In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch

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Product Description On the central and north coast of British Columbia, the Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, containing more organic matter than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. The area plays host to a wide range of species, from thousand-year-old western cedars to humpback whales to iconic white Spirit bears.According to local residents, another giant is said to live in these woods. For centuries people have reported encounters with the Sasquatch―a species of hairy bipedal man-apes said to inhabit the deepest recesses of this pristine wilderness. Driven by his own childhood obsession with the creatures, John Zada decides to seek out the diverse inhabitants of this rugged and far-flung coast, where nearly everyone has a story to tell, from a scientist who dedicated his life to researching the Sasquatch, to members of the area’s First Nations, to a former grizzly bear hunter-turned-nature tour guide. With each tale, Zada discovers that his search for the Sasquatch is a quest for something infinitely more complex, cutting across questions of human perception, scientific inquiry, indigenous traditions, the environment, and the power and desire of the human imagination to believe in―or reject―something largely unseen. Teeming with gorgeous nature writing and a driving narrative that takes us through the forests and into the valleys of a remote and seldom visited region, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond sheds light on what our decades-long pursuit of the Sasquatch can tell us about ourselves and invites us to welcome wonder for the unknown back into our lives. Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of July 2019: To many (or most), Bigfoot is a fantastical if not downright silly subject, one that has attracted mostly silly contributions. If you're a thoughtful person with a fact-based career—say, a scientist or journalist—pursuing the notorious Skunk Ape can hinder your professional ambitions, or scuttle them entirely. John Zada might be one of the exceptions. Like many children of the 1970s who grew up watching Leonard Nimoy In Search Of unexplained phenomena, The Six-Million Dollar Man's battles with an extraterrestrial Urayuli, and (for the real deep-divers) the low-rent cinéma vérité of The Legend of Boggy Creek, he developed a thing for Sasquatch. But while he grew up to become a globe-traveling writer and photographer whose work has appeared in The Globe & Mail and the Los Angeles Review of Books, that thing never really went away. While exploring the Great Bear Rainforest, a remote and utterly wild expanse on British Columbia's northwest coast, Zada was struck by the prevalence of Sasquatch wherever he went—and not just the quantity of the narratives, but the matter-of-fact manner of the storytellers. He returned with a mission, interviewing scientists, First Nations peoples, hunters, and conservationists about the legendary giant, and did he ever bring back some good Bigfoot stories! In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond (originally envisioned as an article before the pile-up of material turned it into a book) takes those accounts seriously while walking a fine line between skepticism and credulity. It's less the hooting and wood-knocking sensationalism of Finding Bigfoot (though that show certainly has its charms) than Robert Michael Pyles's Where Bigfoot Walks, another book that leans toward respectability with its emphasis on natural history. Zada's entry is a beautifully rendered account of a mist-shrouded world suspended between myth and modernity: its people, culture, and ecology, and, for receptive readers, its most mysterious denizen. —Jon Foro Review Praise for In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond:An Amazon Best Book of the YearNamed a Must-Read Book of 2019 by Book Riot“Books on supernatural phenomena typically steer one of two courses: tabloid gullibility or mean-spirited debunkery. Zada deftly tightropes between the two . . . In the