Canadian writer John Zada had an obsession with Bigfoot stories as a child. As an adult, he travelled to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, site of many sightings and legends over the years, in an effort to separate myth from reality.
The next day, I leave my cheap riverside motel in Bella Coola proper and ride up the empty highway on a rented bicycle to the Four Mile reserve — a Nuxalk residential community located that distance up the valley from the main town site. It’s an idyllic day, one of those perfect, temperate end-of-summer afternoons, with swirling tendrils of high cloud and a cool breeze blowing in from the ocean filtered through evergreens.
I turn onto a side road and enter the reserve, riding leisurely past homes situated on spacious, unfenced lots separated by swaths of bushy overgrowth. The placid neighbourhood is alive with groups of romping children. From Four Mile, the view looking up the Bella Coola valley is crystal clear. An adjacent side valley, the Thorsen, beckons with the mist-obscured, sugar-icing-coated glacier at its head.
I’ve reached the supposed ground zero of Bigfoot — the waking version of the lofty wilderness of my daydreams as a kid. It’s hard to downplay the links and associations with Sasquatch here. Because of that, the idea of looking for the physical animal is tough to resist. For, in a real sense, Bella Coola is Bigfoot.
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