The group found many overlapping tracks of different sizes up there.

I didn't know that Rick had already posted some of the pictures, so I have just been reading the thread. You are welcome to post what I have to say.

The purpose of having these photos (there are 35 altogether) was so that everyone could see how ridiculous it is to suggest that all the various shapes could have been made with a pair or two of false feet. From this sample a lot of viewers have gone on the opposite tack, noting how much some of the tracks look like one of the Wallace wooden feet. They do, of course, because those are the tracks the carvings were made to imitate.

That track, generally referred to as the "!5-inch track" was first recorded on a sandbar in Bluff Creek in the fall of 1958, just a few weeks after Jerry Crew made the first cast of one of the somewhat larger tracks that had been showing up overnight that summer on the road construction job above the creek. These tracks were found by Bob Titmus, then a taxidermist at Anderson, California, who is dead, and Ed Patrick, who now lives in Redding. They sank as much as an inch into the sandbar, which, as I saw for myself, was so densely packed that human boot prints did not even show the outline of the sole, just a flattened mark. Titmus made casts, now in the Willow Creek museum, and at one time sold a few copies of them, so they would have been available to copy from then on.

It is probably the most distinctively-shaped of any of the tracks that have been recorded in California, and it certainly the one that has been most frequently photographed and cast, by a quite a few different people, at various locations. At least a couple of times these tracks were reportedly accompanied by a smaller set, once going along a dirt road for a very considerable distance, but until 1967 I had never seen the smaller track, generally called the "13-inch track."

In August 1967 I got a call from a friend at Willow Creek telling me that tracks had been found on a road on Onion Mountain, and I drove down there with a man who trained tracking dogs, one of his dog handlers and their best dog. There were a few of each of the 15" and the 13" near where a road contractor had parked a water wagon, on a side road just where it branched off the main road. They were too old to interest the dog, and were not particularly good tracks, but I cast a couple of each.

A few days later I was notified by the road contractor that a lot more tracks had showed up overnight where he was working on the main road farther along on Blue Creek Mountain, which is really more of a ridge, and this time I managed to raise money for a plane and flew down with the dog and the handler, bringing Rene Dahinden with me. A  cougar hunter named S.C. Buttram came from Willow Creek with a jeep to provide transportation. The dog's owner was not able to come, and after having seen the big tracks he now required that men with rifles were to run a distance out on each side to protect his dog, hence the gun butt in one picture. We certainly did not expect to shoot anything.

By the time we got to where the tracks were it was late at night. At the first track we were shown, a 15'", the dog stiffened abruptly and the hair on its back stood up, but no one was in favor of trying to follow in the dark. The next morning the dog showed no interest. Where that track ended, heading down a hard-packed old side road that showed nothing,  the handler made a determined effort, but the dog only sniffed at the underside of bushes by the road, which the handler said is the last place the scent would linger, and apparently it found nothing it could (or maybe nothing it wanted to ) follow.

The contractor had said there were three types of track, one large and two smaller, but we only saw two. However traffic had wiped out the tracks on two wide strips of road, so he may have been right. The two that were still to be seen had both come onto the road from the Blue Creek side, but not at the same place. Both tracks did quite a bit of meandering about,  the larger one going right off the road on the Bluff Creek side at one point and returning farther back than where it had left, making double tracks for a short distance. We did not record the distance the tracks covered, but we counted 590 of them and estimated that there must originally have been about a thousand. Both tracks left the road on the Bluff Creek side, again not at the same place, the larger track being the first to come on and the last to go off. I don't remember just how the smaller one left.

There were some tracks off the road but in dirt disturbed by the work, otherwise the ground was too hard. The road itself also was quite hard-packed, but had a deep layer of fine dust on it, and this is what most of the tracks were made in. Typically such  tracks are deeper at the heel and toes, and far deeper than human tracks, but in this situation most of the tracks were shallow and rather flat, in those respects  more favorable than usual for possible fakery. On the other hand, although it was during a spell of very hot weather there had been a sprinkle of rain that dimpled the dust where it was undisturbed, and shaping all of the tracks, under a layer of new dust, was a fragile skin of hard-dried mud. As the day wore on, with traffic on the road contributing more dust, we could see the shapes getting less distinct. We considered this to be a clear indication that all of the impressions had been made during a short period while the top layer of dust was still damp: that they could not have been carved out, as the hoaxer's tracks would have been obvious and impossible to remove in the dimpled surface; and that they could not have been made by walking on false feet because there were many small and large variations in shape from impression to impression. To make so many tracks in a single night by any more-elaborate method seemed out of the question, and during the day there was traffic. The contractor, by the way, was not a Wallace, and while Ray was well-known by then for faking casts and movies and telling tall tales he was doing it back home in Washington, not in California.

Not being able to follow with the dog, we spent a lot of time examining and photographing tracks, but we cast only some of the poorer ones because we were waiting for someone to come from the British Columbia Museum. Also we heard, I forget how, that the same two tracks had turned up where some loggers had trailers parked on a small sandbar beside Bluff Creek and we went to look at those. There proved to be only a few left to see, because when the loggers came back from the weekend and saw the tracks around their trailers they hooked up and took the trailers elsewhere. However I did get the only photo I have of a deep track in hard-packed sand with boot prints hardly showing beside it.

When a man from the museum arrived the next day he proved to be an archeologist, not a zoologist, and after examining the tracks he spent his time trying to solidify and lift a track with one of the techniques of his trade, rather than casting any. The following day he spent the morning persuading some scientists from the university at Arcata to come, and by the time they arrived and were taken to the site the contractor had decided that we had left, the road had been graded, and almost all the tracks were gone.

As to the comments on the BFF thread, one of the Wallace carvings is a fairly good copy of a typical 15" track, but its mate, the one with the long thin mark at the heel, is not. It is too narrow, too straight-sided, and the three small toes are only notched at the front, not separated. It looks to me to have been made obviously artificial so the maker could experiment with what could be done wearing fake feet but not risk fooling anyone--something both Grover Krantz and I have also done. There is indeed one photographed track with a similar line, unexplained, in the heel, but it is in only that one among hundreds. The line is not there in any other photo or any cast of the 15" track, and on close examination it is not a match.

John

Again, I hate to sound like the hardened skeptic, but the lower track in this photo looks to be of dubious origin to me. The substrate the track is left in appears to be very soft, fine dust, yet the midpart of the foot leaves no real visable impression or even the vaguest hint of soil deformation. Yet the substrate was not of the nature to provide adequate resistance from this kind of deformation. This is clearly different from the Laverty Pic that shows a pressure ridge made by what can presumed is a metarsal break, on a living flexible foot. I think it's much more likely that this particular imprint, was made by a rigid fake foot. I've always wondered what the the rest of the Bluff Creek tracks that were always talked about, but never published looked like. I think it's human nature to publish the best pictures first, and don't think the rest of the photos were excluded because of what may be their potentially damning nature. I would like to see more of them however.