Twilight Coast Author Offers Guide To The Weird, Wacky, Out Of This World Haunts Of Pacific Region

If fictional FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder have a reference shelf, “Field Guide to Mysterious Places of the Pacific Coast,” is probably on it.

“The X-Files” could easily include stops at a few of the places described by author Salvatore M. Trento - places that visitors may not fully understand. Destinations without explanations.

They include a “sacred mound” near Seattle, pirate treasure territory on the Oregon coast, acres of Bigfoot sightings, vortexes where a ball seems to run uphill and paintings preserved in California caves.

Some of Trento’s places are simply geologic formations, like lava tubes. Many are sites where Indians left their marks.

The book is a travel guide to about three dozen mysterious locations that could bend any vacation a little to the weird.

Take the sacred mound. Many Seattle residents probably don’t realize that Poverty Hill along the Duwamish River in Tukwila is - according to Trento’s Indian folklore sources - the spot where the world was created. The mound has also produced 30 million-year-old fossils, he writes.

Oregon may have the only “mystery vortex” roadside attraction that is something more than an optical illusion.

About a dozen places in the country have copied the idea of a tilted shack where a ball seems to roll uphill, Trento notes. But in his chapter on The House of Mystery: The Oregon Vortex at Gold Hill, he writes that he measured intense geomagnetic fields.

As might be expected, California seems to have cornered the market on oddities. More than half of the 223-page book is about its enigmas.

The best may be figures that ancient inhabitants left in the southeast desert by moving rocks to form images, including a 94-foot-tall man and a four-legged animal 50 feet across. Spotted by a pilot in the 1930s, they can only be seen from the air.

So who, before the age of human flight, saw them?

Trento’s answer is a shrug and the advice to respect what Indians may consider sacred: “Tread lightly in this spiritual domain. It’s not as easily dismissed as you may think.”

Like Seattle’s sacred mound, crisscrossed by bike-wheel ruts and littered with broken bottles, “Field Guide,” is a little disappointing to a reader who may have been thinking of UFO landing zones.

Trento’s research is also a letdown. He skims sources, credited in a bibliography, without getting into depth on any theme or topic. And at least one reference is incorrect. Bigfoot expert Grover Krantz is a professor at Washington State University, not the University of Washington.

Trento’s contribution is to measure magnetic fields, which he theorizes Indians sensed when they chose walls and rocks for drawings. Who knows? He goes no further than speculation.

He provides directions to each of the spots and mentions other mysterious places one might visit along the way. His hand-drawn maps and sketches are good, though his black-and-white snapshots fail to do justice to fading cave paintings.

To get the most from the book, set skepticism aside, embrace the unknown and enjoy a gullible’s travels.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Northwest sites Poverty Hill, along the Duwamish River in Tukwila, is said to be where the world was created. A “mystery vortex” at Gold Hill, Ore., is among a dozen places in the country where a ball seems to roll uphill. But Trento notes there is more than an optical illusion: He writes that he measured intense geomagnetic fields there.