From the book "The Best Of Sasquatch-Bigfoot" by John Green
Used with permission
Here is the text of the Willow Creek museum offer:
$100,000,00 for BIGFOOT TRACKS.
One hundred thousand dollars is being offered by the Willow Creek China Flat Museum for anyone who can demonstrate how the "Bigfoot" tracks that were observed in the Bluff Creek valley in northern California in 1958 and later could have been made by a human or humans. This offer is genuine. It is not a joke or a publicity stunt. The money has been arranged for, and the first person or group who can meet the conditions of the offer will receive it. Everyone should understand, however, that the conditions are not easy. The offer is a direct result of recent publicity which has created a perception that the Bluff Creek tracks were just a hoax carried out by a practical joker walking around wearing a large pair of carved wooden feet, but it is not meant as a challenge to the people who originated that story, who may well be perfectly sincere. The offer also is not a prize for technological achievement, such as being the first to build an effective footprint-stamping machine. It relates entirely to the question of whether the real tracks which brought the "Bigfoot" phenomenon to public attention could have been made by humans under the real conditions of the times and the places in which they appeared. The museum has casts of some of the tracks concerned, a few of them copies but mainly originals, available for inspection. It also has some related photographs, and published accounts of what was done and observed in connection with the tracks. There are also people still available for consultation who studied the tracks when they were made. A formal document setting out the requirements to qualify for the award will take time to prepare, but a successful applicant will have to be able to make flat-footed, humanlike tracks with more than twice the area of human feet and longer-than-human strides which do the following:
Traverse a variety of terrains, including climbing, descending and crossing steep slopes covered with underbrush; show variations of shape and toe position and stride accomodating to the terrain; sink into firm ground to far greater depth than human footprints specifically as much as an inch deep in hard sand where human prints barely penetrate at all; leave hard objects in the ground, such as stones, sticking up above the rest of the track. The applicant will also have to be able to make these tracks under the following conditions, although not all in combination:
In the dark, hundreds in a single night; in places where it is impossible to bring any vehicle or other machine or any equipment except what humans or animals could carry; without doing anything to attract the notice of people a few hundred yards away.
The reason that full specifications could not be included in the announcement was that the museum hoped publicity about the offer would lead to contact with the former roadbuilders and others who had seen tracks in the 50s. They were needed because it appeared that aside from myself everyone who had gone there to investigate the tracks in 1958 and 1959 had since died. As the chapters in this book titled "Bigfoot at Bluff Creek" and "Blue Creek Mountain" will explain, I had seen a great deal of a 15-inch, differently-shaped track that was found in the fall of 1958, but little of the original 16-inch tracks on the road project. Some record of what the tracks were all about is available in the newspaper files of the day:
Willow Creek-Bigfoot has been a familiar character to this part of the world off and on over a period of years.-Eureka, California, Humboldt Times, Oct. 7, 1958
In soft places the prints were deep, suggesting a great weight.-Jerry Crew, Humboldt Times, Oct. 5, 1958
He described the tracks as being pretty heavy. Quoting Julian Paulus regarding big tracks seen on a road job near Korbel in the spring of 1958.-Humboldt Times, Oct. 5. 1958
The footprint looks human but it is 16 inches long, seven inches wide, and the great weight of the creature that made it sank the print two inches into the dirt. Crew says an ordinary foot will penetrate the dirt only half an inch.-Associated Press story from Eureka, Oct. 6, 1958.
Judging from the deep indentation of the tracks he must be somewhere between 400 and 500 pounds. He must be quite an agile fellow leaping logs at a single bound and tracking throughout the wilderness covering a large territory quickly.-Edward Van Schillnger, stake setter on the Bluff Creek Road project, Humboldt Times, Oct. 8, 1958.
The first actual line of tracks definitely jolted me. On the hard ground where Philip Ammons' number 12's made a very light imprint, the track of Bigfoot sunk a half, to three quarters of an inch in depth. Twenty clear deep footprints marched along the side of the traveled portion on the road. Eighteen more were seen at intervals where the trucks had not run over them. We followed them down the road for some distance and found them down the road in both hard and soft earth. Bigfoot's tracks are in perfect proportion to what one would expect in their stride of sometimes 60 inches, 52 inches or the one short step over a small mound of dirt which was 40 inches. Even the depth to which the track had been pressed into the ground was in keeping with their size.-Willow Creek correspondent Betty Allen, in the Humboldt Times, Oct. 9, 1958