Sasquatch

If not for the legend of a smelly 8-foot tall human-like beast, little would set this Northern California town apart from thousands of other American hamlets. Often called the "Bigfoot Capital of the World," Willow Creek straddles California 299 about 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean amid lush groves of cedar, fir, pine and oak.

True believers in Bigfoot ignored a history of hoaxes and misidentifications and gathered Saturday to exchange stories, peruse books and view items on the creature, which is also known as Sasquatch. About 120 people attended the fourth annual East Coast Bigfoot Conference and Expo in this town outside Pittsburgh. Sale items included plaster casts of footprints--some with five toes, some with three. "There's just too much evidence collected, too many sightings, too many reports for the creature not to exist," said Eric Altman of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society.

Full disclosure: I am no Bigfoot junkie. In fact, before strapping my mom, my 3-year-old and myself in the car and traveling north on U.S. 101 to Arcata, Calif., then swinging east on California 299 to the blink-and-you'll-miss-it town of Willow Creek, I believed all things Sasquatch were laughable at best. I knew that lots of honest folks did believe that Bigfoot or Sasquatch or, as crypto-zoologists call him, Gigantopithecus , not only exists but also thrives in Klamath River country between the Humboldt County coast and the Shasta Cascade.

This munchkin-size coffee-table book on flowers will appeal to photography buffs as well as those who want to once and for all distinguish their hellebore from their gladiola. Named after a Seattle flower shop, the book is photographed by a one-name artist, Ilona. The accompanying text takes the florid theme a bit too far -- hydrangeas spill "over time into rich, tone-on-tone hues of amethyst and maroon, lilac and root beer."

The sheer scale of the eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, staggers the imagination. The volcano spewed 540 million tons of ash over 22,000 square miles, killing at least 57 people, 11,000 hares and 5,000 black-tailed deer, and destroying 4.7 billion board feet of timber.

Some families possess great wealth or beauty, or give rise to heroes or scholars. Our family has good taste buds and an enchilada recipe handed down through eight generations. My family was convinced that we made the best enchiladas around. You might consider this attitude to be insufferable until you tasted them. My mother and grandmother, great cooks only a little prone to exaggeration, swore that the enchilada recipe had not been changed in 150 years.

Bigfoot or big, fat lie? Whenever someone reports seeing the hairy beast (details are always fuzzy) or capturing it on film (images always grainy), the news scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was just the latest episode in the sasquatch show.

Fearful pruners have a mentor in Cass Turnbull, founder of a cheeky Seattle-area organization called PlantAmnesty, which is dedicated to thwarting "mal-pruning." Turnbull's emphasis is on allowing a plant to grow into its best and most natural form, rather than whacking it back year after year in a futile bid to turn it into a perfect globe or shrunken shrublet.

Here on the doorstep of the Pacific Northwest, trees grow tall and mystery runs deep. For generations, the dark gorges have yielded lumber, and a legend. Willow Creek is a vortex of Bigfoot lore. This is where the discovery of jumbo footprints attributed to the oversized and doggedly undiscovered man-ape first captivated America nearly a half century ago. Years later, a classic film snippet caught a purported Bigfoot nearby.

IN late 1990, hundreds of Nike shoes began washing up on the beaches of Vancouver Island and Queen Charlotte Sound. They were relatively new shoes, and local flotsamists amassed a substantial collection of them. There was only one problem: The majority of shoes pulled from the wrack were right-footed. Meanwhile, farther south, in Cannon Beach, Ore., other Nikes were appearing, most of them left-footed. Beachcombers up and down the Pacific Northwest were scratching their heads. W.