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Thanks, wiia, for the compliment. I look up to Bob Gimlin, who is almost a decade older than I am, and still wrangling mules and horses. We sat and talked about that over lunch, a couple of years ago, when he had just suffered some cracked ribs from a rambunctious mule in a trailer, and he's still doing it. Now that is the very definition of "cowboy stubborn". Getting out in the wild back country boosts my soul, and I'll keep going there at every opportunity, until they have to carry me. ;-)

What you have when you have a plaster footprint cast that is a male mold. Wax it with a wax mold release and put it in a box upside down that is also waxed. A shoe box works well unless it is a huge print. Pour the latex or silicon based liquid rubber over it and let it harden. Silicon stuff is formulated to make molds. When hardened you can pop the plaster footprint cast out of the latex or silicon rubber mold and that gives you a female mold of the cast. If you keep waxing the female mold and filling it with plaster of paris, you can make as many plaster reproductions of the original footprint that you want. Look up using silicon rubber as a mold on Youtube. There are several videos about that. Make sure you always use a wax mold release or you will not get them apart. That is really important so you do not destroy your original footprint cast. Practice on your own footprint. Step in some wet sand, go through the casting process with your own footprint, make the cast, clean it, then reproduce it so you get all the techniques down. That way when you encounter one in the field you know exactly what to do. Not rocket science. Like I said it is what artists do all the time to make or reproduce sculptures. If you have kids cast their footprint. They will enjoy having a copy of their footprint when they grow up.

Night Walker: Casting is more art than science. The real problem is getting the casting material in the footprint without disturbing or destroying fine details. If the casting material is too viscous, then it can damage the impression. One has to look a law enforcement who has the most experience and practice to cast. Plaster of paris was used for years and does a good job with fine details but it is weak and somethings comes apart when it is taken out of hard ground. I like Hydrocal which is a similar material of different composition that results in a stronger cast. Probably the best caster I have been around is Cliff Barrackman. I attended a seminar at a Bigfoot Conference where he showed his casting techniques. Meldrum attended the seminar and his input was that you need to completely photograph the footprint before you try to cast. Sometime casting will destroy it. Have a ruler visible in the picture. The boot thing is not professional. I use a cloth taylors tape. Circle it, taking pictures from all the way around. That helps him know what the environment around the cast was and lets him evaluate what the BF might have been doing when it left the print. I will highlight some of the stuff Cliff showed but probably have forgotten some stuff. If the footprint is in dry dust casting material will really mess it up. Several light coats of hairspray will stabilize the dust. Just mist it on, It dries very fast and sort of glues the surface dust together. If you have the spray use it on any print. It will help and cannot hurt. Then he would shake dry casting material into the footprint. A shaker with holes in the top that had grated cheese with a bunch of holes in the lid is really good for that. Then you mix the casting material. You want it the consistency of light pancake batter. Not real thick but not super runny. Then he took his rubber gloved hand and sort of dribbled the casting material from his hand into the inner surface of the print. If you just pour it, it will distort or destroy a lot of fine details. Once the inner surface is covered with the casting material, gently pour it into the footprint filling it to overflowing. The next part is what most people screw up. The casting material, especially plaster of paris will harden in just a few minutes. But it will not be hard enough to remove for several hours. The longer you wait the greater the chance that you get it out intact. Once out take it home and let it harden overnight or up to 24 hours before you attempt to clean it up and remove loose stuff like pebbles and pine needles. Those can be gently brushed or washed off. You really have to be careful with this process. Here is a link that details a lot of this. http://www.tracksceneinvestigation.com/TSI PDFs/CASTING.pdf Now to your question about liquid latex. What I have seen it is more viscous than Hydrocal. That makes getting it into the footprint more difficult. I think the setup / cure time is considerably longer than Hydrocal or plaster of paris. One of the problems of casting material is just carrying the weight around. Since most of us carry water it makes sense to me to carry water that can be drunk all the time and if you find a print use it to mix your casting material. The latex is heavy and you cannot drink it. I carry the Hydrocal in a gallon zip lock in an amount appropriate for most castings and just add water to the bag to mix the product. Have rubber gloves with you because plaster of paris and Hydrocal are strong base materials and you don't want that on bare hands. Anyway I wish Cliff would put out a casting video since like I said he is pretty good. A good use of latex materials is making copies of your plaster cast. Make a mold of the cast with latex then you can make all the copies of you cast that you want to. Meldrum sells them at conferences.

Love that show. Hope they renew for another season.

^ And the scolding from Canada would be promptly followed up by an apology for the scolding!

Wait, this is California and Canada we're talking about, here. I think a scolding would be more in order.

I recorded it on Sunday, watched it tonight. Pretty much standard Sasquatch story doc, from a slightly different perspective, but nothing new to see or hear. Nice to see it from a native perspective, and an iconic BC west coast location.

Thank you very much for the update.

Vintage 1953, ah yes, what a good year! for BF heads