Oh Mah Goodness 3: Bigfoot Betty and the Archive!

Flashback to 2024

McKinleyville, CA → Willow Creek, CA
46.3 mi (74.5 km)

More 2026 Adventures

Something big is afoot, everyone!

As you’ll remember from my previous adventure blog, Penguin, Jr. and Penguin III have followed me back to Los Angeles to decode a mysterious message from the nefarious rogue penguins. I’m no cryptologist, but I figured I’d give it a shot. After all, they convinced their polar bear friends to build me something special for my upcoming final national park trip!

I gathered all the special, mystical equipment I owned, read all the most esoteric books on my shelf, and did my best to draw on the most cosmic of powers to crack the code and presumably save the world. Wait… words are coming to me!

“Something BIG is a Foot…” How ominous! But also, when the rogue penguins are involved, something big is always afoot! The three of us put our semiaquatic heads together and came up with… a whole bunch of questions. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered that something big was going to be afoot this weekend up north in Humboldt County, and while I’m no cryptologist, I am something of a cryptozoologist! In fact, the 64th annual Bigfoot Daze Festival in Willow Creek was coming up this weekend. Oh no! Could the rogue penguins have been planning a sabotage of the festival? We had to stop them!

Avelo Airlines stopped servicing California last year, but into their place has stepped Breeze Airways with an easy breezy direct route from Burbank to Eureka-Arcata! Like many economically minded airlines, this one only departed on Thursdays and only returned on Sundays, meaning by the time we touched down in Humboldt County, we had a two-day gap until Bigfoot Daze. Whatever information we could find in those two days would better prepare us for whatever big thing was afoot, but we’d need some expert assistance. So I booked us an appointment to view the Genzoli Collection in CalPoly Humboldt’s Special Collections, my first time in a real historic archive! I was giddy with excitement!

Our onsite contact on this very quiet summer break Thursday was Keith, who jumped right in to help us navigate a huge amount of information from the 1950s and 60s! First, we dove—the Penguins literally—into a big folder called “Betty,” which was short for Betty Allen! Like Andrew Genzoli, whose name was on the collection and who coined “Bigfoot” on October 5, 1958, Ms. Allen worked for the Humboldt Times and collected lots of stories and interviews about Bigfoot while posted in Willow Creek. These Special Collections were a treasure trove! We were sure to find some useful clues here!

Some of these sources were news clippings, some handwritten notes, like the one that showed it was Betty Allen herself who supplied the plaster for the first Bigfoot casts in 1958! Some of the sources claimed Bigfoot sightings, while others tried to disprove Bigfoot! These were super rare finds, the best of which was Betty Allen’s personal account of the 1959 Pacific Northwest Expedition, the first large-scale Bigfoot hunt in history! She’d arranged the first meeting between locals, Jerry Crew and Bob Titmus, and expedition funder, Tom Slick, at Wyatt’s Motel in Willow Creek! After the Expedition fell apart in 1962, she kept on collecting sightings, a real Bigfoot Betty! Viewing her collection inspired Roger Patterson to come back to California and make his famous film in 1967!

Archived evidence showed that something big was definitely afoot here! In fact, we found a literal foot folded up alongside a clip of the original October 5, 1958 Humboldt Times Bigfoot article! It was a scaled drawing of a 16″ x 7″ footprint, which also described a 50″ normal step and a 10-foot running stride! At first I thought it was signed by Ray Wallace himself, the man accused of planting the original Bigfoot tracks, but then I realized it also had Jerry Crew’s name on it! Jerry Crew was the fellow who made the first footprint casts and brought them to the Humboldt Times, but his last name was written “Crews,” a recurring Betty Allen typo, meaning this foot was also drawn by Betty Allen! In any case, this was a very big foot, but what could it have to do with the rogue penguins? We’d need to keep digging.

Keith was very, very helpful in consolidating all of these clues, scanning very high resolution images of these articles and drawings and uploading them to a Google Drive folder so we could check back on them down the road. We took extra special care to make sure each page got placed back in the same order it came out, and it hit me suddenly: these pages were probably handled by the biggest names in Squatching, maybe by John Green and Roger Patterson themselves! I was a little awe-struck, but with only three hours to comb the archive, there was no time to get lost in stardom!

The Special Collections had some extraordinary old maps of the Six Rivers region, so once our clues were digitized, we got to work identifying all the places where something big could be afoot in the area! That meant unrolling some maps from the 1950s and tracing Bluff Creek north to a place I’d visited two years ago, the site where Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin had made their famous film in 1967. But just south of there, at a very distinct confluence between Bluff Creek and Notice Creek, there was another place called Louse Camp, where Jerry Crew found those very first big feet almost a decade earlier, and where the Pacific Northwest Expedition had based their operations for almost three years! We’d have to add Louse Camp to our itinerary and scope them out for rogue penguin activity!

The Penguins’ flippers were getting tired of flipping through pages, so I made use of this nifty CopyMate contraption to spread and photograph some of these historic maps. If no rogue penguins showed up at Bigfoot Daze, we’d use these maps to hunt down their schemes in the wilderness! While I was using the CopyMate, Sarah, the Collections manager, came over and said there might be even more information on these locations at the Willow Creek – China Flat Museum. I thanked her, but I’d already been there a couple of times. No, she insisted, she didn’t mean the exhibits. She meant the Museum’s backroom archive, where she was heading at that very moment to clean up ahead of Bigfoot Daze! Another behind-the-scenes archive dive? Oh yeah, we’re on it!

So the Penguins and I ended up in Willow Creek two days earlier than planned, but I didn’t mind that at all. I was excited to show them one of my favorite places in California! It was a quiet little stopover town just ahead of Saturday’s big bash, even though there were truckloads of firefighters hanging out in the museum parking lot, ever vigilant for what the summer could bring. It was nice to be back!

Right away, Penguin, Jr. spotted a big foot! Was this a clue? Was this part of a bigger picture? Could the rogue penguins have cast a metal footprint and planted it on the ground as a staging point for a grand caper? This was the most obvious place for something big to be afoot. After all, this foot was right at the base of…

…Gordon Burns’ giant Bigfoot statue at the entrance to the Willow Creek – China Flat Museum! It was like seeing an old friend again, like showing two old friends a third old friend and making a new experience out of it! The Penguins were amazed. This was something big indeed! What bigger thing could be afoot in all of Humboldt County?! However, there were no rogue penguins to be seen here. We were still early.

The Museum archive was petite but dense with maps, letters, sighting reports, and more, including the entire yet-to-be-sorted collection of Jon Erik Beckjord, who introduced the idea that Bigfoot wasn’t a physical being at all but a paranormal spirit, something I’ll bet the rogue penguins would love to get their hands on! We combed through the folders, one by one, but a lot of the material reaffirmed what we’d already found out in the Special Collections. There were some interesting tidbits on another local legend named Burro Bill, who’d spent four decades journeying through the backcountry with his burros, making maps and taking photos. Maybe I’m biased in favor of historic Bills, but he seemed like the sort of person who should have a plaque in his honor. Wait a second! A lightbulb went off! Bigfoot was first cast, first named, first hunted, and first filmed at two sites in Six Rivers National Forest. That sounded like Criterion 1 for a California historical landmark to me! One project at a time, though… but what if?

After making a few scans of promotional flyers for Bigfoot Country, we thanked Sarah for her help and planned to see her again on Saturday, hopefully having thwarted the penguin plot. She told us to go check out a statue I’d completely skipped on my last two visits to Willow Creek, arguably the most historic and important of the Bigfoot statues. This was The Oh Mah by Jim McClarin, carved from a single redwood stump back in 1967, a few months before the famous film was released! For thirty years, this was Willow Creek’s central attraction before being upstaged by the museum’s statue, but it The Oh Mah still holds a special place in the hearts of Bigfooters nationwide, even if he’s a little worse for wear.

With our brains very, very full from all the research, the Penguins and I checked into the loveliest AirBNB, a few miles north of Willow Creek, on the banks of the Trinity River and in the shadows of the misty mountains, a very different experience from my sun-scorched visit a few years ago. There was lots of room for us to stretch out on the bed, and there was a whole kitchen stocked with supplies. This was going to be the best possible spot to spend an extended weekend of Bigfooting and rogue penguin sleuthing!

Plus, the host had graciously left us a copy of 101 Humboldt Things to Do, which offered some ideas for what to do tomorrow. I suggested we head north and investigate the old Bluff Creek Road, which was being built when the first Bigfoot tracks were discovered. There was a campground up the road at Fish Lake, which seemed a likely base of operations for rogue penguin evildoing. We agreed that it would be the best place to investigate on the Friday before Bigfoot Daze.

Unbeknownst to us, while our AirBNB was well sheltered from human eyes, we were staying in the midst of a whole neighborhood of ground squirrels, so we asked around whether anyone had seen anything suspicious lately. No Bigfeet had passed through here, maybe because the property was fenced in. Indeed, things had been slower than usual. One ground squirrel hushed the other who said this. Slower than usual? That didn’t seem suspicious in the slightest. I wondered what they were so nervous about.

We’ll meet you in the woods!