PORT ANGELES, Wash. -- A shoe with flesh and bones inside that was found on a beach west of Port Angeles has been determined to be human, the King County medical examiner's office in Seattle determined Monday.

The next step will be DNA testing to see if it matches feet found washed ashore in nearby waters in British Columbia. Five detached feet in shoes have been found in the past year, but one found in June was a hoax with an animal paw.

The latest shoe was found Friday by a woman walking on a Strait of Juan de Fuca beach.

Clallam County Undersheriff Ron Peregrin said his investigators will meet later this week with Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He said the county's right, black athletic shoe does not appear to match any of the shoes found with feet in British Columbia.

A camper found the large black, high-top shoe in seaweed while walking along the shore near the mouth of Jim Creek on Friday, and relayed the discovery to the Clallam County Sheriff's Department at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday.

Peregrin thought that it probably washed ashore during high tide because of its position, tangled among seaweed and other debris, and could have been there for weeks or even longer. He has notified Canadian authorities about the discovery.

Clallam County Detective Sgt. Lyman Moores said the shoe probably belonged to a man, although he couldn't identify the brand or size.

A cadaver dog were brought to the scene on Sunday to see if it could detect any other remains, but nothing else was found on a mile-long stretch of shoreline near the site of the shoe's discovery.

Peregrin said one oddity about the shoe's location is that tides in the Strait of Juan de Fuca don't really move toward Canada. Instead, they move east and west.

Five athletic shoes containing human feet have been found along the Strait of Georgia between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland since August 2007.

The bizarre findings baffled Canadian officials.

The first foot was found nearly a year ago on Jedidiah Island in the Strait of Georgia. Within days, another right foot was found inside a man's Reebok sneaker on nearby Gabriola Island.

The third foot was found in the same area, on the east side of Valdez Island in February. The fourth foot was found in May on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River, less than a mile from a the site where the fifth foot was found later on.

So far, one of the five feet has been linked to a depressed man who went missing a year ago, and two of the other feet were determined to be from the same unknown person. One of the feet belongs to a woman; the rest are men's feet.

Beyond that, the shoes and their origins remain an enigma.

Adding to the mystery is the discovery of a footless body found on an Orcas Island beach in March 2007 - about five months before the first detached foot appeared in Canada. Authorities are trying to determine whether there is a connection between the body and any of the feet.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, said when a human body is submerged in the ocean, main parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head are usually what come off the body.

Ebbesmeyer said the feet could have been severed or detached from their bodies on their own.

The Peninsula Daily News, a media partner of KATU's sister station in Seattle, KOMO News, contributed to this report.