COLOSSAL CLAUDE
Imagine you're a crew member aboard the Lightship Columbia in 1934. You're minding your own business, staring out into the murky Pacific Northwest mist across the Columba River between Oregon and Washington. Then the waters begin to bubble. Steam exhumes from the surface. And a 40-foot serpentine sea monster reveals its big ugly head. You've just met Colossal Claude.
Although Claude often plays second banana to Sasquatch as the famed S-tier PNW cryptid (and not just because of his shape), he's got his own lore dating back decades. The Lightship Columba members were by no means the laughing stock of the "Whatever Boats Did in the 1930s" Industry. Because their sighting was not an anomaly. Just a few years later, crew aboard the Viv spotted a 40-foot beast lurking around them. Members of the Argo (not Ben Affleck) saw Claude feasting on some fish. This begged the questions: Was Colossal Claude indeed a real monster of the famed river? What was he up to? Was 40 feet the only increment ship captains were capable of measuring in?
As with any cryptid sighting, one account begets another until the lore is a tapestry of half-remembered anecdotes. Claude has been spotted in the years since, but nobody seemed to care. Then, in 2017, some kayakers up in Yale Lake near Cougar, Washington, spotted some oddly vigorous bubbling. A plume of mud and leaves bellowed to the water's surface. They even caught it on video! Could Claude have relocated, potentially deeming river monsters to be country-listening, Natty Ice-drinking, trashy alternatives to a lake monsters? Some suggested the creature followed the salmon population from the ocean to the Columbia and then to the lake. However, marine biologists (you know, George Costanza's fake job) pointed out that salmon populations in the river have actually decreased and there are no signs of large beasts in Yale Lake. Geologist Bob Anderson suggested it was simply a natural occurrence releasing gasses from the bottom of the lake. But from a paleontological perspective, the other persistent theory is that a colony of plesiosaurids somehow survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event and one of them lived on to become this Columbia Bar Sea Serpent. This latter idea seems, as other scientists might put it "incredibly stupid."
Whether Claude is real or not, a river or lake dweller or both, does not deny the allure of the sea creature mythos. Could this Loch Ness cousin simply be a way of interpreting our fear or curiosity (or even affection) of the unknown? After all, on original cartographers' maps charting the mysterious parts of the earth, weren't unexplored expanses of water marked by serpentine creatures? Maybe, just maybe, one of those guys found its way to the Columbia. And maybe he's still there today.
See you out there.
