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  He then proceeded to talk non-stop for about half an hour about various sightings. He told me that when the original logging tracks were first built into the wilderness, a logger friend of his complained that something was messing about with his machines. They were being vandalized, with something hurling big heavy rocks at them. He also found several sets of footprints.

  Forest Ranger Jim was on a roll.

  He told us about how many creatures previously unknown to science there were discovered every year under the sea. He mentioned the recent discovery of a type of deer that scientists had thought extinct.

  It was safe to say that Forest Ranger Jim was a believer but we couldn’t stop him talking. It felt like the whole world was being sucked into some time-space vortex from which we would eventually have to extract ourselves if we were to go anywhere that day. Despite this I was quite stoked to find a forest ranger who believed in Bigfoot. These guys were officials who had spent all their lives in this environment. It seemed to me that he was a pretty credible witness.

  We drove on through Hoopa, the Indian reservation. Richard’s father-in-law had been the dentist here in 1969, after he’d left the Marine Corps, and so he knew quite a lot of the people. Richard had rung the tribal museum to ask whether we could come and talk about Bigfoot, but they’d hung up on him. They didn’t like people cheapening the Omah story and without their cooperation it was very difficult to gain access to any valid information on the reservation. We drove on through. There was trash everywhere and shanty-type trailers with old cars and junk lying about. To be honest, it was a bit of a shit-hole.

  Once out of the reservation we soon came to the town of Weitchpec. This was the site of the very first reported sighting of Wandering Willie of Weitchpec. We stopped at the local store, which had more than a touch of Deliverance about it. We bought turkey jerky, which was a first for me. Richard chatted to the old guy behind the counter, who looked like Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard. He was the descendant of a Norwegian who’d married a squaw and he very much gave out the impression that he was in charge. I asked him whether he knew anything about Wandering Willie. He nodded slowly as though he knew everything about it. I waited for him to expand but nothing came and it was fairly clear that nothing would.

  We drove on again, the road running above the raging river and through some staggeringly beautiful scenery. As I looked up into the thick woods bordering the roads it was easy to see how something could stay undiscovered there if it so wished. We got to a bridge that spanned Bluff Creek where the creek ran into the main river. We parked the car and clambered up the sides of the hill to get a better view. As we climbed, I noticed a weird, unpleasant smell. Was it Bigfoot or was I being paranoid? We climbed higher and I had to push my way through some thick bushes. The smell was really bad now and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. I bustled through another thick bush and the ground flattened out into a little plateau on which stood a loo. It was weird – we were about fifteen minutes from the road, in the middle of nowhere, and suddenly we’d stumbled on a loo. It stank to high heaven and I opened the door while holding my shirt over my nose. It was a mess. It looked like somebody had exploded in there. What on earth was this thing doing here in the middle of nowhere? Did bears shit in the woods? I was definitely on the lookout for Bigfoot scat but hadn’t expected this. Richard was totally confused. He had no idea what this was doing where it was. It was oddly freaky and we climbed back down to the car quite speedily. I looked up the creek for a while and imagined spotting a creature down on the shoreline fishing for salmon. It would look up startled and then move off in that curious gait, back into the thick undergrowth. This was just what a fisherman had seen on this river very near Willow Creek. Bigfoot was not showing himself for me, however. I was rather pleased. Nobody would believe me if I spotted one anyway, but in Bluff Creek of all places it would be ludicrous.

  We got to Orleans, once a serious conurbation with a population of 6,000 inhabitants but now a bit of a ghost town with a population of less than 600.

  We found the forestry office and popped in. An elderly woman was sitting in the back and seemed very surprised to see someone. We asked her a question but she couldn’t hear too well, so she got up and started walking towards us so slowly that I estimated it took her about seven minutes to traverse the twelve feet or so between us. She was also wearing glasses so thick that you couldn’t see the eyes behind them. When she eventually reached us we asked her about roads and whether they were open. We wanted to try the Go Road. Originally built to join Orleans with the next valley, this was the closest proper road to where we needed to go. Local Indians had complained that it crossed over sacred ground and building work had stopped. Now the Go Road just went to a dead end miles up in the hills. It was therefore known by local wags as the No-Go Road. The Forest Ranger Lady knew nothing about the road but offered us some posters and Smokey Bear goody bags. Out of politeness we said yes and to our horror she announced that she would have to go find them. She started to move off on what looked like the beginning of an extraordinarily long trip. Richard and I glanced at each other in despair.

  As we waited, an unkempt man called Bud turned up and seemed to know all about which roads were closed and which were not. He said that the Go Road had snow and was not really passable. I asked him the default question.

  ‘Have you ever seen a Bigfoot?’

  ‘I have not personally, but I know a lot of people who have . . .’ This was getting to be very repetitive.

  He told us about having to rescue ‘some idiots’ from very near the Patterson Gimlin site. They had hiked down there having heard a story of a Bigfoot massacre. Forest rangers had supposedly killed ten of the creatures and were covering the whole incident up. The hikers had got completely lost and had no food with them. Bud told us that they were lucky to have been found.

  ‘It’s a big place out there . . .’

  I asked him, just for clarity to assure me that forest rangers had not carried out a hushed-up massacre of Bigfoots and he confirmed that, no, this had not happened. I asked him what had started the story.

  ‘Who knows? Some wacko writes something on the Web and then it’s fact. Those sorts of things get in the way of real sightings.’

  I later looked up this theory and could find only a confused story claiming that Patterson and Gimlin, on an earlier trip, had stumbled on a clan of Bigfoots and had shot dead several of them. They then panicked at their similarity to humans and buried the bodies. Supposedly, when they returned and shot their famous film, ‘Patty’, the Bigfoot featured, had been in the process of digging up the bodies.

  The world of cryptozoologists is indeed a weird one.

  We thanked Bud and got back into our car. I was a bit depressed about not being able to go up the Go Road. This meant that we could not get near enough to the Patterson Gimlin site to hike in. Richard looked at me like I was crazy.

  ‘Sure we can go up there. He said what he had to say, I said what I had to say, but the body language was all about understanding that we were going up there anyhow.’

  I hadn’t picked up on any of this at all; I just heard that the roads were closed and that was that. But Richard clearly knew the area and I trusted him. We filled up with gas at a petrol station run by Indians. There was a sign on the door with a drawing of a nasty-looking gun:

  If you are found here tonight, you will be found here dead tomorrow

  The Indians seemed pleasant enough but you certainly wouldn’t mess with them. With a full tank we headed uphill on the Go Road. It was a rather magnificent thing and we cruised up it in bright sunshine in high spirits. We spotted mile markers, which were useful because we needed to turn off at the seventeenth mile; there we would start heading down to the end of Cedar Creek Road and walk from there. I couldn’t help feeling that we were a little underprepared but Richard didn’t seem worried and he knew the area so I rolled with it.

  I adore driving, especially in snow or sand – th
e fun stuff. We saw nobody on our way up, although there were supposed to be the paranoid weed farmers hidden away all over the place and they don’t like strangers. On we drove until, at the ten-mile marker, we started hitting some patches of snow. It was mainly lying on the side of the road and not too bad so we cracked on. Any part of the road on the south side was exposed to the sun and had no snow but we slowly came across more and more stretches of road that were on the north side and in shade with a lot more snow on them.

  There were a couple of tracks through the snow, and my rental was an all-wheel drive, so we carried on. I motored through a particularly deep bit, just keeping the car under control and on the road and preventing us from falling off the drop on the right. I got a massive adrenaline rush and Richard seemed impressed with my driving. The short snowless stretches gave us confidence to face the next lot. I started to drive and film at the same time and this made Richard a little more nervous. He hinted that, should I need a cameraman, he could be of assistance. On we ploughed as the road got steeper and darker and snowier. As we passed the fifteen-mile mark we came round a corner and the road got very steep and the snow extremely deep. I gunned the motor and flipped into low gear. We made steady progress but it was tough going. About half a mile further up the slope I veered out of the tracks and into deeper snow. The SUV stalled and we were stuck.

  We were not overly concerned. We both got out to film the situation and made jokes about what idiots we were. It was noticeably colder than down in Orleans, even though it was only around one in the afternoon. Richard was all for calling Bud and getting him to come up and help us out but I was rather embarrassed that we had not heeded his advice. My manly pride kicked in and I thought that we should try to do this ourselves. I had a look at the car. We were not that stuck and I thought that, if we dug the snow out from under the car, we should be able to move back into the tracks and reverse back down to a better spot. Richard didn’t seem so convinced. I was slowly coming to realize that he was about as practical as I was: i.e., not at all. We were two idiot city boys stuck in the middle of nowhere.

  We set about digging the car out and soon had all four wheels fairly clear of snow so I got back in and started the engine. Richard was at the front pushing and, after a while, a wheel gripped the snow and we moved back on to the tracks. I was elated and whooped with excitement. Richard shouted at me not to stop and to keep reversing downhill until I got to an easier spot. Over-adrenalized, I shot off way too fast. For a while I managed to keep the SUV on the road but suddenly I skidded very badly and the car screeched into a ditch on the side of the road and smashed against the bank. We were now well and truly stuck. Richard came down looking concerned and I announced ruefully that we were not getting out of this one. It was clear from his face that he already knew this. I said that maybe it was time we called Bud. He picked up his mobile and peered at it for a while before putting it back down.

  ‘You not going to call him?’ I asked.

  ‘We haven’t got any reception,’ he answered. The first shiver of uncertainty shot through my body. I’d seen this before in Ray Mears’s TV shows – the gentle progression from adventure to big trouble. Nobody knew that we were up here, unless Richard’s ‘body language’ theory was right (which I was starting to doubt). We had no way of contacting anybody and we had only four hours of daylight left. We had to get the car out. I looked around and spotted a fallen tree. I told Richard that we had to get some of the thick bark on the trunk and then put it under the tyres to create traction. He looked rather impressed by this. I waded into the deep snow and ripped some bark off in long strips. We put them under the car and I tried to rock back and forth using the engine but the car was stuck fast.

  We struggled for a while but it was useless.

  We needed to make a decision as to what to do. We were stuck in the middle of nowhere, very high up a mountain, and it would get extremely cold at night. Richard thought that we should start walking down the road and he would soon get cell reception. I couldn’t help remembering Ray Mears’s golden rule of survival: always stay by the vehicle . . .

  That, however, was surely when you were lost in the middle of nowhere? At least we knew that there was a town seventeen miles away down the road we’d come up. Sure, there were bears, mountain lions, paranoid and armed weed farmers and possibly a Bigfoot, but there was a town at the end. We got our coats out of the SUV. We put our three bottles of water and a pack of turkey jerky in a bag and headed off. Confidence at this stage was fairly high. We would simply walk downhill into the sun where we would get cell-phone coverage.

  For the first mile or so we kept stopping to hunt for the elusive single bar, but there was nothing. I told Richard that we needed to be near Orleans before we got any signal. He admitted he hadn’t had any there either. I started to realize that we were not going to get cell coverage. We needed to find someone to help us or it was going to be a very long trek.

  I thought humans averaged about four miles an hour walking speed so I estimated that it would take us about four hours until we hit Orleans. It would be dark in three. It was doable but we had to be careful. Richard said that weed farmers tended to ‘SSS’: shoot, shovel and shut up.

  Many of the local Indians were also a law unto themselves and not really who you wanted to bump into. I’d heard a story about Jeeps Colgrove, a physically imposing Indian woman who used to wander about with a razor stuck in her hair. She’d committed several murders and used to pick people up off the side of the road and then ask them, ‘Do you know who I am?’ She was from the Hoopa reservation, which was not a huge distance away.

  We really didn’t fancy any of this. I’d stupidly left my passport in the car and was worrying about that as well. It was also getting darker quicker than we anticipated. I had a little panic. Had we really fucked up here? Were we going to become the poster boys for idiots from the city? I was wearing a T-shirt and a Prada anorak – what a twat. Then I remembered another Ray Mears tip: survival was all about keeping a positive frame of mind.

  We started telling stories. Richard and I were actually quite similar: he used to work in Congress and for CNN whereas I used to work in Parliament and for ITN. We were both passionately interested in American politics and we discussed the upcoming presidential campaign. We both thought that Obama would scrape back in, but only because of the lack of serious opposition.

  I was quite pleased with my pace, especially considering the old foot injury I have.

  We reached the twelve-mile mark only to find a long uphill slope that we didn’t remember driving over. The slope sapped our strength and we both realized how far we still had to go.

  Had this been a script, this would have been the perfect time for Bigfoot to find us after we’d fallen unconscious by the roadside. I would awake in a Bigfoot nest to find the beast gently breastfeeding me.

  We got to the ten-mile marker at four-thirty. We had one more hour of light, if we were lucky. It was getting very cold and I longed to see a car: even if we got Deliverance-d maybe they’d let us go afterwards?

  Richard kept saying, ‘You’ve been in worse scrapes, right?’

  And I kept thinking, Yes, but with people who knew what to do.

  I tried to imagine the headlines: ‘Idiot comedian dies in Californian hills looking for Bigfoot. But is it a hoax?’

  We reached the eight-mile marker and my feet were really starting to hurt. It was almost dark and getting rather creepy. We spotted some tracks going straight up a steep bank of red clay. We couldn’t work out what had made them and, for a moment, we forgot our plight and got quite excited. Richard tried to clamber up the hill beside them and they were a big size. There seemed to be smaller tracks of something like a deer followed by far bigger tracks, bigger than a human foot would make. What puzzled us, however, was the steepness of the slope. It was almost vertical. Richard was having difficulty getting any traction but whatever had made these prints had gone straight up and over. Richard re-joined me on the road and we s
tarted trying to figure out what might have made them. It was not a bear, as there were no claw marks; these tracks had toes and did look pretty humanlike. As we stared I heard a voice – and then, a miracle. I spotted someone coming out of the woods further down the road. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and was carrying a basket. Was he a crazed weed grower? He didn’t appear to be and I couldn’t see a gun. To my shame we forgot all about the tracks and approached our potential saviour like desperate castaways to a friendly boat. He gave us a big smile as though he’d been expecting us. His name was Peter and he was picking mushrooms to eat. He had a car hidden out of the way down a side track because, ‘There are dangerous folk around here.’

  I asked him what he meant and he listed a series of people whom we really would not have been thrilled to encounter: local rednecks, homicidal Indians, bears, mountain lions, armed weed farmers . . . It appeared that we had been picked up by the only safe man in Humboldt County.

  He seemed more than happy to give us a lift and we walked towards the car. I had never been so pleased to see anyone ever in my life. Peter seemed like a really cool guy. His parents ran a ‘dude ranch’, a place that harked back to the tradition of ‘soft’ East Coasters coming west for a vacation where they could rediscover their manliness by taking part in cattle drives, shooting guns, riding horses, etc. He was polite enough to leave the matter unsaid, but it seemed clear that he felt that Richard and I were prime candidates for this experience. Surprisingly, Peter had not seen Bigfoot himself but he knew lots of people who had . . . I told him about the tracks we’d seen and he said that they were probably deer or bears. By this stage I was too tired to care.

  Peter clearly realized that we probably shouldn’t be left alone again and he insisted on driving us the twenty miles to Richard’s father-in-law’s cabin. I’d expected this to be some small two-room hut. How wrong I was. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, a set of gates swung open and led us up a drive and past two fish ponds to a giant log cabin complete with swimming pool. It was idyllic.