Students from English department teacher Cat Mills’ spring and fall Mythology classes will take a trip to the Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum on March 19. After taking her students on the trip for the first time last year, Mills feels more prepared for the exhibits she and her class will see on this year’s trip.. “It’s a field trip that is to encourage critical thinking and media literacy, but in a backhanded kind of way,” Mills said. “The exhibits are absolutely insane, and you wouldn’t think you’d be learning critical thinking skills when looking at preserved Bigfoot poop, but here we are.” Illustration by Sylvia Robinson
CCHS Mythology students will take a unique field trip to Expedition Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum on March 19.
English department teacher Cat Mills is taking students from her Mythology class on a cryptid-filled field trip to Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum in Blue Ridge, Georgia on March 19.
Mills discovered the museum during the 2023-24 school year and found that despite the controversial nature of its exhibits, it supported the lessons she was already teaching in class.
“The goal of the field trip is to make students think about how we identify fact from fiction (and) how we think about truth in the face of evidence that may confirm our biases or closely-held beliefs that may not be supported by evidence,” Mills said.
“I was able to gain more of an appreciation for the history behind some of the other cryptids as well, because whether you believe in them or not, they definitely all have some very interesting history surrounding them.”
— Liam Ferguson,
CCHS junior
Students will spend about two and a half hours at the museum exploring photos and up-to-date maps of Bigfoot sightings, an extensive historical record that CCHS junior Liam Ferguson, who went on the trip last year, found engaging.
“The thing that really stood out to me was the variety of evidence that (the museum) had on display,” Ferguson said. “All of it had a story to go along with it.”
For Mills, the most appealing aspect of the museum was having to go into it with an open mind – especially when seeing items as absurd as preserved Bigfoot excrement – a skill she finds translates well to the classroom.
“If you’re going into something, being willing to explore it, and being willing to say, ‘Maybe this isn’t real,’ then you’ll be more skeptical about evidence. But if it’s like, ‘No, this is real and it’s true,’ then anything is,” Mills said.
Photos from the 2023-24 Mythology classes’ trip to the Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum on March 20, 2024 are shown. CCHS junior Liam Ferguson went on the trip last year and found the exhibits to be engaging and well-researched. “It was definitely an interesting choice for a field trip, although I figured it would be difficult to find someplace else that would be related to what we were talking about (in class) at the time,” Ferguson said. “It was definitely a lot of fun, and I don’t really tend to enjoy field trips so that was a bit surprising.” Photos courtesy of Cat Mills
After the trip, students will engage in research on cryptids – animals that have been claimed to exist, but never proven to, according to Miriam-Webster Dictionary – before jumping into their final project of the semester, researching any aspect of mythology.
“The project was a lot more engaging after (taking) the trip,” Ferguson said. “After getting to engage with a lot of the history while at the museum, I was able to gain more of an appreciation for the history behind some of the other cryptids as well, because whether you believe in them or not, they definitely all have some very interesting history surrounding them.”
