The inspiration for the film The Dark Divide starring David Cross and Debra Messing, one of America’s most esteemed natural history writers takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot-and finds the wildness within ourselves.
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch, Yale-trained ecologist Dr. Robert Pyle treks into the unprotected wilderness of the Dark Divide near Mount St. Helens, where he discovers both a giant fossil footprint and recent tracks. On the trail of what he thought was legend, he searches out Indians who tell him of an outcast tribe, the Seeahtiks, who had not fully evolved into humans. A handful of open-minded biologists and anthropologists counter the tabloids Pyle studies, while rogue Forest Service employees and loggers swear of a vast conspiracy to deep-six true stories of unknown, upright hominoid apes among us. He attends Sasquatch Daze, where he meets scientists, hunters, and others who have devoted their lives to the search, only to realize that “these guys don’t want to find Bigfoot-they want to be Bigfoot!”