An outdoor adventure novel in search of Bigfoot. Set in the Pacific Northwest rich in biodiversity and scenery so stunning the novel vibrates beauty like no other. Enjoy.

This book was very different then what I thought it would be. Not in a bad way! Just different. The author dived deeper then just bigfoot talk, and talked about the land and the people who lived in the area. We learned a lot about some Native American tribes in the far west coast of Canada that we really don’t hear much about. We learn about a lot of the problems they are facing and how they are trying to fight back. Mixed in to this environmental and cultural political narrative, we get sprinkles of bigfoot sightings and stories, all second hand.

I was very impressed with the author. Even though he was a big fan of bigfoot, and truly wanted to believe in it, John did a remarkable job of staying unbiased and looking at both sides of the coin equally. Not many people can pull that off. You are either a big believer or you are a skeptic. It is rare to see someone in the neutral camp. I thought that was great because the author didn’t try to force any one view on you. He just reported what he heard and what those stories (and bigfoot) meant to the people telling them.

I wished this book had focused a little bit more on bigfoot, because that IS why I wanted to read it… I didn’t really want to get in to the political quagmire of the region. BUT… it was very informative about the native American tribes living in the area and I really knew nothing about them before hand. So I do appreciate the fact that the author took time out of his project to write about what is going on in that area and the life of these people and their struggles with the government, hunters, and commercial fishing. So if you want to learn about a diverse area that you don’t hear much about, or you would like to learn about some environmental issues from the far west coast, I highly recommend this book. I also highly recommend this book if you are into travel writing. If you want just straight up bigfoot searching with fanfare, you might be a little disappointed unless you know going in that it’s not going to be sensationalized.

I wanted to love this more. I did enjoy it and I tend to love all things Sasquatch so that isn't surprising, however, I just felt like there wasn't anything new...I mean not that there can be with a creature that doesn't exist but it just didn't hold my interest the way I wanted. If you are new to this topic I think you will get more from this than someone that already has a passion for this type of thing.

I received this book in exchange for a honest review from NetGalley.

I generally call myself a searching skeptic. Someone who doesn't necessarily believe in claims of the unusual and paranormal but is always willing to proven wrong and genuinely enjoy reading lots of books about the paranormal. Zada does an excellent job of scratching this itch. Zada does lots of personal interviews with people who have experience what they understand to be Sasquatch and does a great job of portraying these folks in a honest and respectful way. He also does a great job of introducing the reader to a wonderful cast of people who are residents of the Great Bear Forest and explaining many of the issues facing indigenous populations in that region (one of the more important and incredibly well executed parts of this book). Overall great book, very enjoyable to read.

"On the central and north coast of British Columbia, the Great Bear Rain forest is the largest intact temperate rain forest in the world, containing more organic matter than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. The area plays host to a wide range of species, from thousand-year-old western cedars to humpback whales to iconic white Spirit bears."

-Tales of a giant North American Ape. Well written and entrhalling story. Great read for anyone who loves a good Sasquatch story. A very fun read.

John Zada traveled to the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia to investigate the extensive sightings of Sasquatch. As he meets with the people of the First Nations, Dear Reader learns much about their culture, history, and spiritual connection with such legendary creatures. This book is more than a collection of personal experiences; it’s a compendium of human nature and the desire to believe in something larger than oneself and how the inexplicable mysteries of life feed that desire. I was fortunate to received this well-researched and well-written book from the publisher Atlantic Monthly Press through NetGalley.

I was expecting a book about Sasquatch but I was pleasantly surprised to instead get a book about the Pacific coast of British Columbia and the native people that still live there. I found the Sasquatch stories interesting, but it was the stories and first-hand accounts of life among the First People that provided the true story. The author travels up and down the remote and sparsely inhabited west coast of British Columbia and experiences it's beauty and danger and learns about the lives of the tribes and tiny villages that live there. The book seems to be about the Great Bear Rainforest and it's ecology more than anything else. This is by no means a criticism. I was intrigued and fascinated by the author's descriptions of his travels, the people he talked to, and the adventures he experienced during his hunt for Sasquatch. His faithful representation of the tribal people of the area was a refreshingly up-front depiction of the complicated issues they face.
The whole Sasquatch thing did turn out to be kind of interesting too. I highly recommend it. I'm definitely convinced that I need to visit the area and experience its wild beauty for myself.

I ended up having technical difficulties on my end and wasn't able to finish. What I was able to read was impressively written - it's clear Zada is a very skilled writer, painting a compelling picture that makes me want to follow along on his journey.

As I read the book it felt like we, reader and author, are sitting around a camp fire and he was telling stories. Zada has a lot of stories. This book is a collection of those tidbits her learned and he also writes of how he got those stories. The book has these short exciting stories, between longer periods of what's going on with the author and the people he meets.

The book takes place nearly entirely in the Great Bear Rainforest, which is located in British Columbia, on the west coast near the central and northern coastal region. It is one of the few areas where old growth still exists. There are small towns populated by people of different First Nations who have lived in the area for thousands of years. This area has the most Sasquatch stories, but also it is part of the oral history for the people.

Zada goes into the project with an open mind, trying to truly determine if Sasquatch is real or not, despite his boyhood fascination with the subject. There is only a little review of the history of "Sasqualogy" and some of the most important "Sasquoligists." Perhaps Zada believes people reading this book already knows all that came before. I didn't, but it doesn't really matter too much.

The book was entertaining enough, the writing well done. The story line got a little distracted and sometimes not very focused. For myself, the most interesting parts of the book to me where of the landscape and the First Nations people.

Book rating: 3.5 stars

When I first started to read this book, I thought it was just another book chronicling one man’s journey to find the elusive man ape known as Sasquatch or Big Foot. Not being a believer myself, I didn’t really know what to expect from the tale. I did find myself pleasantly surprised;however. As I got into this story, I started to realize it was so much more than a Sasquatch story. This really is more of a hybrid novel, part history, part psychology, part mystique. The author does a wonderful job of telling the story of the Great Bear Rainforest, a pristine section of wilderness in British Colombia. This story has appeal across a wide swath of interests and I would definitely recommend it. Novel supplied by Netgalley.

I have mixed feelings about this book.

What I expected was a bunch of stories from people who claimed to have run-ins with Big Foot, as well as the author’s take on these stories, and maybe even some of his own. A first-hand account! Essentially, a bunch of fun campfire stories.

While there was some of that, it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for.

There was a lot of information about the areas he travelled to in his quest, and the people he met along the way. A lot about small native communities that were being impoverished by modern business practices, pollution, and inflation.

We spent some time with a man named John Willison Green, who devoted his life to trying to prove the existence of the Sasquatch. And while that might seem like a life wasted to some, I couldn’t help to admire his expertise in a field that kind of doesn't exist. I was also deeply saddened to read about his his biggest fear of fading away with his contribution unrecognized and never actually making a mark in history.

A in-depth look at the efforts of one community that lessened bear hunting in their area by obtaining exclusive rights to lead the hunts and taking people in all the wrong areas. "Sorry folks. I guess we're just not having any luck today..." Ha ha ha.

Many, many interesting side-notes that I didn’t expect, but still enjoyed. Some of the other tangents weren't as interesting and seemed even less relevant to the core subject on a book like this.

Even with all the other interesting aspects, I wish there was more Big Foot talk. More about the searches. More eye-witness accounts and more in-depth into those account. A few of the stories got really creepy and just when you were getting into them, it was over. I wanted MORE!

I was also very disappointed that the author didn’t have his own encounter. I can’t fault him or the book for that. It’s not exactly within anyone’s control, but it was still a let down.

Based on the description and early reviews, I requested and was granted an ARC from Grove Atlantic.

The final narrative feels like a bit of a bait and switch. At one point about a third of the way through, Zada mentions that while he has returned to Canadian tribal areas with the intention of hunting for Bigfoot or, more likely, local stories and experiences with Bigfoot, he's given a lecture by a local that he should be ashamed of himself for writing about Bigfoot instead of about the poor social and economic conditions suffered by the people of the area (I immediately asked myself why this clearly literate and seemingly articulate lecturer wasn't writing about his community instead of browbeating a stranger into doing so). Zada admits to feeling shamed, and to wondering if he is, in fact, in the wrong but he's just so interested in his initial attraction to Bigfoot that he intends to persevere. However, he kind of... doesn't. He does, indeed, seem to succumb to the guilt and the majority of the narrative is about his joining with different cultural groups and their expeditions/adventures (not all of the time to look for Bigfoot) and soliciting their potential experiences with the creature but ultimately expounding upon their way of life and their social, political, and financial concerns. He wanted to learn more about Bigfoot and told us he was going to, and we wanted to learn more about Bigfoot and so jumped in to ride along, but then he became mired in guilt and went off on a tangent much of the time and so dragged us along, too.

I'm in the cohort. I agree with the environmental concerns and I appreciate being better educated about the conditions that the people who are most likely to encounter Bigfoot are living in but this is, unfortunately, not what I signed up for. I'm not bemoaning cultural, contemporary, and historical context. I was interested in reading this book because it seemed like an intellectual step up and not a rehashing Bigfoot-experience history and it is that. But it's also really not all that much about Bigfoot.

I owe so much to Last Podcast on the Left. If I hadn't started listening to it, with its frequent hilarious dives into the world of cryptids, I never would've considered picking up a book about Sasquatch. Horizons, consider yourself expanded.

Journalist John Zada, captivated by Bigfoot since childhood, undertook an unusual quest with the utmost seriousness: tracking the Sasquatch legend through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Using scientific and psychological data, he explores theories purporting to explain the mythical creature's existence rationally, like that they're a "surviving species of great ape."

Or, fascinatingly, the results of pattern matching, when an eyewitness thinks they're seeing an unknown creature but is experiencing a mismatch. He analyzes belief and perception and "cognitive mistakes" in interpreting "sensory inputs," offering possibilities on how reality can be (mis)perceived in eyewitness accounts of alleged sightings.  This was illuminating, as I appreciate anything that employs skepticism healthily and doesn't automatically lean on the lazy crutch of being inexplicable, so must be otherworldly.

"There has to be a way to make better sense of the phenomenon: one that doesn't just rely on ready-made positions rooted in unquestioning belief or disbelief; one that moves past the pop-culture veneer and rhetoric of opposing camps and into the more nuanced territory where psychology, culture, history, literature, and indigenous experience overlap. If primeval nature and collective memory are places where the Sasquatch continues to thrive, where better than the Great Bear Rainforest, and its deep-rooted communities, to go in search of it?"

Zada does due diligence in exploring both the science and psychology that debunks as well as myth and lore in favor. That should be the go-to approach yet it's often not, I was impressed with his efforts here.

"Why are many otherwise normal people from different walks of life seeing giant, hair-covered humanoids? And why do scores of others who haven't believe in them anyway, with an unshakable conviction?"

And he does accept the possibility of unexplained phenomena, but with an interesting twist incorporating the long, storied history of the Sasquatch across different world cultures. Making a good case that "North America too has its far-flung, otherworldly realms," he highlights some surprising stories from US history, like that "Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the creatures in his 1892 book The Wilderness Hunter. He described a story he'd heard about a woodsman who, reputedly, had been killed by one of the animals."

The historical element was a major highlight, because I knew nothing about how wide-ranging this history was, having always automatically relegated it to the tinfoil-hat fringes in my own thinking. Did you know the Nazis believed in a "proto-Aryan race of giants" and Ernst Schäfer, a German zoologist and "erstwhile Nazi SS officer" spent nearly the entire 1930s in the Himalayas on Heinrich Himmler's orders trying to prove their existence?

Eventually the animals sighted there were determined to be Tibetan blue bears, but that was kept under wraps out of fear of execution, "since it contradicted notions at the time that Yetis were Aryan ancestors." I learned so much here. It's also one of those books with not-to-be-missed stories in the footnotes, like that "Mount Saint Helens, an active volcano in the Cascade Range in Washington, has long been considered an important node of Sasquatch activity."

Zada's journey spans contacts with investigators in the field of what he calls "Sasqualogy" (a word I never thought I'd write), who have devoted their lives and work to proving its existence-- as yet unsuccessfully-- and often in the face of professional ridicule. He examines the most common arguments in favor, like presence in North American aboriginal folklore, and the different camps of beliefs investigators fall into (extraterrestrials, humanoids, etc.). He also covers obsession, a topic that never fails to mesmerize.

He travels to aboriginal locations where the Sasquatch is deeply rooted in lore, with an ecological message that explains a lot about the persistence of belief in a wild mountain man as nature is further encroached by modern life and technology. According to a member of the Heiltsuk nation, from the island community of Bella Bella in British Columbia:

"Our culture really reveres the Sasquatch because it's a reminder that at one point in time, we were living in the same way that they're living. It's also a reminder of our connection to the land and everything that exists in our territory. It's not something to be afraid of. It's something that teaches you things."

I'm torn because the book veers wildly between writing that's lucid and engaging and writing that's weak. His nature writing is lush and descriptive, evoking the Great Bear Rainforest and the foggy harbors of the Pacific Northwest vividly, and he's impressively adroit in covering science and psychology. On the other hand, in the advance copy (could've changed by publication) there were 17 instances of people nodding. Five were the sentence, “I nod.” It's annoying; I see why Benjamin Dreyer specifically warns to be careful with nodding.

Still, the glimpses into First Nations communities are sensitively done and informative, and his research into psychology and brain function and how this ties into belief in cryptids was fantastic. I think if there's any decent, serious book about Sasquatches (Sasqueetch? nothing sounds right for this plural), their cultural significance and relationship to the diminishing natural world and its remaining unknowns, this is it.

I didn't find anything new about Sasquatch in this book but it was still a very enjoyable, informative read. I liked the authors writing style and enjoyed reading about his travels in British Columbia and the places not many dare to tread. If you like nature and travel writing I would recommend this book even if you don't believe in Sasquatch, by the end you just might.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I absolutely enjoyed reading this book! Based on the fact that it was about searching for Sasquatch in the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia (one of the most fascinating ecosystems in the world to me) I already knew this book was up my alley, but it was so much better than what I expected.

In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond is about a journalist searching for signs of Sasquatch in one of the most ecologically rich forests on earth. But this is so much more than simply another Squatch hunt. Zada excels at creating this beautiful narrative about this almost otherworldly place that exists on the edge of society, his empathy and respect for the Great Bear Rainforest and its denizens (human, animal, plant, and cryptid) shines through the story. I was so compelled by this read that I realized I was reading it faster than I wanted to and ended up having to slow myself down!

Not only does Zada approach Sasquatch with hopeful rationality but he also adds an especially respectful and compelling account of the complex nature of what seeing Sasquatch or humanoid-like creatures means for certain cultures, for humans in general, and occasionally for our emotional states. I appreciated the way he balanced science and tradition. He covers many different scientific views on Bigfoot, both skeptics and believers, while also taking the time to speak with local indigenous communities and finding out what Bigfoot traditionally meant to them as a culture.

Overall, I cannot recommend In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond enough for fellow cryptozoology enthusiasts, or even someone looking for well done nature writing!

I loved this book! The best part of the book for me was the
beautiful area, I love nature and wildlife and this book is well
written about this beautiful area.
Thank you so much, Netgalley, John Zada and the Publisher
for the chance to read this wonderful book!

Fans of nature writing and those interested in British Columbia should pick this up immediately. Yes it's framed around the Sasquatch but it's so much more. Make no mistake, Zada is not arguing for the existence of this legendary creature- he's letting a whole range of people talk about it, as well as about the region. It's a terrific read. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I hope this gets the audience it deserves.

A combination of travel memoir, Sasquatch sightings and philosophy. As John Zada searched for Sasquatch, he vacillated between "it exists" and "it doesn't exist." He traveled from one village to the next seeking out firsthand reports and searching for evidence. Along the way he became intimately acquainted with the beauty of the Great Bear Forest -- the Noble Beyond -- in British Columbia and saw the ecological struggles occurring there. As a child of the 70's, I was drawn to this book and the search for Sasquatch. This book will also appeal to travel aficionados, cryptozoologists and philosophers. Perhaps we all have our own version of the Noble Beyond.

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book is to misquote the Michael Rosen poem feels like We're All Going on A Bear Hunt but in this case its seeking out Bigfoot. The book is a sum of many parts, there is natural history and ecology, psychology, local politics and much human experience all combining into a narrative. The book is very easy to read and is informative, never preachy and takes an evidence based approach to the mythology surrounding Sasquatch.

For me the key to this book is the stories from those who are eyewitnesses, they are just telling their story and as is shown there is a long history of these stories across many cultures. Do I believe that they exist? Does that even matter? The answer is probably not, what I found from reading this book is the importance of an open mind and the ability to be fascinated by the things in this world that we don't yet fully understand and surely this is the human condition. The quest for knowledge goes on.

Read, learn and marvel with this book and admire the First Nations and their resilience and connection to the natural environment - something we could all do with a reminder of.

#InTheValleysOfTheNobleBeyond #NetGalley

Beautifully written tale about a writer's exploration not only of the myths surrounding Sasquatch, but the psychology behind the human experience of "seeing" strange phenomena. The writer discusses the Native people's reactions to his interest in the myths and his lack of focous for their own societal problems, as well as his ability to relate to them as outsiders of the midstream American life. The author is Middle Eastern, and I enjoyed his reflections on being seen as "the other" as well having come from a dry climate that he would be fascinated with the lushness of the Northwest/Canadian remote areas.