Trucker Recalls 1981 Bigfoot Encounter Along Idaho's Lochsa River

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and I think any researcher or witness who spends time in the woods needs to hear it. It's a first-person account from a man named Glenn Russell, a long-haul trucker who, back in November of 1981, had an encounter on US Highway 12 along the Lochsa River in Idaho that he clearly never forgot. Glenn had been driving truck for 19 years at that point. He was running his own rig, a brown and cream 1976 Peterbilt 359, hauling lumber out of the Potlatch mill in Lewiston over Lolo Pass to yards in Missoula. Highway 12 east of Kooskia is the kind of road most truckers avoid — two lanes, no towns, no payphones, the river on one side and rock and timber straight up on the other, with a curve every quarter mile. He ran it anyway because it saved him 70-some miles and because his daughter Patty lived in Missoula. Patty was turning nine on Friday, November 13th. Glenn had missed her last two birthdays — once stuck at a loading dock in Spokane, once with a blown turbo outside Kellogg. This time he had it planned to the minute. Load by noon, roll by one, over Lolo Pass by dark, into Missoula by suppertime, pancakes with his girl at 7:30 the next morning. Connie, his ex, made it clear: if he was going to be late, don't come at all. The hydraulic line on the loader threw his schedule off by a few hours, and by the time he pulled out of the mill gate it was already dark. He stopped once at a cafe in Kooskia, called Connie, and promised he'd be there. Patty got on the phone — she was supposed to be in bed — and asked him to bring her a rock from the mountains or a pine cone for show and tell. He said he would. He did bring her a rock from the mountains. He just wasn't the one who picked it out. East of Lowell, the highway follows the Lochsa, and at night in November the Lochsa is a lot of black. His headlights would catch a hundred feet of wet pavement and a wall of cedar and rock, then the road would swing and he'd be looking at nothing but river fog. Around 8:30, a fellow driver named Floyd Perry came up on channel 19 and warned him about elk moving downriver below the lodge like the barns were on fire. Glenn saw it himself — cows standing in the road staring uphill, a herd of eight or nine going across at a dead run and swimming the river in his lights. He'd never seen elk do that in the dark. Around 10:00, about 12 miles below Powell, he heard a strap slapping on his load. Lumber settles. He pulled off into a wide gravel pullout on the riverside, set the brakes, and got out with his flashlight and his winch bar — a four-foot steel bar he'd used for years as a pry bar, a jack handle, and once as a club on a dog with bad intentions toward his leg. The air was cold, low twenties, with that flat clean smell it gets before snow. That's when he smelled it. It came across the road from the north side, from the timber, and it was strong enough that he stopped cranking. He'd been around elk camps and cattle feedlots and a bear in a dumpster behind a cafe in Lolo. This was none of those. It smelled like a barn where cattle had bedded for a month on wet straw, and underneath that a sour-sweet note like apples left to rot in the bottom of a bin. The air moved and it was gone, then it came back stronger. The owls that had been calling all the way up the canyon had gone quiet. Then from across the highway, up in the timber, he heard three knocks — hard ones, like somebody swinging a splitting maul against a hollow log. One, two, three, evenly spaced. They echoed off the far wall of the canyon. He waited for more. None came. He finished tightening the strap quicker than he needed to. On his way back to the cab, headlights came down out of the timber a quarter mile ahead — a pickup pulling a trailer, bouncing down one of those old Forest Service spur roads. It swung out onto the highway headed east, went about 200 yards, then braked and swung back across into the same pullout he was in, maybe 50 yards in front of his bumper. He heard steel banging before it ever stopped — a heavy hollow clang like somebody hitting the inside of a water tank with a hammer. A young, heavy man in a canvas coat and knit cap got out of the passenger side and went back to the trailer with a flashlight. The driver stayed in the cab. Glenn walked up because that's what you do on a road like that at night. The young one about jumped out of his coat, swung his light in Glenn's face, and said they were fine, just checking the load. The load was a bear trap. The discussion cuts off there, but the title of the video tells you where this is going. Six hours later, Glenn climbed down a riverbank in the snow and pulled a small one out of that wrecked trap with his winch bar and his bare hands. She was about the size of a three-year-old child, soaked through and covered head to foot in chestnut hair, and when she got hold of his wrist, she did not let go. Before sunrise, a mother came down off the mountain for her baby, walked up to the passenger side of his Peterbilt in the dark, took hold of the mirror bracket, and leaned in to look at him. The whole cab tipped on its springs toward her. He would lie to a sheriff's deputy, run in front of a Fish and Game truck waving his arms like a crazy man, and miss the one appointment in his life he'd sworn he would keep. And thirteen years later, from across that same river, the little one would say goodbye to him with a sound she learned in the cab of his truck. I won't spoil the rest. The full account is on YouTube and it's worth every minute. Highway 12 along the Lochsa has been a hot corridor for sightings for as long as anyone has been keeping notes — the dense old-growth cedar, the remoteness, the river bottom travel routes — and stories like this one from old-timers who ran that road are part of the oral history that researchers have been chasing down for decades. Glenn Russell's account has the kind of detail that doesn't get invented: the smell, the silence of the owls, the three knocks, the elk moving at night, the exact feel of a winch bar in the cold. Whether you take it as gospel or as one man's experience, it's the kind of testimony that belongs in the file. Go find the video. It's a long one, but it's the kind of long one you don't want to rush.