IT IS WIDELY rumored across the internet that there is an espresso shack near Gold Bar, Snohomish County, with the original Bigfoot statue featured in the 1987 film “Harry and the Hendersons” out front. This, it turns out, is not quite true. For one thing, the statue from the movie was removed when filming ended, and secondly, there actually are three statues of Bigfoot there now.
The spot in question is Espresso Chalet, a roadside gem on Washington’s Highway 2, which stretches across the Cascades between Everett and Spokane. Heading east, just past Gold Bar and Sultan and heading to Mount Index and Bridal Falls, you pass through miles of farmland alternating with mist-wrapped trees, by what feels like hundreds of coffee shacks by the side of the road.
Espresso Chalet, however, was the very first coffee stand on Highway 2 — owners Mark and Sandy Klein have run the spot for the past 31 years, and have the paperwork to prove it. The plot of land where it sits originally held a logging shack; the ramshackle original structure still sits on the property, festooned by the passage of time by moss and lichen.
It subsequently held a gas station, where, in 1986, the film crew shooting “Harry and the Hendersons” — a wry John Lithgow-led classic about a family that befriends Bigfoot — erected a fake North American Museum of Anthropology in a Quonset hut and added the film’s giant statue of Bigfoot. When they left, they took the statue with them, though the structure that housed the “museum” remains.
In 1992, Mark Klein was driving past when he saw a “For Sale” sign, pulled over and saw potential. He subsequently bought the land and, as he puts it, “went out there with a saw” to carve out a spot that he turned into Espresso Chalet.
The “chalet” is actually a wee trailer covered with a peaked Alpine-style roof, funky and drenched in patina, around which are racks of Bigfoot-themed T-shirts, knickknacks and parapharnelia all encased in plastic against the persistent mountain drizzle.
The Quonset hut, now painted vivid green, never was truly a museum and is currently used as convenient storage for the cafe, though on the outside, it still dresses the part. Around the trailer is a mini-wonderland of whimsical moss-covered surfaces, Sasquatch crossing signs and even the occasional gnome diorama.
And there is more to that nook by the highway than coffee: Behind the chalet is a deck Klein built himself, from which he claims the only clear view of Bridal Falls and Mount Index (apart from standing right below them), where the trees make a convenient V — the perfect vista to gaze upon while sipping a prehike espresso.
The aesthetic and energy of Espresso Chalet run on all things Bigfoot, and Klein himself expresses a cautious open-mindedness about the existence of the creature, partially stemming from his own encounter with a large, otherwise inexplicable set of footprints he observed in the area of Rainier during his former life as a snow dog musher (re-created mock-ups of those footprints in wood hang on the wall on opposite sides of an area map).
Klein had one Bigfoot statue commissioned for himself in 1993; then another in 2008; and finally a third, more photo-realistic, Harry-like one in 2017, all three of which are still on the property.
And if all that isn’t enough of a draw, Espresso Chalet has served a delicious proprietary blend of four single-origin coffees compiled specifically by Longbottom Coffee out of Hillsboro, Ore., since it opened, a blend you can acquire only right there at that spot on Highway 2 (50000 Stevens Pass Hwy., Gold Bar) — a true, indisputable rarity.
