On Valentine’s Day in 2025, California Lawmaker Chris Rogers introduced Assembly Bill 666 to the California State Legislature to designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid. The version of the bill amended in committee is worth a read, but the gist of it is:
“The most famous and beloved cryptid in contemporary California culture is the creature known as Bigfoot … While the legends of a large, hairy, elusive creature persist in many parts of the world, its etymological origins reside firmly in California, with the first use of the term “Bigfoot” in 1958 by Andrew Genzoli for the Humboldt Times newspaper … This documented first use of “Bigfoot” squatches any other region or state’s claim to the legendary creature.”
The bill goes on to state that Bigfoot represents California’s status as the storytelling capital of the world, and that along with promoting tourism to rural areas in Northern California, he’s a great mascot for California’s wilderness and culture. The bill died in committee and Rogers said in a statement the bill was an inside joke between lawmakers. Despite its origins as a joke bill, a few days after it was introduced, it caught some national attention. Stephen Colbert mentioned it on air and Rogers said in a later interview, “We have been hearing from people across the nation who want to come and testify on the bill.” A joke bill, it turned out, had touched on something real.
Bigfoot and another famous cryptid, the Dark Watchers, represent a version of California that I want to embrace more often. There is something silly about Bigfoot in particular, but there is something productive about his existence in the public consciousness. Cryptids are an acknowledgement that our wilderness is stranger and vaster than we can account for and that the world does not center around human perception. These cryptids don’t represent the California of Hollywood, influencers, Silicon Valley or the California that is the quintessence of materialism. They are the resonance of an older, ecologically vast California that inspires a turn away from anthropocentrism. California is full of people who aren’t scared to push the boundaries and imagine and inhabit a world that is more.
California, it seems, has always produced creativity and diversity. Linguist Leanne Hinton said “Before white contact, California had more linguistic variety than all of Europe.” The California Language Archive, housed in UC Berkeley’s Dwinelle Hall, records that between 80 and 90 languages were spoken in California two centuries ago.
As Rebecca Solnit mentions in her book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” research suggests that this linguistic diversity might be related to how ecologically diverse California is. Solnit mentions the Wintu, an indigenous group whose people orient themselves using the cardinal directions rather than left and right. Unlike English, where directions are in relation to the individual, the Wintu language centers the world in a more intense way. Solnit says, “In Wintu, it’s the world that’s stable, yourself that’s contingent.” I believe a turn toward world-centering is more important than ever. As Silicon Valley’s race to the bottom intensifies, as our precious redwood forests face increasing dangers, as corners of the world are mapped and made knowable, as we scroll ourselves numb, how do we keep insisting on an existence that is full of wonder? How do we connect deeply with what’s beyond ourselves? How do we connect with California’s vast ecology and diversity?
I believe our state’s unique cryptids offer somewhat of an answer to these questions. These cryptids are our shared mythology that Californians today can shape and create together. They represent mystery: mystery that is valuable because it breaks us out of self-absorption and routine. As the committee version of AB 666 states, Bigfoot as we know him today is a product of California.
Almost a decade after Genzoli coined the term Bigfoot, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin alleged they had captured footage of the elusive Bigfoot. The Patterson-Gimlin film is now famous and played a key role in making Bigfoot into a pop-culture icon. It is no surprise that Bigfoot mythology came alive in exactly the kind of old-growth, mysterious, ecologically irreplaceable place that is most under threat from logging and climate change today. Bigfoot is not simply a monster. He has become a beloved creature, an insistence that the forests will not yield their secrets to humans and that there is still so much more out there to discover.
The aforementioned Dark Watchers are an even more mysterious California cryptid. The Dark Watchers are tall, shadowy figures reported in the Santa Lucia Mountains along the Big Sur coast. Similar descriptions have appeared in Indigenous oral traditions, and California native John Steinbeck wove them into his short story, “Flight,” granting them a literary permanence that speaks to how seriously this particular stretch of California has taken the presence of something beyond explanation. In “Flight,” Steinbeck writes,
“Pepe looked suspiciously back every minute or so, and his eyes sought the tops of the ridges ahead. Once, on a white barren spur, he saw a black figure for a moment; but he looked quickly away, for it was one of the dark watchers. No one knew who the watchers were, nor where they lived, but it was better to ignore them and never to show interest in them. They did not bother one who stayed on the trail and minded his own business.”
The Dark Watchers are immortalized in Steinbeck’s work, emphasizing that some corners of the forest are too deep to venture or understand. I am reminded of a quote I read by Hayao Miyazaki, whose films deeply embrace mystery and nature: “The deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.” The Dark Watchers evoke the kind of darkness that Miyazaki is talking about. I don’t believe he is talking about depression or dread. Rather, I believe he is talking about the part of ourselves that only exists in relation to the vast and the sublime, the part of ourselves that is as old as the forest and as unresolved as the mystery of cryptids. We do not need to optimize our way into wonder. In a world increasingly shaped by the impulse to make everything efficient and legible, there is a quiet radicalism in insisting that some things about the world — about ourselves — remain unknowable and thus still open for infinite discovery.
This is the California and the world that I want to live in. Not the one that moves fast to capitalize on things, but the one where enormous hairy creatures move through the redwoods, where the Santa Lucia Mountains keep their watchers, where there is more mystery to conjure and reckon with at every turn. California has always helped people imagine a different and vast world, and our cryptids are another way we continue that tradition in ways centered around a more sustainable vision of our relationship with nature and the world around us.