This story has been floating around the online-news-o-sphere for the past few days, and at least two people have forwarded it to me. Some local hunters in Northern Minnesota have produced a trail cam image that they claim is Bigfoot.

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My good friends Cynthia Rose and Steve Sampson have moved to Paris. I am happy for them, but sad to see them go. I got an email with some amazing photos by Steve of a massive installation by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, using animals from Deyrolle, the most famous taxidermy shop in the world, an institution in itself in Paris and a must-see for visitors (I havent had the privilege myself, I haven’t been to Paris since the first Bush administration).

Ark, by Huang Yong Ping. Photo: Steve Sampson

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Part of my new show at Gallery 4Culture involves a simple, Myth-Busters type experiment: is it possible to replicate Bigfoot footprints with those giant wooden strap-on feet made famous by Ray Wallace in the 1970’s?

As the video shows, results are mixed. The average step reported in Bigfoot trackways is 48 - 60″. My target trackway was about 57″. For most ordinary individuals, taking steps large enough to replicate this spacing, with wooden feet strapped to your shoes, is simply not possible, at least not for any distance. My friend Jay Bryant, however, at 6 foot 6, is the exception that proves the rule.

In the video you can also see people interacting with the taxidermied bigfoot whose construction I have been chronicling here over the past few months. This is the effect I have wanted: to put you in a dark room with Bigfoot and a flashlight. It changes the experience completely from the open, well-lit group show in Kirkland. There is something pulse-quickening about carrying a flashlight into the dark, to see what you might find there, especially the big lantern type with the huge square batteries and over-arching handles, that bring memories of childhood campouts and thunderstorm-induced power failures. It’s simply primal.

Journalist Scott Bowen is On the trail of the New York Bigfoot. He joins an expedition sponsored by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, and tells us all about it. I have always wondered about these expeditions. At the reception to my show the other night, I met a field biologist working on the Olympic Peninsula, who has met some of the core members, and what she had to say wasn’t terribly kind. Another gallery visitor mentioned that the expeditions have become so popular (despite the $300 fee for first-time joiners) that BFRO is no longer allowing new people to come along.

So when you get 400 people to go camping together and trot around in the woods with their night vision scopes and walkie-talkies and whatnot, does it become anything other than a kind of group snipe hunt? BFRO contends that their expeditions do, reliably, turn up Bigfoot-related phenomena like vocalizations and wood-knocking. But are they legitimate, or are they some kind of manufactured thrill-experience? Hard to say. My informants tell me some of the participants are quite sincere.

I guess I won’t find out; not this year, at least.