More on crippled right-footed Bossburg Tracks: Bossburg, WA

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More on the crippled right-footed Bossburg Tracks: Bossburg, Washington 1969
near northeastern Washington's Colville National Forest

On page 56 of Dr. Grover Krantz's 'Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence' book, it was mentioned that "some pathology" might have deformed the right foot of our crippled individual.

It has only four toes-the middle one is either missing or somehow raised above the other four, which have spread to fill the gap. More significant is the distortion of the entire foot, which is bent radically inward from the heel. Krantz calculated the natural adaptations in foot structure and stride necessary to enable a large, heavy animal with such an anatomical deformity to walk. "It was right on," he says. "Such an animal would have had to walk exactly as this one did: stride, angle of foot placement, distribution of weight -- it was all exactly as it had to be."

These footprints, in fact, were what converted Krantz from a Sasquatch skeptic to a believer.
"Before I examined these prints, I would have given you ten to one odds that the whole thing was a hoax," he says. "But there is no way that everything could have been tied together so perfectly in a fake."

"Various suggestions have been made as to what that pathology might be, with 'club foot' being the most popular opinion. I had not the expertise, time, nor the inclination to pursue this matter any further. Fortunately Jeff Meldrum did have all those attributes and has provided us with the likely answer. He researched the pertinent literature and found that metatarsus adductus is almost certainly the ailment in question.

This is a congenital condition, also known as 'skew foot,' where both heel and forefoot are twisted inward — just as in our crippled footprint. Metatarsus adductus usually occurs in about one per thousand children in varying degrees, usually in just one foot, and often improves over time without treatment.

(Interestingly, in one detailed report of fifteen patients it was bilateral in seven cases, affected only the left foot in one, and only the right foot in the remaining seven.) In any case, the actual bones are little affected, and they are simply forced apart as I had postulated originally. This does not necessarily make my foot-bone reconstruction exactly accurate, but it does at least offer some general support."
© Krantz, Grover S. 'Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence' (1999, B.C.: Hancock House, pp. 298-299)