In 2012, Toronto-based journalist John Zada travelled to British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest to write about the up-and-coming wilderness tourism destination. But while there, he caught wind of a different kind of story: tales of a monstrous apparition on the edge of a youth camp near the town of Bella Bella, rumoured to be the mythical wild ape-man hybrid known in North America as Sasquatch or Bigfoot.

The alleged sighting reawakened Zada’s own childhood fascination with the creature — known elsewhere in the world as the yeti or yowie — and sparked a multi-year quest to understand the allure of the legend. Is the Sasquatch a lost species of hominid, so rare and intelligent that it has so far been able to evade the best efforts of science to identify it? Or is it an archetype, a symbol of humanity’s enduring connection to nature in spite of the distractions of modern civilization?

In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond, out now from Greystone Books, chronicles Zada’s attempts to answer these fundamental questions as he travels through the world’s largest coastal temperate rainforest. Zada interviews coastal First Nations, backcountry guides who claim to have encountered the creature, and eminent “sasqualogists,” and delves into scientific research on human perception and imagination. Ultimately, though, in the tradition of the best unsolved mystery stories, the conclusions are left up to the individual reader.

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