perhaps be conventionally explained individually, but, added together, a pattern begins to emerge. As an old British military maxim goes, "twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." On the other hand, one has to be very careful that the "pattern" is not simply a misperception in the mind of the investigator, as with Percival Lowell when he was sure he saw -- and drew -- the non-existent canals on Mars. I personally think that it is very important not to make a Type I error -- a concept borrowed from statistical theory. That is, to assume that something special is going on when, in reality, it isn't. However, in our haste to be properly skeptical and avoid making a Type I error, it is easy to succumb to making a Type II error; a Type 2 error occurs when one assumes that nothing special is going on when, in fact, it is, even if the signal is hard to detect within the noise. After carefully evaluating all of the evidence that we were exposed to, however, I am still unconvinced that the Sasquatch exists as a
biological species, although I am closer to accepting it now than before this field project. The second "bed" we found and the howl we heard at the end of the expedition was particularly persuasive. I am frustrated though, that, in the first year, we deployed cameras outside of camp, and the visitations by entities unknown occurred inside of camp, whereas this year we deployed the cameras inside of camp, and the visitations by entities unknown occurred outside of camp. If we return in the future, I suppose we are simply going to have to deploy cameras both inside and outside of camp! I don't remember who among you know of our specific strategies, but one of them, in order to stimulate visitations, is to avoid displays of "unnatural" colors or sounds, including gunfire. Unfortunately,
that did not occur this year. On the third full day of the expedition, July 22, we had to deal with an aggressive bear that wanted all of our food -- and it was eating about a pound a minute. I tried everything to dissuade it, from throwing rocks and hitting it with a campchair to shooting into the air and into the ground. It got only bolder and bolder, increasing its threats to harm us physically, and I think that it would have done so quite soon. We ended up having to shoot the bear. I am not a hunter, and I do not like killing animals, but I am always well prepared to defend my safety and that of those around me when necessary. I want to state, however, that shooting that poor bear was a very sad and upsetting experience for me, one I hope I never have to repeat.

Upon examination, I determined that the bear was an old male, with most of the incisors worn away. It was very skinny, weighing only 200 lbs. It almost certainly was having trouble eating enough food, and I doubt if it would have survived hibernation next winter. A full report has been made to the California Department of Fish and Game, as required by law concerning bear killings out of hunting season. In any case, the gunfire, which echoed around our box canyon and down towards the Dillon, may have conveyed a somewhat different message than the one we had intended. Is it possible that nighttime visitations into the camps themselves did not occur because of increased caution due to this gunfire -- and the obvious nearby physical evidence of the dead bear carcass? It is all speculation, of course.

There is one further point I would like to make before ending. The territory we covered in one month, including the nine linear miles, would barely cover the thin end of a pushpin on a map of the Siskiyous and its surrounding regions. It is a vast area of some 1,000 square miles. With its rugged terrain, it may as well be 10,000 square miles. Humans, who rarely enter it, will travel just a few linear miles. The large Dillon and Herrington drainages, just to mention two of them, are enormous. Darwin and I spent two days dropping into and coming out
of one valley in the Herrington drainage. This valley had obviously not been visited by humans for many years, if at all, and we didn't even try to explore its creek as it descended down towards the drainage -- it simply got too rough for us. Such valleys and associated drainages, which contain lush, edible vegetation, are very difficult for humans to enter and leave safely, as many deadfalls, huge rocks, cliffs, and other obstacles are present.

One team of professional forest firefighters that took a "short-cut" through Dillon Creek a few years ago had to end up being extracted by helicopter by the Forest Service. I'm not saying that there are, but there could be dozens of Bigfoot subsisting in these Siskiyou drainages without anthropology or zoology having any notion of it at all. And the Siskiyou Wilderness is only a small part of Northern California, and Northern California is not even considered part of the
U.S. Pacific Northwest by some ecologists! This expedition has certainly given me a greater appreciation for the remote terrain and rugged conditions available to such supposed primates. Certainly, the statement by the erudite Stephen Jay Gould, that "there isn't a single square foot of the North American continent that hasn't been extensively trampled over," is nothing less than uninformed nonsense; I know from previous post-expedition discussions that some will wonder why we didn't do this, or didn't try that. One very critical anthropologist, for example, once told me that, if we really had Sasquatches in our camp during those cold, rainy nights of the 1997 expedition -- when we couldn't even get our work-tent into the field -- we would certainly have made a greater effort to see them, and, in fact, would have. What is hard to convey in a report such as this are the real-life difficulties in just trying to survive and simultaneously run a field project in wilderness conditions for a month. The heat sometimes reaches over 90 degrees F. in the day, only to possibly drop to freezing at night -- there was still snow in some spots when we arrived in late July. The exertion expended by all of us in moving hundreds of pounds of equipment and materials to different camps in that kind of terrain is enormous. The priorities of safety, health, acquiring clean water, cooking, eating, protecting delicate and sensitive electronic equipment from rain and humidity -- not to mention one's few personal belongings -- and maintaining such in daily operational condition, trying to stay warm enough at night, trying to get sufficient sleep, and, through it all, trying to stay good-natured while working with others -- all of these priorities detract from an expedition being in continual optimal condition. It is almost impossible to successfully be on top of everything all the time under such conditions, and one is never in optimal form in the middle of the night, when one is cold, maybe exhausted, and without having had enough sleep. But those middle-of-the-night periods are the "safe" times when one or two individuals of this unverified species, assuming it exists, may drop by for a visit, perhaps out of primate curiosity, or perhaps looking for discarded food, or both. The visit may last only a few minutes, but if there hasn't been enough time to install the seismic detectors, or if the rain or humidity have shut down the remote night-cameras, or if they simply don't walk where the night-cameras are operating, or if you sleep through the whole thing, exhausted, then another chance at providing new evidence is lost forever. Ideally, it would be nice to spend such nights in a pleasant, air-conditioned and heated laboratory, perhaps underground, one which is well-stocked with good foods and nice beds, and from which one could continually but leisurely observe and film different parts of a camp and surrounding areas through video surveillance monitors conveniently set up on a desk -- as building security guards do. That, of course, is not the reality of the Siskiyou Wilderness, so we try to do the best we can under the existing conditions.

The bottom line, then, is that all we came out of the Siskiyous with are more stories of things that go bump in the night -- and the day! -- some strange, unidentified calls, one of which we recorded and erased and one of which we failed to record at all, and some unidentified "beds." But we have also returned with continued confidence in the scientific method and how we have applied it to this particular problem. We have tested, through this field project, in an unbiased, objective way, the hypothesis that a large, unknown primate species exists in the forests of North America. We have not been able to validate the hypothesis. The truth is that the testing of this kind of hypothesis in a wilderness setting is physically difficult, exhausting, time-consuming, expensive, and frustrating. But nobody ever told me it would be easy.

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