'THE BEST' BIGFOOT PRINTS EVER ARE FOUND NEAR MOUNT RAINIER

----BOTHELL, Wash. A Sasquatch hunter says footprints found by mushroom pickers near Mount Rainier National Park are the best Bigfoot prints he's seen in 33 years of searching for the legendary ape-like beast.

''It's Bigfoot track as far as I'm concerned,'' said Cliff Crook, chief investigator for Bigfoot Central, a Sasquatch-watchers' network based at his home in this northeast Seattle suburb.

He proudly displayed two 7- by 14-inch plaster casts apparently of prints left by an oversized, heavily calloused ape-like foot that he said he made Sept. 7 on a sandbar in the upper Nisqually River.

''It wasn't a bear or a horse or a barefoot human,'' Crook said in an interview published Wednesday in The Morning News Tribune of Tacoma.

''It had to be somebody real tall and powerful and who matches the description of a Sasquatch. I link it to Bigfoot,'' a reclusive, hairy, ape-like creature similar to the yeti of Himalayan myth.

The Pacific Northwest legend has been fueled by hundreds of reported sightings of Bigfoot or its footprints, but there is no scientific evidence the creature exists.

Crook, who mans a Bigfoot-sightings hotline, said he got two reports of encounters during the Labor Day weekend within a three-mile radius in east Pierce County.

No recent sightings have been reported to authorities, according to the Pierce County sheriff's office and park headquarters.

''You think we'd admit it if we did?'' Deputy Ken Tucker said. ''There was a state trooper up here who reported seeing one himself 10 years ago or so. He still hasn't heard the end of it yet.''

''I've heard nothing from anybody here in the park no rumors, nothing,'' said park spokesman Cy Hentges at Mount Rainier.

The first report to Crook was from Karen and Grant Ferguson of Graham, who had been mushroom picking near the park with her father, Joseph Ried of Tacoma.

Crook said the second report came from a Roy man, who has since been unavailable for comment, the newspaper reported.

Neither the Fergusons nor Crook reported the incident to authorities.

''I didn't want to be made out to look like an idiot,'' Karen Ferguson said.

In the Fergusons' case, ''The minute we started picking mushrooms, we smelled something that stunk really bad worse than a dead skunk,'' Karen Ferguson told the newspaper Tuesday. Then her husband, who was off on his own, heard something ''crashing through the bushes like crazy,'' Ferguson said.

''He sat there and watched it thrash through the woods and he said the smell was a lot more prevalent. We got up there and the smell about knocked me and Dad out,'' she said.

''As we started looking we saw footprints. It took two of my longest steps and a half to make one of his strides.''

Crook and his son went to the site Sept. 6, but found the tracks difficult to cast. The following day, Crook said, he made casts of clearer tracks he found a few miles away.