Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Welcome! We hope that you enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for signing in! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Please purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Your current subscription does not provide access to this content.
Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code.
Promotional Rates were found for your code.
Overcast. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 90F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph..
Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 64F. Winds light and variable.
Bob Dickey and Gina Rafatti, the husband-and-wife owners of Strawberry Store in Strawberry since April, recently located what they believe is the original chainsaw carving of Bigfoot that graced the front porch of the old Strawberry Store for decades before it was sold by a former owner of the store in 2014. Dickey and Rafatti paid workers to restore Bigfoot to his former glory and replaced him out front of Strawberry Store in early August.
Bob Dickey and Gina Rafatti, the husband-and-wife owners of Strawberry Store in Strawberry since April, recently located what they believe is the original chainsaw carving of Bigfoot that graced the front porch of the old Strawberry Store for decades before it was sold by a former owner of the store in 2014. Dickey and Rafatti paid workers to restore Bigfoot to his former glory and replaced him out front of Strawberry Store in early August.
Bigfoot sightings are back in vogue in Strawberry, where Bob Dickey and Gina Rafatti, the new husband-and-wife owners of the Strawberry Store, recently located what they believe is the original chainsaw carving of Bigfoot that graced the front porch of the business for decades until the mid-2010s.
Dickey and Rafatti paid workers to restore Bigfoot to his former glory in July, and it took a crew of men and a John Deere backhoe loader to replace the estimated 1,000-pound carving in front of Strawberry Store in early August.
“Bigfoot is iconic in Strawberry,” Rafatti said Tuesday at the store. “It’s part of the history of the mountain.”
“So many people coming back up here this summer remember Bigfoot,” said Dickey, who with Rafatti bought the Strawberry Store in late April. “We’ve had hundreds of people ask us ‘Where’s Bigfoot?’ Now he’s back.”
Jim and Helen Kerscher, owners of the Strawberry Store from 1977 to 1994, hired chainsaw carver John Roberts to create the original Bigfoot in the parking lot in front of the store one summer in the late 1980s, Helen Kerscher said in a phone interview, speaking from where she now lives south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Helen Kerscher shared photos of Roberts working on the Bigfoot carving in front of Strawberry Store more than 30 years ago.
“It was my husband’s and my idea to have him carve a Bigfoot,” she said Tuesday. “We paid him probably $1,000 or more. It was not cheap. He got a piece of cedar from a local logger.”
The couple wanted a Bigfoot in front of Strawberry Store because, “We figured a lot of locals said they had seen Bigfoot before and we wanted to have our own Bigfoot,” Helen Kerscher said.
The Strawberry Store was built in the 1940s, according to previous owners.
Old-timers of the Mother Lode region know that reports of Bigfoot sightings used to be frequent in Tuolumne and Calaveras counties. As recently as the mid-2000s, there were people who visited Calaveras County and billed themselves as legitimate Bigfoot hunters.
Historians say stories of giant, ape-like, hairy creatures are so common across all human cultures that they are ubiquitous to humanity, and as old as the first campfires.
In recent centuries, as post-industrial humans became wealthy enough to explore the world’s high mountain ranges for pleasure and recreation, stories of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, also known as the Tibetan Yeti, began emerging in the 1920s. Newspapers spread the hearsay, rumors, and misinformation worldwide.
The timeless big beast of the woods myth got a new twist in the late 1950s when loggers in Humboldt County began communicating with newspaper people about massive, human-looking footprints they came across in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. By 1958, the Humboldt Times was quoting the loggers and their nickname for this new version of the wildman of the mountains, “Big Foot” and “Bigfoot.”
Again, other newspapers picked up the story, and 20th-century pop culture fanatics had another nonscientific mystery to play with, a Bigfoot myth to go along with UFOs and other wildly popular science fiction stories on radio, in comic books and hardback books, in the movies, and on the new picture box arriving in everyone’s living rooms, the television.
By the early 1960s, The Union Democrat was publishing front-page stories headlined “The Mountain Monster” and “Jest or Giant?” and “Old Monsters Just Fade Away.” In January 1963, the Sheriff’s Office received numerous reports of a monster, a hair-covered creature and unidentified creature shrieking in a wooded area west of Cold Springs.
Deputies contacted people who had claimed to witness similar phenomena two to three years earlier in Mendocino County.
In 1963, Tuolumne County Sheriff Miller Sardella pleaded for additional information from an unidentified man who reported spotting a giant creature near the Peter Pam subdivision in the Cold Springs area the same night. Deputies followed “king-sized tracks” in efforts to confirm or squash reports of a 10-foot monster roaming Tuolumne County’s brushlands.
By the next day, law enforcement and most other people were dismissing reports of a grotesque figure and weird sounds and the 10-foot monster as the work of a bear and a mountain lion.
“I have never seen tracks as big as that,” Sardella told this newspaper. “They measured a good 16 inches.”
Sardella said the tracks were made with shoes, and they must have been made by a big man, or a little man with big feet.
In spite of no scientific evidence to support Bigfoot sightings, they became more frequent through the next few decades. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Association has a list of more than 30 different Bigfoot reports from 1963 to 2008 (see box on this page).
A May 2019 story from CBS13 in Sacramento said the Travel Channel conducted research for a new show “In Search Of Monsters” and found Bigfoot Field Researchers Association data showed California had the second-most reports of Bigfoot in the nation, behind Washington State. In California, Humboldt County had the most Bigfoot reports, and Tuolumne County had the second-most.
To this day, Bigfoot remains a Tuolumne County marketing tool.
Visit Tuolumne County, also known as the Tuolumne County Visitors Bureau, which is funded by the Tuolumne County government, has a May 2020 article on its website headlined “History's Mysteries of Tuolumne County.”
The article features “Sasquatch Sightings” and notes that “The Sierra is filled with myths and tales. One of the most well-known is the legend of Sasquatch aka Bigfoot. Head out on a hike to explore and you’ll never know who or what you might stumble upon. Many claim to have spotted it in Twain Harte or at Herring Creek in the Stanislaus National Forest. It is your chance to try and crack the mystery of Bigfoot in Tuolumne County.”
There’s more to the story of the Strawberry Store Bigfoot carving. Helen Kerscher, Dickey and Rafatti say the chainsaw carving was stolen two times, once in February 1992 and again in 1994. The Bigfoot was returned both times.
Back in 2014, a previous owner of the Strawberry Store named Scott Cole sold the Bigfoot for a couple hundred dollars to someone who bought it for a birthday party, Dickey said.
Buffy Bandley, a member of the Strawberry Volunteer Fire Department's board at the time, said she bought the Bigfoot carving back for $1,000 because she wanted it to stay in the community and brought it to the fire station off Old Strawberry Road.
The Strawberry Volunteer Fire Department kept Bigfoot in storage at their station, Dickey said. When Dickey and Rafatti bought the Strawberry Store on April 22, they heard about the Bigfoot carving at the fire department and asked if they could have it back at the store.
Dickey said the fire department agreed to loan Bigfoot to Strawberry Store indefinitely, and the Strawberry Volunteer Fire Department retains ownership of Bigfoot.
Bigfoot came out of storage and needed substantial repair due to rot and deterioration, Dickey said. Dickey and his wife hired local woodworkers Mark Patton and Ken Sorrick to restore Bigfoot, and it took them about two weeks.
The restored Bigfoot was put back in front of the Strawberry Store on Aug. 1.
Reports of Bigfoot incidents in Tuolumne County from January 1963 to June 2008. Source: Bigfoot Field Researchers Association:
June 2007-2008 (Class A) - Road crossing sighting just after sundown on Highway 108 between Strawberry and Beardsley Lake.
August 2007 (Class B) - Son and father hear possible sasquatch vocalizations in the Emigrant Wilderness.
March 2007 (Class B) - Possible road-crossing sighting in daylight near Strawberry.
November 2006 (Class B) - Possible vocalizations heard by resident near Twain Harte.
October 2006 (Class B) - Camping couple report possible vocalizations outside Long Barn around 6:30 a.m.
December 2003 (Class A) - Man has late night sighting near Twain Harte.
September 2003 (Class B) - Possible nighttime encounter, food taken from hunters camping near Tuolumne.
July 2002 (Class B) - Campers find stacked rocks and hear unusual rock banging near Strawberry.
September 2001 (Class B) - Possible vocalizations awaken campers in Clark Fork Campground.
September 2001 (Class B) - Women hear late night vocalizations at Sand Bar Flat Campground.
May 2001 (Class B) - Couple hear strange nighttime screams near Twain Harte.
April 2001 (Class B) - Man see large prints outside of Long Barn.
March 2001 (Class B) - BFRO Investigators detail activity around Twain Harte.
August 1999 (Class B) - Hiker has strange late night experience in Emigrant Wilderness.
August 1998 (Class A) - Late night sighting by motorists travelling through Tioga Pass (Yosemite), a few miles beyond Crane Flat Campground.
November 1997 (Class A) - Sighting by woman in Eagle Meadow, above Strawberry.
August 1994 (Class B) - Man hears late night howl in the Emigrant Wilderness.
June 1994,1995 (Class A) - Campers have sighting above Pinecrest.
November 1993 (Class B) - Two hikers have interesting experience near Strawberry.
August 1993 (Class A) - Man remembers seeing an animal move through a ravine near Yosemite.
June 1993 (Class A) - A wildlife biologist observes a large upright walking animal near Pinecrest.
September 1988 (Class B) - Family hears late night screams near Long Barn.
Summer 1985 (Class B) - Camper experiences strange night time visitor near Groveland.
October 1983 (Class A) - Friends have night sighting above Sonora.
September 1978 (Class B) - Hunters have strange night experiences near Groundhog Meadow.
August 1978/79 (Class A) - Girl has daytime sighting near Twain Harte.
July 1978 (Class A) - Three witnesses have daytime sighting near Strawberry.
Winter 1977 (Class B) - Loud, high-pitched animal screams heard outside a cabin late at night.
October 1977 (Class B) - Witness reports loud screaming near Strawberry.
January 1977 (Class B) - Campers hear late night vocalizations at Carlon Station.
August 1971 (Class B) - Brothers have strange experience above Strawberry.
December 1963 (Class B) - Deputy sheriff sees strange footprints above Strawberry.
January 1963 (Class B) - Large prints found below Cold Springs.
January 1963 (Class B) - Ten-foot shrieking monster reported near Cold Springs.
Contact Guy McCarthy at gmccarthy@uniondemocrat.net or (209) 770-0405. Follow him on Twitter at @GuyMcCarthy.