CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Robert Pyle!

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Big Food and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo. These guys
are your favorites, so like to say subscribe and rade
it five star s and me rights on yesterday and listening,
oh watching always keep its watching.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
And now your hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bubo Fay.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Hey, Bobo, how you doing today?

Speaker 3 (00:32):
All right? How's going? Cliff?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Pretty awesome? I'm super excited. I have one of our
favorite bigfooters and people in general on the line with
this for today's podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
I know who it is, and I'm pretty stuck. The
guy's a.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Legend, absolutely had written one of my favorite books on
the subject because it's so out of context for the subject.
But instead of just teasing and stuff like that, I
want to jump right into this because I know that
an hour or even two hours is going to be
too short of a time to speak to the gentleman
Bobo and everybody else listening right now, please welcome doctor
Robert Piles, or Bob as we call him, Bob Pile,

(01:09):
who wrote Where Bigfoot Walks Beyond the Dark Divide and
has a new movie out where Actually David Cross, you
know that dude from OSAs Show, arrested development and a
million other things. The comedian actually plays this gentleman right here,
Bob Pile Bob, welcome to Bigfoot and Beyond.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
Thank you so much, Cliff and Bobo, Hi, do you too.
It's a pleasure. I'm I am a It's a great
cliche to say one of your biggest fans, but in
both of your cases, it's absolutely true, and it's an honor,
beyond honor to be on the podcast.

Speaker 5 (01:42):
We do both speakings. Very nice of you to say, Bob,
thank you so much for.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Having That's the thing that's been said about us ever, Cliff.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
That's the thing about Bob. Whenever he says anything, it's
the nicest thing anyone's ever said. It's like every word
that drops from his mouth is like a honey wrapped
in gold.

Speaker 4 (01:58):
I'll tell you this, Cliff. Life is too short for flattery,
So I never give false praise and never give false oaps.
So don't expect that from me. So if you hear
it from me, you can take you to the bank.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Well well, Bob, for people who don't know who you are,
and because we have a lot of listeners who are
kind of new to the Bigfoot field, or perhaps you know,
haven't been stewing in it for the last few decades,
like Bobo and I and you have. Let's start a
little bit with like how you became acquainted with the
subject in general? Is this like a lifelong interest or
did it? Was it spurred by something? Or how did
how did? How did you become one of us?

Speaker 4 (02:35):
Well, it's not quite a lifelong Sure, that's a good
place to start clifts. It's not lifelong. I am a
lifelong naturalist, an observer of the natural world, although I
have to tell you that I don't consider there to
be a fine line of any kind between humans and
the rest of nature. And so when I say to
the natural world, I include people in that, and naturally

(02:56):
include what I consider to be likely our closest living relative.
So they all run together. But my first attention to
natural history as a boy in growing up in Colorado
was seashells. Now that sounds counterintuitive, You're right. It was
a stupid place to be a young concologist in Colorado,

(03:16):
and diminishing returns quickly set in after I spent all
my allowance buying seashells at the Denver Museum of Natural History,
I belonged to the Shell of the Month Club and
so on and so forth. But there weren't many seashells around.
I've soon discovered there were more butterflies around. I mean,
there weren't any more seashells around than there were Bigfoot

(03:36):
and there were Colorado in nineteen fifties and sixties, But
there were a lot of butterflies. So very early on,
at the age of eleven on, I became a lepidopterist,
a person who is serious in his or her or
their pursuit of butterflies. And butterflies were reading my big
window on the world. And the other part of the

(03:59):
window on the world old ditch outside Colorado, and that
ditch was my my wilderness. Got out of my subdivision
out on this old, tangly wet ditch, and that's where
the life was. That's where the butterflies were, and of
course that's where the imagination went. And I always imagined
that I might see something that nobody else had seen.
Occasionally I'd find a rare butterfly, and that was pretty satisfying.

(04:21):
But later on, when I went to college up in
the Pacific Northwest, I started hearing about something that really
might be out there that most people had not seen,
and that was Sasquatch, Bigfoot, oh mah se Latis. I
had the most wonderful introduction to the subject. Now, mind you.

(04:41):
Prior to that, I'd read some of the some of
the early crypto books that a lot of boys read,
that Ivan Sanderson and so on and so forth, and
the Yeti, the early Yeti things and so on. So
I had an interest, but it wasn't greater than an
interest in many other things until I took three wonderful

(05:01):
classes at the University of Washington from Bill Holme. Bill
was a Cherokee Norwegian dude who became a quak Utile Indian.
Through the Hamits dances and his great study, he became
the greatest authority on Northwest Native American art and culture anywhere,

(05:23):
all the way from the Athabascans to the Hoopa, through
the Ballabellas and Bellaiculas and Macaws and Nukahs and everybody else.
He knew their art, he knew their culture, and he
knew the people, and tot three classes in it, one
on totems and carving some masks, one on their flat art,
and one on their dance and tradition and lucky boy,

(05:45):
I got to take all those classes, and one of
the strongest elements in my memory from them was the
presence of the Bigfoot cognates and all those cultures do
Naquah Book was merging in bak Baquali, Nuxi Way, and
all the others, and how powerful the Bigfoot traditions were

(06:05):
and remain in those Native American cultures, those first people's cultures.
And here was the thing that really got me, Cliff,
was when Bill told us that not only did every
single Northwest Indian culture have these stories and traditions, but
they were considered to be part of their natural history,

(06:29):
not necessarily restricted to their spirit world. Along with set seed,
the sea serpent in Thunderbird. Of course the two run
together for a lot of Native Americans, but they also
have us a recognition of the animals that they encountered
regularly in the woods, skunk and weasel and raven and
barn orca in the water, and Bigfoot was among those.

(06:51):
The other thing he told me was that he did
not know a single Indian in the woods or in
the waters that is still living in the villages, living
in the countryside from Alert Bay all the way to
the Hoopa, who did not have a personal belief not
only that the animal lives among them, but that we,

(07:12):
the whites, are foolish to even ask the question of
them does it exist as a real animal. So those
things made a powerful impact on me, followed by encountering
Peter Burn a few years later. Peter had an enormous
impact on me, and then it went from there. My

(07:34):
own studies grew out of that, and we'll get to
that later. I'm sure that was my beginning, really was
the early crypto books, followed by being up here in
the Northwest and then going to build Holmes classes, and
then on Halloween night camping on the snows of Mount
Saint Helen's ten years before the eruption in nineteen seventy

(07:55):
and hearing the cries all through the night that I
believe we're likely the cries of telatics.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
So it really it sounds like your interest is born
in the same way with many others, kind of just
having a curiosity about the natural world combined with frequent
trips to the library. I think rober apps that certainly
the beginning, yes, yeah, and then add to that an
influential person or two to kind of guide you along

(08:23):
the way, and then finally some personal experience on the
end of it all.

Speaker 4 (08:27):
Yeah, I expect this does pretty well mirror a lot
of your guests experience in the generals is not the specifics.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, But to just to be clear, though you're you're expert.
You are an expert in butterflies and moths, right, I
mean that's what you have a doctorate, It is that correct?

Speaker 4 (08:45):
Correct, I'm one of the I don't mean to sound
like it's some kind of an elite thing. It's just
another trade. But I do happen to be one of
the few trained biologists in our field I think, I
mean they're there are a lot of good biologists. There's
a heck of a lot of magnificent autodidactic biologists and

(09:06):
naturalists in cryptozoology. There aren't many who have had the opportunity,
the great privilege that I've had to have a pretty
rich academic background in biology, and in my case, it's
centered on ecology and ultimately on the ecology of rare
and endangered species of butterflies as my thesis project. But

(09:29):
I've always been a general naturalist, and my training was
in general natural history and biology, and then ultimately in
butterflies and into writing.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
Well, that's one of the things about Bigfoot that I
find so accommodating for the lay person and other scientists
and just people in general, is that Bigfoot isn't it
isn't exclusive to one discipline. It's so multidisciplinary. And one
might think that while we're studying butterflies, what does that
have to do with sasquatches. Well, I mean to understand butterflies,

(10:02):
you have to understand the ecology. You have understand seasonality
of animals and all sorts of stuff. I mean, I mean,
look at me, I have a degree in music. What
good is that? You know? Like, well, I incorporate that
into my big foot stuff when I get I.

Speaker 4 (10:15):
Can't imagine many many degrees that would be more valuable
than that in the field in which audiology is so
very important, right.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
Right, I mean, I guess I could have majored in
something like you know, painlea anthropology, but you know, then
i'd be over in you know, in Eastern Africa somewhere
digging rocks, rocks up aground, or Eastern Idaho.

Speaker 5 (10:35):
Or Eastern Idaho. That's true, But you're absolutely right, these
fields are they've run together. I mean, really, isn't that
what we should be? I mean, I've been freelance for
most of my life. I never took a hold in
a job too well. I've been an academic, I've been
a professor, I've been lots of other things. I've done
a lot of teaching and lecturing, this.

Speaker 4 (10:52):
That and the other. But I've never I've never been
one to sit in one job for too long. So
I've been freelanced for a long time. And I consider
myself I like the term acket of independent scholar. I
like the independence of it, But I also like the
whole question of scholarship going forth in the world as
a perpetual student, which is exactly what I think we do,

(11:14):
and it's exactly what I think you two guys are
all about, our scholars of the wilderness and its inhabitants.
So butterflies were just as good a portal for an
interest in Bigfoot as I think any other subject might
have been. These are animals that live by the same
constraints and ecological opportunities as any other living things, and

(11:37):
so you study those constraints and opportunities with whatever group
of animals you work on, and they're applicable to others
if you apply the broader principles. You know, for years
I went up every March until this year of the
Germ and gave a couple of evenings lectures or talks,

(11:59):
conversations really with sixth graders at an outdoor school at
the Cispas Center in Washington, which is pretty cool because
that's where I began my trek for crossing the Dark Divide.
But those kids were hungry for this information, of course,
but I wanted them to have their vegetables as well
as their desserts. So I'd give them one night of

(12:21):
butterflies and one night of Bigfoot, and then I would
put them together and I'd say, now, you tell me,
when I've taught you all these things about butterflies and
they're seemingly miraculous metamorphosis, you tell me that butterflies are
not just as weird as Bigfoot. In other words, that
Bigfoot isn't just as natural as butterflies.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Right. And you know, one of the things that I
think I appreciate about you, Bob, is that you kind
of I don't know if the word transcend is right,
I'll say it transcend the role of scientists again, transcend
doesn't work because really you're rolling it back to before
there were scientists, because you're a naturalist, and back in
the eighteen hundreds, before science was a thing, really there

(13:05):
were naturalists studying the natural world. And eventually these naturalists
became specialized, and that's how science was kind of born
in some ways, these various arms. But really you're a
student of the world, the natural world, and you happen
to specialize, you know, in mods and butterflies, But really
you're a student of the natural world with a curiosity
that will never be satisfied. And I think that is

(13:28):
just so cool, And that's part of the reason we all,
Bobo and I and everybody else listening are interested in
the sasquatch thing because of the mystery of it all,
just to know that the world is not as not
a solved puzzle. It is full of wonder and grace
and beauty waiting to be discovered. And I think you
and your writings really embody a lot of that.

Speaker 4 (13:49):
Oh, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
And then where you learn just the more questions you get.
To Tigos, it's exponential, it.

Speaker 4 (13:55):
Is exponentialist, And to Bobo, it just goes on and
on every question asks more question, every answer asks even
more questions.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
And of course you're also a poet.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
Well yes, but before you get to the poetry, let
me just say what you've just said is beautifully put.
I wish I had it all in print in front
of me. I guess I'll have the recording that deserves
being passed on the way you embodied all that. But
I'm so glad to see you re honor the word naturalist,

(14:25):
because that word sort of fell out of fashion. But
you're quite right. I'm Humboldt and Asa Gray and Legacy
and Audubon and all the others right up to Darwin,
the chief naturalist of all they were naturalists, and yet
that word fell out of favor, particularly between the Wars.
It was really's spot Neck that did it. In used

(14:48):
to be the American nature study movement was active all
over the country, and learning something about our local flora
and fauna was a regular part of elementary education in
this country. And then as things began to become more specialized,
more technological, that began to fade a little bit in
favor of hard science. And then between the Wars, when

(15:11):
there was such an emphasis on armaments and instruments of
warfare and hard science. Driven by that, it became even
more so. And then when sput Mac went into orbit
in fifty six, I think it was the first Russian satellite, Well,
that really was the nail in the coffin of natural
history in the schools because we really had to catch

(15:33):
up with the Russians on science and the space race,
and so natural history went by the bye in the
schools until environmental education came along later. And by that
time they had lost a lot of the basics of
the flora and fauna because the teachers didn't know it anymore.
And by the way, Cliff and Bobo, during that time

(15:54):
when I was at the University of Washington as a
lucky student, there were a lot of good naturalists left
on the faculty, but they were all being farmed out,
retired off to the pasture, and not being rehired in
favor of all hard science. The hard science was good,
but it was done at the expense of the naturalists.

(16:14):
I called the time of the purge of the naturalists,
and I was one of the last students to come
in to really get the advantage of all those old
naturalists on campus. Which let me put those great stories
of Bill Holme and the Indians into the context of
a lot of different kinds of plants and animals. So yes,
I have been always a general student of natural history,

(16:38):
and I deeply, deeply admire and am grateful for the
legacy that we have all the way back to Darwin
and everybody before.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
It seems like a studying natural history, it's just a
lot more organic way to move forward, especially especially with
the study of sasquatches and other things like that, because
science has a reputation, and it's certainly possibly even a
deserved reputation of being a little cold, shall we say,
you know, a little perhaps reductionists like you know, it's

(17:10):
instead of figuring, like looking at a clock, we've got
to take that clock apart in order to figure out
how it works. Whereas if you study natural history, you
see how that clock fits into this environment and what
role it plays in a larger scale. And I think
perhaps studying things as a natural historian might serve what

(17:31):
am I trying to say, I might serve the subject better,
especially when we're dealing with subjects like sasquatches or people
or something that is sentient and it certainly has emotions
and fits in and it has relationships, as opposed to
let's let's, you know, dissect the arm to see what
how thick the tendon is what.

Speaker 4 (17:50):
We don't need one or the other, dew were really
in fact, I think we do need both. Science is reductionists,
and that's not necessarily a bad word. We don't ever
get a bridge that works or a rocket that works.
That might be better if we don't reduce the elements
to their basics and understand how they work. The reduction

(18:12):
isn't in itself a bad thing. When it becomes negative
is when it becomes the whole picture.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, a little out of balance.

Speaker 4 (18:19):
Perhaps the breadth and the encompassing holistic view that a
naturalist has, which is one that the mountain man had,
and it's one that the wise women and the women
with the knowledge of the herbs add, and it's the
knowledge that takes in the hole that's absolutely essential too.

(18:42):
And so rather than setting them up against one another,
which I know you're not doing, we really need both.
We need a hard, intelligent, skeptical, critical and rigorous view
of the natural world. And by the way, I had
to come back and do some more medial on all
that because I so much rejected it in college and

(19:05):
went within natural history. In order to do graduate work
and to do a doctorate an e college, I had
to come back and re educate myself on some of
the hard stuff that I had blown off. That necessary too,
But if you put it in the context, as you say,
of the broader natural world through its working parts, yes,
but also through the sensations and the emotions, then you

(19:29):
have a much more meaningful whole. And that's where we
get to the poetry. And that's why, yes, I am
a poet as well, because I feel in fact, I
think I don't mean better in the sense of quality,
but I think I'm probably more naturally a poet than
a scientist actually, because I find it impossible to distance

(19:50):
my emotions and my reactions and my opinions. Fortunately, as
a poet and an essayst and a novelist, I don't
have to do that. On the other hand, when I
put on the headgear of the scientists and the journalists,
which I don't do very much. I still do some
science with butterflies, and I still do write some material

(20:12):
that I try to err on the objective side. Then
of course, I have to abide by the very same
principles of rigor that a scientists or our journalist would
have to, you know, if it really serves us well,
and I know this would be Bobo's experience out in
the woods. To have more than one arrow in our quiver,
we need to be broader than narrow. We need to

(20:35):
be we need to take a broad view instead of
be single minded about these things.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
We don't want my opium. You're a poet, Yes, A
challenge you to do a slam poetry competition or done
with this interview?

Speaker 4 (20:49):
Oh, I'm sure you knock me down on that. I've
never really done slam because I don't know. Slam has
a competitive aspect to it that somehow strikes me as
wrong for poetry. But I enjoy watching it, don't get
me wrong, But I don't know how I do. I
also don't do very well and remembering poetry. I usually
have to read my own scripts. But poetry is important

(21:10):
to me. I've got several published collections of poetry. I've
just come out with a new one that's entirely about
the Columbia River. There are forty four poems about the
Columbia River the Lower Columbia. The estuary part published together
with photographs that one of my favorite photographers, and it's
given me a way to look at the river that
the science never has. Through the lens, the personal lens

(21:34):
of the emotions.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bobo will be right back after these messages.

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Speaker 1 (23:31):
Tell us about UH and again. This is one of
my favorite bigfoot books, and partly partly because it's not
really specifically about bigfoot. I mean, you can read doctor
Krantz's book and get into the nitty gritty and doctor
Meldrum's book to learn about all the evidence for the subject, etc.
Lauren Coleman's book to talk about the history and the sightings.
But yours isn't really about that. Yours is a different

(23:51):
take on the subject, and it was kind of it's
just refreshing to read through. But tell us how that
how that book came about?

Speaker 4 (24:00):
Thank you, thanks for those kind words. It's true. I
did hope that it might be somewhat different from, and
therefore complimentary to a number of the other great Bigfoot
books that I had read and been inspired and entertained
and educated by. It came about in the following way.
In the eighties, I left my job at the Nature Conservancy,

(24:23):
where I was the Northwest Land Steward, the manager of
the Northwest Nature Reserves of the Conservancy. Prior to that,
I'd been a researcher in Papua New Guinea on the
giant bird wing butterflies, which are the bigfoot equivalent. They're
the biggest species of butterflies in the world, there about
as big as a bigfoot's foot. Enormous butterflies and the

(24:46):
jungles of Papua New Guinea. And that was my first
job out of graduate school, and that was a pretty
wonderful job for a young naturalist. From that, I went
to work for the conservancy, and when I was really
ready to leave that job, I wanted to go to
the country and try writing full time, which was a
crazy thing to do without any visible means of support.

(25:08):
My wife was an artist, and we thought we'd try that.
We did, and I've been in this house here in
Gray's River, Washington, this old Swedish farmhouse ever since then,
over forty years. I have had to go out elsewhere
from time to time to make a book, and I
did back then too, But part of the time I
got to write. And I wrote a book called Winter
Green about these hills here and their wildness. In spite

(25:33):
of being private timberlands that have been very heavily and
very often log Do you realize a certain wildness persists,
including some Bigfoot stories from these hills. But I was
in between books and I was looking for my next
topic for I'd actually written another book after that, called
The thunder Tree, about the ditch I told you about

(25:55):
where I grew up and found nature in Colorado. Then
I needed a new book, and I was hoping to
write a book for which I could find a little
bit of a support too, maybe some grant support to
help pay some bills, so I could really get into it.
I had this idea and that idea, and then I'm
not sure what it was. I think it was Sir
Peter Scott in England, a son of Scotch of the

(26:18):
Antarctic and the founder of one of the founders of
the World Wildlife Fund, with the which I was in Ball.
Peter Scott was very interested in NeSSI. In fact, just
as gorover Krantz applied a scientific name to bigfoot Gigantapithecus candidadensis,
Peter Scott, based on a mini submarine photograph of a

(26:44):
seeming pleaseias or finn from Lockness depths of Lockness, applied
a sign of a name to that animal too. He
called it Rombopterix. That was the genus oh ron Bopterix
nes citrus. The diamond finned animal of Lake Ness is

(27:07):
what it means. Neither of those names, of course, achieved
scientific acceptance because they were not accompanied by what a
scientist calls a type specimen to go along with the name. Nonetheless,
Peter's interest in lacustrine plesiosaurs, one of the other great
rich fields of cryptozoology, re enlivened my interest, and I

(27:31):
remembered that night on Mount Saint Helens at Halloween in
nineteen seventy and I remembered Peter Burn's book. I had
actually run into Peter Burn in nineteen seventy five. I
was doing butterfly research and I went to the DALs,
Oregon and there was a double wide it's actually very
just single white trailer on the docks at the dolls

(27:54):
had a sign said Bigfoot Information Center. So I dropped
on down there met Peter for the first time, and
I was impressed by his credo, which was when in doubt,
throw it out. I had no idea that time about
the extremely contentious and polarized nature of the Bigfoot world
and the many opinions that the top people and had

(28:17):
had of one another, and so out. I wasn't biased anyway,
and so I actually brought him back to Yale to
give a seminar. I was on the seminar committee at
the Forestry School, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale,
and I got permission. I had to get permission from
the vice president of Yale, not even just from the

(28:38):
dean as usual to bring a Bigfoot speakers to campus,
but they ponied up the money and we brought Peter
back to Yale, believe it or not, and he gave
a very arresting talk. As you know, he's full of
charm and very convincing speaker. And he had this extraordinary
audience of distinguished Yale oh primatologists and zoologists and archaeologists

(29:04):
and anthologists, and many students and graduate students wrapped around
his finger. And when he concluded, a lot of them
had come really to make fun and to just have
a lark, and I didn't hear a single person behaving
in that manner. Now, I won't say that he convinced
anybody that day in such a rarefied academic environment, but

(29:28):
he did open some minds, and that to me was
extraordinarily impressive. So people going out of their scratching their
heads thinking, well, maybe there's something to be looked at here,
just as we've seen in very recent years with the
collection of scientists organized around Oxford.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bobo will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
So the act of opening a scientist's mind was very
impressive to me, and so that all came back to
me and I thought, huh, what if somebody were to
try to write a book. First I thought about cryptozoology,
but it was too big none. I thought about Bigfoot then,
which was different from all the other Bigfoot books in
that a it wasn't being written from the standpoint of

(30:25):
a true believer, because I was not. I was deeply interested, hopeful,
open minded, but I would not say a true believer
trained after all as a biologist and a skeptic had
not seen personal evidence at that point except for the
one night of Calls. But also not from the standpoint

(30:47):
of a professional skeptic, as some of the other books
were too. Most of the books either tried to advocate
for or advocate against, or tell a history, or like
John Napier's book, to give a founded picture of it,
but without actually being in the field with it, a
scholarly approach. And that was a good book, but not

(31:09):
the book I wanted to write. I wanted to write
a book by a naturalist, an actual biologist who could
be skeptical from that standpoint, but who is also a
decent Woodsman, which by the way, does not come across
in the movie quite the opposite, but also a person
who was a literary writer, not writing journalism and not

(31:32):
writing strictly history. I wanted to write it from the
standpoint of creative writing and yet attentive to fact, which
is what the essayskts to do both those things, and
that was my approach. So I needed to have some
support for it, and so I applied for a oh

(31:53):
Lindbergh grant, which I did not get, and then some
other grant and some other grant, and then someone said
why not try for a Gugenhem And I said, oh, yeah, sure,
you know, one of the most sought after and competitive grants.
I'm going to apply to write about Bigfoot. And they said,
well why not try? So I did try, and damned

(32:14):
if I didn't get the thing. I mean, you guys,
that is the weirdest thing about all of this, Bobo,
wherever you're sitting, if our friend walked in the door
right now and sat in your lap, and you're one
of the few people I know who could actually probably
support it and started feeding you bond bonds and reciting

(32:36):
Italian poetry from the seventeenth century. Now, I think we
could agree would be strange, but it would be no
more weird than a person getting a Gougenhem grant to
write about Bigfoot, now, would it. It just wouldn't. I
think that's the weirdest thing about the whole deal. And
then once I got the Gougenheim, therefore assuring me of

(32:57):
a year's support for study, then I went to Holton Mifflin,
my publisher, and said, hey, look, fellas, the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation is taking this seriously. How about you too?
And they did, and they gave me a book contract.
So armed with both the book contract and the and

(33:18):
the GG I still laugh when I think about that fact.
I went to work. That's how it all began.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
And what year was it finally published?

Speaker 4 (33:29):
Well, my year of Bigfoot studies was eighty nine ninety
in ninety one, and then I wrote for about a
year and a half or two years, and then it
was published in nineteen ninety five. And I'll never forget
the formal publication day it was. It was my big

(33:50):
Cinderella day as an author. The day it was published
in July of nineteen ninety five by Holding Fun grand
old American publisher. It was also reviewed in the New
York Times Review Books, my very first book ever to
be reviewed there, and it wasn't a bad review. It

(34:11):
was a little bit snide, and they made it difficult
to pull out a good pull line from it, but
it was generally positive. The publisher was over the moon
about it because it wasn't a kill job. That same day,
I was doing promo all around Seattle. I had a minder,

(34:33):
you know, a driver who took me around all my
interviews and TV and radio back in newspapers, back when
all those things existed. And then I was taken to
dinner at the Alexis Hotel by the book reviewer of
the Seattle Post Intelligence or newspaper, and I had a
wonderful hotel room. And that night I gave a reading

(34:57):
from it at the Elliott Bay Book Company, which was
the premiere stop on any author's book tour in the country,
and it was packed with a couple hundred people. And
the climax of it all was at the very end,
I noticed there were a group of Native Americans in
the room, and they were in the back of the room,

(35:19):
and at the end of the reading they all stood
up together. They were twelve or fifteen of them, and
everybody became silent as a stone. I didn't know what
was going on, and their spokesman said, we came tonight
from La Pushe, from the Quillia Reservation to make sure
that this subject was being treated with respect. And at

(35:42):
that point I was just paralyzed because about a third
of the book is about Native American traditions and the
stories that I was given and talks I had once
I finally learned the politests of speaking to the first peoples,
which I did terribly at first, and I was very
very concerned that they would respect what I wrote and

(36:04):
that they would felt the feel that I respected them.
And then he said, and we concluded that you have
treated it with respects. I was extremely relieved.

Speaker 9 (36:15):
Oh yeah, sure, you can't get that back. If you
pull you cannot. And then he said, and we have
a recording with us that we would like to play, not.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
To lure you people out to the reservation, but just
to let you know that we live among these people
and we consider it ridiculous that anyone should even ask
whether they really exist. But we also know that they
need to be treated with respect and Rick Simonson k
who he ran the book story. He had a he

(36:47):
produced a boombox, We threw the cassette in there, and
these couple hundred people were treated to an extraordinary set
of recordings that in places very close resembled what I'd
heard on Mount Saint Helens in nineteen seventy and also
what I heard toward the end of my time in

(37:07):
the Dark Divide at the conclusion of my Bigfoot studies.
So that was quite a conclusion, quite a publication day.
And then of course after that I turned into a
pumpkin again. But that was my Cinderella day with the
publication of that book.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
And so out in the woods, you know, in the
Dark Divide, which for people who are listening to other
parts of the world, is in Gifford Pinchot National Forest
in Washington, Scamania County is a lot of it in it.
There's probably overlapping in Lewis County and a few other places.
Scuka Meadows is in the hearts of it. It's really
in between Mount Saint Helens, Mount adams Son, Mount Saint

(37:44):
Helens on the west, Mount Adams on the east, and
then Mount Rain near to the North. I think that's
a fairly good rough estimate of its size. There you
were out there alone for how long?

Speaker 4 (37:57):
Four month?

Speaker 3 (37:58):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (37:58):
Now I'm so glad you came around to that, because
the Dark Divide itself is that this center of our discussion.
It's the place. It's all about the place. Of course,
it's about the animals and the people in their lives,
but it's about the place. And not only that. Let
me say this, I don't think I would have got
either the grand or the book contract and certainly not

(38:20):
the movie if it hadn't been for that really cool name,
the Dark Divide. How cool a name is that? Where
could you get a better name for a place than that?
Because just think it sets up any kind of divide
you might want to have, the divide between belief and
non belief, between spiritual versus physical, between life and death,

(38:46):
between the supernatural and the entirely natural of you know,
between belief and those who are hardest bones against belief.
You just can't get a better name than that. It
sounds good, the Dark Divide. Well, what is the Dark Divide?
As you say, it's this range that occurs in between

(39:09):
Patois or Mount Adams and lou Witt or Mount Saint
Helens and Tahoma or Rainier and Mount Hood also known
as Why East. Across the river to the south. They
form more or less a crucifix, and the crossbar is
the Dark Divide. It's a black rock, rugged, rugged, scregly

(39:33):
range of basalt extrusions that runs perpendicular to the main
axis of the cascades. Of course, Adams and Saint Helens
are offset from that main axis, opposite one another, leading
to all manner of wonderful Native American stories about the

(39:54):
love affair between them and the triangle with Batwa Mount Hood,
and so on and so forth. The Dark Divide runs
between them, and along the Dark Divide runs the very
old and important Indian Trail, the first great trading freeway
of the people there known as now known as Boundary

(40:16):
Trail number one, the very first trail designated in the
Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and that runs the center of
the Dark Divide. The divide part refers to the watershed
divide between the Cispus River on the north and the
Lewis River on the south, and the dark part, well,

(40:37):
I'll give it, shall I give it away?

Speaker 3 (40:38):
Here?

Speaker 4 (40:39):
Cliff why not give it all. I'll give you a
little exclusive air. We'd like to think that dark referred
to mystery, mystique. I don't think there's a mystical bone
and Bigfoot's body, but I think there's plenty a mystery
it could refer to that. It could refer to darkness
or dark that. But sad to say that is just

(41:02):
named for some dude named Dark Prospector by the name
of John Dark, who was up in those parts and
lots of things got a named for him, the Dark Mountain,
Dark Meadow, and ultimately the Dark Divide. But that's okay,
it doesn't matter. It works just as well as this
great evocative, mysterious name, the Dark Divide. And so that's

(41:27):
the place I decided to go. I mean, I spent
several months in deep Bigfoot study with people. I studied
with John Green, I studied a little bit with Reneeda Hinden,
certainly with Grover Krantz, with Peter Byrne, with lots of people.
I went to meetings. I went to all the archives

(41:48):
and the transcribes transcriptions of the Bigfoot symposia that have
been held, like the Great win at UBC.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
I read everything.

Speaker 4 (41:59):
From David Bobson in the late eighteenth century forward all
the way through Sanderson and all the others writing into
the twentieth century. I studied everything I could about Bigfoot
during that year of intensive scholarship, including the tabloids. I'd
go out and I'd say, this is my Bigfoot Swiss

(42:21):
army knife, this is my Guggenheim canoe rack I'm buying,
And these are my research tabloids that I would buy
at the supermarket. Because there's a whole chapter in the
book called Bigfoot Baby Found in Watermelon as Elvis sneer,
and it's all about the tabloids and how they've done
their best to make just a silly joke out of

(42:42):
this very very powerful and consequential set of stories in
our midst and I take that to task. So I
did all that study, and then ultimately, and this became
the heart of the book. I had to take it
to the forest. I had to take it to the woods,
as you two always did in the program. You always

(43:03):
went to the forest with your colleagues. And that's what
we have to do. We have to take it out
to the real land and confront our book knowledge and
our experiential knowledge in scholarship and studies with the actual
facts on the ground, that's where it matters. And so

(43:25):
I chose the area known as the Dark Divide not
only for the cool name, although as I say, that
turned out to be extremely consequential for me, but also
because it's an area of deep and abiding Bigfoot lore
from the clickitats Yakamas and so on, and put all
that together, including John Dark. I mean, those prospectors had

(43:48):
had their own Bigfoot low as we know from the
Portland and Kelso posse of nineteen twenty three and earlier.
So yes, I went to the Dark Divide, which at
that time was considered by Need to be the richest
area within the epicenter of the Mount Saint Helens center
of the universe for Bigfoot. And I spent a month there,

(44:09):
And that gets back to your original question. I was
out there for a month.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
You're a hiking during that That was a pretty contentious time.

Speaker 10 (44:15):
I remember, because I was logging back then and there
was a lot of the Earth First protesting, and the
loggers were really getting if you're like a naturalist, you know,
an environmentalist, you're on the wrong side of the deal
with those guys.

Speaker 4 (44:31):
Back then, You're quite right, Bobo, that's perceptibly put. I'd
worked in the woods myself a little bit when I
was much younger, but also been a college conservationist, you know,
and we were pretty radical, and we were also pretty
pretty damn self righteous. We're also pretty stupid and naive
in some ways because living in the city and not

(44:53):
living in a timber dependent community. Of course, we were
quite sure we were right about things, and we were
right about a lot of our conservation principles, but we
were also deeply, deeply naive about the nature of forestry
and the nature of logging communities and the culture that

(45:15):
takes place in them. And so it wasn't until later
when I actually went to forestry school, and ultimately when
I came out here to live in grays River, that
I got a much more relevant education about the logging community.
So by the time I went up to the Dark Divide,
I had already written my book Winter Green, which is
subtitled Rambles in a Ravaged Land. The Willebaugh Hills where

(45:37):
I live are very heavily logged and multiple times because
they're all private lands, no national forests, very little state land,
and so that of course has come back to haunt
the people of the woods as well as the woods themselves.
A lot of erosion, a lot of the salmon streams
are badly silted up. And not only that, but when
the big trees were gone, and when the big when

(45:59):
the older second Girl was liquidated in the nineties, Warehouser
and Crown moved on and they broke the unions and
no longer were their good family jobs in the woods here.
And it's been kind of a depressed timber economy ever since.
But not because of spotted owls, but because of bad
management on a long period of time. So in my

(46:21):
book Winter Green, it's not an anti logging book at all.
You know, I know what my book's published on. It's
published on the rendered flesh of trees through the pulpe nolls,
for God's sakes, And also came out of two different
forestry schools. I'm no longer naive about that. And I
also live in a timber town where a lot of
people's livelihoods really do depend in the woods. So I

(46:42):
had a kind of an inside view by that time
of the timber Wars, and yet I understood the biology
of the spotted owl and all the other old growth
organisms too, And of course the spotted owl, as comes
out in the movie, became a scapegoat for everything else
and became target of people's very very justified frustration when

(47:04):
the jobs ran out. And of course, the as you said, Bobo,
the antipathy toward people who look like me, you know,
kind of along haired backpackers out of the woods. They
were bound to make the assumption that I was opposed
to the way they made their their lives and their livings,
though I wasn't. And so yeah, there were some kind
of tense encounters now and again, ultimately I think we

(47:26):
have some good conversations and one of those is extremely
well enacted in the movie with the actor Gary Farmer,
who plays a logging boss. But you're right now, and
those were tense times. That was really coming out of
the worst of the Timber Wars.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bobo will be right back. After these messages, I kind
of found it.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
I know you're a great kind of like you watched
the movie David cross is Port Trivia, like I wanted.
I wanted you to like fall off him out.

Speaker 4 (48:05):
I didn't I didn't like you.

Speaker 3 (48:07):
You know that the way he came across, I was
like one of those loggers didn't like him, that's for sure.

Speaker 4 (48:13):
He punched him out.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about the movie,
because that's that's one of the most exciting things that's
going on at this point, at least in Bigfooting, I think,
is that your book has been turned into a movie
with some big name starring in it, and I think
that's so cool. Tell us about how that came across.
And then then Bobo and I can nitpick about how
David Cross played you.

Speaker 4 (48:37):
Yeah, I'll join you in that, but you know, also
i'll praise him also.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Oh, of course he did a great job. It just
not the Bob that we know.

Speaker 4 (48:45):
Sure that came about an interesting manner. The book had
been out for guys twenty years already, and it had
a lot of people who liked it, and one of
those was a filmmaker in California by the name of
Tom Putnam. I didn't know him, but he got in
touch with me. He mostly made documentaries. He made one

(49:06):
big Hollywood film with Paris Hilton, which was kind of
a kick. I guess, he said, she was charming, but
he didn't really like the Hollywood process. So he started
making documentaries and he made some extraordinary ones. Probably the
best known is called Burne. It's about the Detroit Fire Department,
an amazing movie. Don't know how he filmed it. He

(49:26):
sent me a bunch of his movies and I love them,
and he said, I want to make a movie based
on We're Bigfoot Walks. And I said really, He said, yeah, documentary.
He said, when I read the book, a friend of
mine said, you're going to love the book, but don't
even think about making a movie. It'd be impossible. But
then he said, I had been thinking about it anyway,
I want to go ahead and try, so I said, okay. Fine.

(49:48):
So my agent wasn't really interested because he was independent.
They didn't have a big budget and it was a documentary.
The film department of my agency in New York said
they don't have enough money. Don't worry about it. So
I said, well, heck il I'll do it myself then,
because nobody else is going to make a movie out
of my book. So I negotiated a contract myself. Tom

(50:12):
optioned the rights to it, and every year re knew
the option This went on for six or eight years,
and then finally he started getting some support, but not
until he changed his mind from making a documentary to
making it into a narrative feature film semi fictionally. And

(50:33):
at that point he started getting support especially. The most
important one was from a fellow named Jory Whitz, who
was the main producer of the movie A Napoleon Dynamite,
Oh yeah, wonderful movie and a successful independent film. And
Jory loved Tom's script he was beginning to develop. So

(50:54):
once he got him behind it, he started getting some
other support and was able to start attracting money and
a cast. And so he informed me it was going
to be a narrative instead, and I said, okay, that
means there's going to be changes, and he said, well,
of course. So he started sending me the script, and

(51:14):
I realized I was going to have to make my
peace with some fairly significant changes from how it actually happened.
For purposes of the narrative. You know, you've got to
have in ninety minutes. You've got to have sufficient drama,
you've got to have conflict, you've got to have room
for the character to grow and so on. So the

(51:35):
first thing that was hard was he wanted to change
the timeline of my late wife TIA's illness with ovarian
cancer and her death and move that up so that
my trip into the wilderness was partly a grief trip,
partly in response to my grief over Tea. Well, that
wasn't the timing of how it actually happened, but it

(51:58):
made a much more interesting and compelling story, and it
was completely consistent with how my life went a little
bit later. And what did I do. I went to
the wilderness for you know, my sucker and my support.
So it was in character, it was consistent, and I
proved it. The second big change was that he wanted

(52:19):
and this part may have I don't know how this
part struck you two, but I'm sure a number of
our of our bigfoot friends found it disappointing in a way.
But I hope they'll see the point of it, and
that is they changed the emphasis from being bigfoot toward
toward butterflies. Now, as you said earlier, Cliff, my book's
a little bit different from a lot of the other

(52:41):
books because it's not entirely about Bigfoot. I mean, it
is about bigfoot, but it's not trying to find Bigfoot,
and when I went into the dark divide, It's important
to specify that I wasn't trying to find the animal. Obviously,
I had my eyes and ears open, and it did
end up with a very consequential auditory and track experience

(53:02):
for me, even near the very end. That made all
the difference. However, what I was really looking for in
the dark Bide should have said this earlier is was
my sense of Bigfoot after my year of study, after
learning so much about it from so many people and
books and so on, and now finally from the wilderness itself,
from the habitat, which is how a naturalist must always

(53:26):
ultimately do it. What do I think? Not really about existence,
That's not the main question here. I mean, Bigfoot obviously walks.
Bigfoot exists, whether or not it walks in flesh and blood,
we know it exists powerfully in the culture. But that
wasn't my question. My question was what does it mean?

(53:47):
What are the consequences? Does it have consequence for us
the way it did for the Native Americans and still does,
And ultimately what does it mean for the wilderness? My
point of the book ultimately, and you'll find it on
page eleven is Bigfoot and the wilderness are, in many
senses equivalent to one another. And if we manage to

(54:11):
preserve an appreciable portion of Bigfoot habitat, then along with it,
we will protect everything that goes with it, including the
possibility of its actual physical existence. But if we allow
the land to become so tamed outright that we can't
even imagine the presence of giant, hairy monsters out there

(54:35):
beyond the campfire, then we will have lost everything. We
will have lost something truly profound. That was the point
of the book, and ultimately I wanted to be the
point of the movie, and Tom convinced me that it was,
and so by shifting the balance toward butterflies, he was
able to highlight Bigfoot in a much subtler way. Think

(54:58):
of it. If it had been really about Bigfoot in
the same sense that the book was, chances are, gentlemen,
that it would have been sidelined as excuse me, yet
another silly Bigfoot movie. And we all know there have
been some real, slocky, stupid Bigfoot movies. There've also been

(55:19):
some that have been perfectly entertaining and really not bad,
like Harry and Anderson's. But they don't get any critical attention,
they don't get any real reviews, They certainly don't get
the degree of screening that we've been getting. We've been
on hundreds of screens already during the plague of all
things that wouldn't have happened. And yet by changing it

(55:39):
so that I get the googanem for the Butterfly for
Butterfly Studies, and then I go out and Bigfoot comes
into the story almost tangentially, It comes in subtly and
yet ultimately profoundly and totally changes him, as does the
whole experience. Well, I think it's much more powerful that way,

(55:59):
so I could go along with that change too. And finally,
this is the one that was a little bit hard
to take it, and it still is. I admit it,
And Bobo, you put your finger on it. It's not
the Bob Pyle that I see myself a haz or
that my nearest and dearest and people who know me
see me as. David's a little bit different from that.

(56:24):
He's dweeby. He's he's a dufus in the woods, naive, annoying,
he's annoying, and he's kind of self righteous. With the loggers,
and he's he doesn't know very much. But and I
said to Tom, I said, Tom, it's not how I am. Yeah,

(56:46):
I know, but he said, You're not going to have
a story unless the main character has room to grow.
I mean, in every single vision quest you're ever going
to find, from the Bale Wolf, through the Odyssey, through
a walk in the woods, to go from the sublime
to the ridiculous, the main character has to have a

(57:07):
room to grow and change. And I think David comes
out at the end a bigger person, a better person,
a more open minded person, certainly more adept in the
woods than when he went in, and I hope more likable.

Speaker 3 (57:22):
You know. I actually I haven't rid your book for
like fifteen years. In my mind now, I just recently
saw that Reese Witherspoon trail movie, Hiking the PCT, and
I mix it. I get these confused like images. They
kind of blur together for me. Now the movie that's
those two movies, like Bob Pyle and Reese Witherspoon.

Speaker 4 (57:43):
You know, we've never been mistaken on the street for
some reason, but when we get up in there woods.
I was always getting people say, Hey, Rees, how you doing,
you know. But I guess that's because of all. You know,
we get pretty scusy on the trail and you can't
tell a spart I will say though, that probably nobody's
going to mistake David crossing me for each other. But

(58:05):
we have certain things in common. And he's a city boy.
He's a cool guy. I got to go out in
the field with him for one day to teach him
how to catch butterflies, teach him how to use a
butterfly net in the Columbia Gorge with the director Tom Putnam.
But we had a ball. I mean, he's extraordinarily funny.
I mean just in person. It's not like he's trying
to put on a stand up act all the time.

(58:26):
He's not. He's just plain funny. And he's got quite
a different take on things from most people. Not really
a woodsman, he said in an interview. I saw afterwards
that he loves the out of doors, he loves wildlife,
he loves nature. But he doesn't see himself as becoming
a backpacker or ever doing anything like this again. And

(58:49):
yet it was an extremely demanding role. It wasn't easy
at all, you know, all that blood and gore, and
cuts and scratches he's got on him at the end,
And most of that was not makeup. Most of that
was absolutely real. They were down in those cold, sharp
lava caves for hours at a time, falling on the rocks.

(59:12):
He did his own stunts in every case except one
rolling down the rock side in the cave. Somebody else
did that. But where he falls into the stream and
he's underwater and they filmed that. He did that twice,
two takes, and he he damn near was hypothermic. Quen
it was over.

Speaker 3 (59:32):
Yeah, I was gonna say, because I know how long
those shoots are on, how long a scene takes, and
how many times you have to do it that I
was watching every man David Cross. I think it was
being like a whimpy city guy, but that was tough
business there. I be like, he was really doing that stuff.
I know how many hours like to see like a
five second scene, the four hours of freezing or whatever
it is.

Speaker 4 (59:52):
You're absolutely right, it takes hours to make those scenes,
take after take after take. And he he was tough,
according to Tom, and he's got a better body than me,
and he's certainly a lot younger and a lot stronger.
I never could have I never could have done it.
In fact, there's another actor they were going to hire
before him, and that didn't work out. And I'm glad

(01:00:13):
it didn't because I saw him in the movie recently.
He couldn't have acted.

Speaker 1 (01:00:17):
He did do a really good job. And the film
is just so well made, and I so appreciate that
it was made in the Gifford Pinn Show and the
surrounding areas and the Cascades and wherever else like up
in the Pacific Northwest. It is a beautifully shot film.
That's It's just a high quality film. Yeah, the cinematography
is wonderful, isn't it. It's funny that things like this

(01:00:37):
would happen to me now, isn't it, isn't it? Cliff
and BOBOI man seventy three years old. I'm an old fart,
and you're supposed to start winding down, I think at
this age, and physically physically, I'm winding down a little bit.
I don't have the energy. I couldn't do some of
the things in the field. I couldn't do that Dark
Divide Trek now the way I did it in nineteen ninety.

(01:01:01):
That's not surprising, but I still get out there. But
to have this kind of thing happening to me as
an artist, also still getting some biology done with butterflies,
and got a few butterfly projects I'm still working on.
I feel incredibly privileged and gifted, and to have friends
like you, and to have people of your stature paying

(01:01:23):
attention to some of what I'm doing is a greater
honor than I can possibly express. I'm I feel like
a very lucky boy. So I just try to navigate
this plague these times with an attitude of gratitude, and
I feel like I'm having a much better plague than
a lot of people are having. Happy plague to you,
Happy plague to you.

Speaker 4 (01:01:44):
Let me tell you about how people can access this movie.
Is that all right?

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Yeah? Please do that. A lot of people are want
to see this, especially after hearing you. We had Tom
Putnam on the show a few weeks ago or whatever.
But you know, now that they know you better, I
think that this is really going to stirp a lot
of about the film.

Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
The movie is called The Dark Divide. It's based on
the book called Where Bigfoot Walks Crossing the Dark Divide.
That book is in print right now in paperback new
paperback from Counterpoint Press, but of course you can order
it through I'm a Monster or any of the usual suspects. However,

(01:02:22):
I recommend going to an independent bookstore if you possibly can,
because they really need support during these times. So if
you're anywhere near a community or downtown or main street bookstore,
please please get it there. Or you can go online
to Powells dot com, pow E L l s dot com,

(01:02:44):
Powells dot com, great independent bookstore in Portland that has
this book in stock all the time and can easily
supply it supply you with It is cheap. I think
it's about sixteen bucks. But the movie itself was east
in September. It's called The Dark Divide. It's produced by OREI,

(01:03:06):
the Great Outdoor Equipment store has a new studio. This
is their first movie called OREI Studios. That's one of
the major partners and with the company that Tom Putnam,
the filmmaker, put together. It is an independent film, but
it has had about as much exposure since it came
out as just about any independent film has during these

(01:03:28):
COVID times. It's remarkable they managed to get it onto
more than one hundred screens actual cinema screens, as well
as a bunch of drive ins around the country. It's
still playing on a few screens here and there, but
it has gone to a video and demand and it
is now available on many of the streaming services and

(01:03:51):
standard ones. It's on Prime, it's on Voodoo, It's on
Google Watch or whatever it's called. It's on half A,
but it's not on Netflix. It's very hard to get
on Netflix, but it's on many of the others, So
check your service, whatever you've got, and you can also
find out where it's playing by going to the website

(01:04:13):
for the movie. Also at the website you can see
the trailer, which should get an award itself. It's a
wonderful trailer, and a bunch of other extras. You can
have access to various interviews and zooms and things about it,
little concerts by some of the members of the soundtrack.
Also on the Facebook page for the Dark Divide, you

(01:04:35):
can do that if you just search go to Facebook
and search Dark Divide. You'll get to theirs that gives
you a lot of entries to stuff about the movie.
But the Dark Divide website is this darkdividefilm dot com.
That's a lowercase and it's all one word, Darkdivide Film
dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:04:55):
Well, all right, Bob, it has been such a pleasure
talking to you far too long.

Speaker 4 (01:05:01):
I just love the work that you've done in the
world and the respect you've bought, the respect that you
have brought to the big Glut, you know, to our joint,
our joint love here this wonderful, wonderful animal and the
habitat it occupies. And if we ever see a Dark
Divide wilderness area protected, it will owe to you as

(01:05:21):
well as to the movie and the book, I hope,
but it's going to owe to all the people who
care about this animal that we care about and the
habitat that supports it. So thank you for that. And
once again I thank you at the bottom of my
heart for honoring me with your attentions and your time.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
Thank you, Bob.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
The honors all ours, honestly, Bob. And just to call
you a friend as a treasure in itself, I don't
say that lightly. You've been the model for the Bigfoot
community in general, not only in just your work your
perspective on the subject. But you're I don't know that
your delicate words that that encapsulate not only the subjects,

(01:06:06):
but the context of the subject of the wilderness areas
themselves and their importance has been great for me as
an individual, and I think the community in general. And
I want to thank you for all the work you've done,
and also thank you for coming on with Bobo and I.
I cannot wait to buy you a beer and sit
down and talk about stuff when we're not recording.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
I'll drink to that. You're welcome and I thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
All right, Bob, thank you so much. You take it
easy and you both be safe. Both be well, Okay, Bobo,
what do you think, man, how great was that? It's like,
you know, it's like coming up from being submerged in
water for too long to have Bob on the show
and just hang out with them and talk with them
a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:06:51):
I'm going to be stuck in this room for a
while because my head got something with all his comments,
I'm not going to get through the doorway.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
He is a true measure in the community and it
was just so nice to have him on.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
I think I got to talk to Bob as much
as I want to. Like I've said it on group
talks with me. You know, and it's just always you know,
I'm just over. I'm more just listening, you know, because
he's got so much information. But yeah, I'd love to
fill us spend some real time with him. And if
I do move up, it sounds like I might be
moving close to him, so I'm sure I will at
that point. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yeah, Well, it's this whole plague thing passes. And if
you go up to if you come up to Oregon here,
we'll be sure to get together.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Oh definitely, all right, Bob, take us home man. All right, folks, Well,
thanks for tuning in listening. We appreciate it. Check out
the Dark Divide movie. It's a good one and IF
and I thought we recommend it. And until next week,
keep her squatching.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Bigfoot and Beyond.
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(01:08:06):
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