Sasquatch Makes Big Impresssion Giant Footprint Found In North Idaho Hills

Gene Woodruff is carrying the suggestion of a legend around in a tote bag.

The Kelso Lake, Idaho, sawmill builder claims he found a footprint of the elusive sasquatch last week while bear hunting in the hills of the Idaho Panhandle.

“We walked into a clearcut and my 13-year-old boy stopped and said, ‘Dad, is this a Bigfoot track?”’ Woodruff said Monday. “When your boy says that, you got to go back and take a look.”

Woodruff did and returned three days later with plaster of Paris and a video camera. He hauls the resulting cast around to authorities and Bigfoot specialists.

But even experts in the not-so expert field of sasquatch surveillance appear less than excited by Woodruff’s claims.

“It’s just adding one more footprint,” said WSU anthropologist Grover Krantz, the nation’s most accredited scientist to have studied the man-ape. “You need a body - or a substantial piece of one.”

Woodruff’s find, it seems, comes at a time when Bigfoot research - once the province of eccentrics, practical jokers and Washington State University - is struggling to take on the air of science.

“There is a shift going on,” said Jeff Glickman, acting director of the former Bigfoot Research Project in Hood River, Ore., renamed the North American Science Institute.

“Scientists are becoming more careful in the way they state things, becoming less dogmatic,” he said. “Because of this increased care, it’s become possible for them to examine things that traditionally were considered fringe science.”

Consider:

Seven of the speakers at last weekend’s annual Bigfoot conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, (titled the Sasquatch Symposium) hold Ph.D.s - a first, Glickman said.

Jeff Meldrum, a primate morphologist at Idaho State University in Pocatello, recently joined Krantz as a serious student of the beast.

“I guess you could say I’m still kind of at the head-scratching stage,” Meldrum said, although he admitted leaning toward believing in the beast.

Hoping to find Bigfoot, Ohio State University scientists tried unsuccessfully 18 months ago to put strands of unidentified primate hair through DNA testing. Their results: inconclusive.

Glickman has spent the last four years conducting computerized image analysis of the “Patterson film,” 16mm home movie footage shot by a Yakima man in 1967 - a sort of Zapruder film for Bigfoot buffs.

Dismissed by most as a man in a monkey suit, the film shows a blurry, hairy creature ripping through the woods in Northern California.

Glickman is not yet willing to reveal his findings but hopes to publish them in a respected journal. His research paper is under review by his peers - “as much as you can have peer review in something like this.”

Meldrum attributes the new scientific approach in part to a change in science culture.

“A lot more of today’s scientists grew up with these stories and aren’t so quick to dismiss them,” he said.

Like Glickman, he believes scientists have learned a lot in recent years about how little they really know.

Anthropologists recently found a fossilized ape in China that raises questions about primate evolution. Other scientists recently discovered a new species of antelope in Laos.

“There are still corners of the globe that have not fully been plumbed,” Meldrum said.

For Woodruff, one of those corners is in the Panhandle National Forests, north of Priest River, Idaho.

That’s where he and his son were tracking bears last Tuesday, heads down, scanning for paw prints.

When his son shouted, Woodruff turned back.

Sure enough, Woodruff said, there it was - a 14-inch-by-7-inch depression in the mud on a slope a few feet above a logging road. It was shaped like a giant human foot with only three toes.

Woodruff had heard all the stories, one from an uncle 30 years ago who had told of footprints in the snow near Mount Rainier. Woodruff was convinced immediately that the footprint was real.

“All I could do was sit there in awe,” said Woodruff. “It was something. It was shocking.”

He returned with a friend, who videotaped him making the plaster mold, which he hopes to share with Krantz or other scientists.

Beyond that, Woodruff said, he’s not sure what he’ll do - unless a millionaire offers to send him on a hunting expedition.

“I ain’t got to satisfy nobody else but me,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo