Stories have always had a way of becoming more elaborate and fanciful over time, but inversely, some of the most ancient stories were etched into rock as singular symbols.

Baker City anthropologist Scot Violette’s talent is focused on one figure that repeats not only throughout history, but in the annals of virtually every native tongue.

“My expertise is in Native American cultures,” said Violette, speaking remotely via Zoom somewhere in the Oregon wilderness. “Every tribe in the nation has a Bigfoot legend.”

Wood apes, Sasquatch, some might even let fly with Yeti. There’s many names and a lot to be said about the public’s fascination with hairy woodland wanderers, and personal accounts of encounters extend as far back as prehistoric times.

For Violette, stories are where it all starts, but evidence, methods and proof are still his gold standard, and he hopes that one day he gets his chance to study the real thing. He grew up in Summerville, graduated from Imbler High School and moved to Baker City in 2012.

His fascination with Bigfoot started at age 7 when he watched a film, shown at the Elgin Opera House, that included the most famous film in the Bigfoot annals. Roger Patterson made the film, showing a hairy bipedal creature walking along a stream, while on a scouting trip with friend Bob Gimlin along Bluff Creek in Northern California on Oct. 20, 1967. The footage has since been enshrined as the Patterson-Gimlin film.

Violette brings his passion to the subject not only to the search, but to planning the Blue Mountain Bigfoot Festival. The event, which had its debut in 2019 and returned in 2023 after a hiatus during the pandemic, is scheduled for June 22-23 at Geiser-Pollman Park. Admission is free, and details are available on Violette’s website, squatchamerica.com.

The search

Violette has spent decades moving from region to region to learn the legends and names associated with Bigfoot, and thoroughly explored the wilds they’re rumored to roam, collecting any and all compelling data on what he hopes may be proof of a real species.

“I’ve worked in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, worked with the Miwuk tribe of central California in Yosemite Valley,” Violette said.

Chaco Canyon is a Pueblo heritage site and a famous ruin dating over 1,100 years old.

“Lots of tribes had different relationships with them, some had trade treaties with them, other tribes had wars with them, depending on the tribe,” he said. “I think they’re a whole different hominid branch, but they’re more of an ape.”

There is fossil precedent for such creatures, something Violette is well aware of in his work. Teeth and facial bones of Gigantopithecus, a giant ape that lived in China, indicate the existence of a powerful species plausibly 9 feet tall and weighing roughly a quarter ton, one closely related to orangutans.

As well, some of the most ancient evidence for human existence in the Americas goes back 23,000 years. Prior to those eras, geology suggests there was a land bridge between Alaska and Asia at the end of the Pleistocene epoch.

Violette says there is some potential for such a creature to have arrived as ancient humans did, by simply walking across the land bridge some 37,000 years ago.

Locally, Violette says that stone pictographs, possibly made by Nez Perce or Paiute tribes west of Richland, Oregon, warned travelers to avoid the area, indicating the presence of a very large humanoid creature.

Tools of the trade

Despite the popularity of the hunt, as yet Bigfoot researchers have yet to secure the ultimate evidence of a living specimen.

There have been several hoaxes involving costumes, animatronics and even taxidermy, most of which are found out sooner than later.

To that end, Violette has collected a variety of findings, including footprint casts, possible nests, even partially eaten carcasses suspended in trees. But he says his intent isn’t to capture or kill what he thinks could be sapient creatures on par with early humans.

He catalogs his research regularly, and illustrates his work on his website. Violette says he relies on a bevy of instruments, many attached to his official Squatchmobile, a heavily customized vehicle he takes on his expeditions. In itself it’s an attraction he features at the annual Blue Mountain Bigfoot Festival.

“Tent, water, food, infrared cameras, a microphone recording 24/7 audio, a 360-degree camera, Starlink internet,” said Violette, elaborating on what’s built into his rig. He wears similar cameras whenever he is hiking on foot as well.

Though drones are very useful for surveillance, they often sound like angry bees to animals, forcing them to hide, and Violette says he doesn’t rely on them.

He has networked trailcams as well, which can link through to each other in an array, such as along lengths of crucial wild waterways, and monitor long stretches of territory wirelessly.

Sharing legends

Violette states his business front and center on his website: “Investigating the Unexplained, Not Explaining the Uninvestigated.”

Violette draws inspiration from his own Bigfoot encounter that took place while exploring with a new friend in 2018 in the Elkhorn Mountains west of Baker City, and many years after he’d committed his life to the research.

“I have had a sighting myself,” he said, “and recently we got my blurry photo enhanced and it looks pretty good.”

The image, taken through boughs of pine trees on a summer day, appears to contain the symmetry and contours of a face.

“We were hiking up the trail, and we smelled the most horrible smell,” said Violette. A rank odor is occasionally reported by people who claim to have seen one of the creatures.

“Then we stopped in our tracks, and were trying to detect where it was coming from,” he said.

Violette says he growled audibly, and when something responded in kind he managed to approach it and snap the photograph, which he believes to be of a juvenile Bigfoot.

“I saw it for the first time, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” he said.

He shares his story, and his discoveries, in depth at Blue Mountain Bigfoot Festival, which he puts on with his wife, Hannah.

The event will be accompanied by author Robert Leiterman, musician and Bigfoot researcher Tom Bennett, and presenter Jeremy Scott from the “Into the Parabnormal” podcast.

Last year the festival brought nearly 2,000 people to Baker City, and Violette thinks that figure, like the legends, will continue to grow.