Sasquatch Summit 2017

Sasquatch Syndicate surfs into Ocean Shores for Sasquatch Summit 2017

Ocean Shores in November is exactly what it sounds like. The Pacific is cold and close, the sky comes down low over the coast, the firs are dark against the grey, and somewhere in the Great Hall of the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino, a few hundred people who have been waiting all year for this weekend are finding their seats. This is the Sasquatch Summit. This is home territory. And the Sasquatch Syndicate was grateful to be back.

The fifth annual Sasquatch Summit — November 17th through 19th, 2017 — was everything the Quinault Beach Resort has come to represent for this community: warm, welcoming, professionally organized, and set in one of the most naturally appropriate locations on the Pacific Coast for a conference dedicated to the Pacific Northwest's most enduring mystery. Johnny Manson and his team have built something genuinely rare here. In a field that can sometimes feel fragmented, the Sasquatch Summit is the conference that pulls everyone together — science-based researchers and paranormal theorists, veteran investigators and first-time attendees, skeptics and true believers — and gives all of them a room where the conversation can happen without anyone having to defend why they showed up.

That philosophy was evident from the first moment Friday evening, when the Great Hall opened for vendors and the meet-and-greet that kicks off the Summit weekend. The energy in that room was immediate. People who had driven from across the Pacific Northwest, and from considerably further, arrived with the specific enthusiasm of a community that does not get enough weekends like this one. By the time the evening's audio analysis lecture and Witness Town Hall were underway, the room was full in the way that only happens when the subject genuinely matters to the people in the chairs.
The speaker lineup for 2017 was one of the strongest the Sasquatch Summit had assembled. Thomas Sewid — Native American commercial fisherman and lifelong Sasquatch researcher whose knowledge of the British Columbia coastal region and its encounter history is among the most grounded and culturally rooted perspectives in the entire field — was one of the keynote presenters, and his combination of traditional ecological knowledge and firsthand experience gave the weekend a depth that purely academic presentations cannot replicate. Scott Taylor of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization brought the methodological rigor that makes the BFRO's field investigation work worth paying attention to. Cindy Dosen addressed hair analysis — one of the more technically demanding areas of physical evidence evaluation and one that rarely gets the detailed treatment it deserves at a public conference. David Ellis brought his expertise in audio analyzation, a discipline that has produced some of the most compelling and debated evidence in the Sasquatch research catalogue.

Derek Randles of the Olympic Project — a man the Sasquatch Syndicate has come to know well and respect deeply — presented with the authority of someone who has spent more hours in the Olympic Peninsula terrain than perhaps anyone alive, building a field investigation operation that remains the gold standard for rigorous, location-specific research in the Pacific Northwest. Mike Paterson of Sasquatch Ontario brought the eastern Canadian perspective that reminds the American-dominant Bigfoot research community that this phenomenon has no national borders. And Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University and the foremost academic voice in Sasquatch research anywhere in the world, was present — as he so often is when the conversation is serious — to anchor the scientific framework of the weekend's discussions.

Saturday opened with a tribal blessing — a tradition at the Sasquatch Summit that grounds the entire event in the Indigenous cultural context that predates every researcher and every conference by generations. The name Sasquatch itself comes from the Halkomelem language of the Coast Salish peoples, and beginning the main conference day with a recognition of that lineage is one of the things that separates the Summit from events that treat the subject as purely a modern pop culture phenomenon. The day moved through studies, Q&A sessions, evidence presentations, and the kind of open conversation that only happens when the speakers are accessible and the audience is genuinely engaged. Sunday's small-group workshops — capped at fifteen attendees per session and covering themed research topics in rotating hour-long intervals — sold out in advance as they consistently do, and represented the most intensive learning opportunity the weekend offered.

For the Sasquatch Syndicate, the three days were a full immersion in everything this community is at its best. The booth was active from the first evening through the final workshop. Photo ops, conversations, discussions that started at the merch table and moved to the hallway and then continued over dinner — the kind of organic, sustained engagement that conference weekends make possible and that no podcast episode can fully replicate. The fans and listeners who stopped by to say hello, share their own encounter accounts, ask about the show's direction, or simply shake a hand and take a photo — every one of those interactions is the reason the Sasquatch Syndicate exists. Every single one. The Summit gives us a chance to remember that in the most direct and human way possible, and we are always better for it.

The Quinault Beach Resort and Casino deserves its own paragraph of gratitude, because the venue is not incidental to what makes the Sasquatch Summit work. The Great Hall is a proper event space in a proper resort setting — comfortable, well-staffed, and managed with the hospitality that makes a three-day conference feel like a weekend retreat rather than an endurance exercise. The accommodations are excellent. The on-site dining is real. The Pacific Coast setting — an easy ninety minutes from Olympia, the Washington coast stretching in both directions with the kind of raw, weather-beaten beauty that reminds you exactly what kind of country this is — is the right backdrop for the right conference. The Quinault Beach Resort takes this event seriously, and it shows in every detail of how the weekend is hosted. We are grateful for every room, every meal, and every night spent on the coast in their care.

To Johnny Manson and the entire Sasquatch Summit team — thank you. What you have built in Ocean Shores since 2013 is something this community needed and continues to need. The philosophy of the Summit — broad, inclusive, evidence-respecting, community-first — is the philosophy that keeps this field honest and keeps the conversation productive. You ran out of chairs in 2016. The Summit keeps growing because it keeps earning it. That does not happen by accident. It happens because the people running it love the subject and love the community in equal measure, and it shows every November.
To Grays Harbor County and Ocean Shores — thank you for being Sasquatch country in every sense. The history here, the sightings database, the culture, the landscape, the Indigenous knowledge that precedes all of it — there is no better place for a conference like this, and no better community to host it.

Research. Share. Believe.

By Chanelle Elaine, Chief Marketing Officer Sasquatch Syndicate Inc.