Three Generations of Lofgren Bigfoot Sightings in Montana's Bitterroot Forest

There's something about a story that spans generations that hits differently, and the one that just surfaced over on the Bigfoot's Trail channel is exactly that kind of tale. It's the kind that makes you sit back and realize these encounters aren't just happening to random people in the woods — they're happening to the same families, in the same drainages, sometimes decades apart. The story centers on Harlon Lofgren, a 51-year-old millwright out of Hamilton, Montana, who in October of 1994 took his 17-year-old son Micah into the Lost Horse Creek drainage on the west slope of the Bitterroot National Forest for the opening week of rifle season. It was their fourth year running the same camp. They knew the road, the spring, the two lodge poles. They lashed the meat pole between them every fall like clockwork. On the third morning, the meat pole was empty. Two elk quarters that had hung there overnight were gone. But here's where it stops looking like any ordinary predator story — the ropes weren't torn, weren't chewed, weren't broken. They were untied. Coiled loop over loop and laid on the ground at the foot of the pole the way a man coils a rope he means to use again. Over the next five nights, the drainage closed around them. Each night the activity came a little closer to the tent than the night before. It ended with knocking coming from four directions at once, a rock thrown hard enough to ring the stovepipe like a struck bell, and two photographs Micah took by camera flash into the black timber. Both men walked out alive. But Harlon never hunted again — not one day in the 25 years he had left. The photographs went into a shoebox on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, and he told his family that if he ever came home to find that box opened, there would be no more talk of that week from anyone. The negative strip inside held three frames. Two were printed. The third was cut out with a blade, cleanly straight across between the sprocket holes, and has never been found. Micah scanned the two surviving prints in the spring of 2019, three days after he buried his father. He wasn't trying to prove anything — he was looking for photographs of the man to set out at the reception. What he found instead put him on the road to a retired Ravalli County Sheriff's deputy named Dale Quist, who looked once at the background of the second print and said he knew that camp. Said he'd stood one drainage north of it in the same week of the same year, heard the same thing in the dark, and had written a report his own department made certain was never filed. But the story goes back even further. Going through his father's closet, Micah found more than the shoebox. Underneath it, wrapped in an oiled rag the way a man wraps a tool he means to keep, was a Forest Service field notebook belonging to Einar Lofgren — Harlon's father, Micah's grandfather. Einar had been a trail crew foreman for the Forest Service in the early 60s, and three entries from September of 1962 were dated in the same drainage Harlon would take his son into 32 years later. The first entry noted that the pack mules had refused the spring crossing two mornings running. They would take the trail up to a point about 200 yards below the spring, set their legs, and refuse to go on. No amount of hauling on the lead would move them. Einar wrote it twice — and he didn't double up on ordinary things. He noted there was nothing there to see. He noted the men laughed about it. The mules did not. The second entry, three days later, told of tools left stacked against a stump at quitting time being restacked in the morning — handles down, heads up, leaned in a fan against the same stump in a pattern no man on the crew had made and no man would own to. Einar counted heads that morning and counted them again and wrote both counts down, the kind of thing a foreman does when he's trying to force a fear to behave like arithmetic. The third entry wasn't words. It was a drawing. A head and shoulders seen from below, the angle you'd have on something standing on the screen above you while you stood at the spring. A wide, flat face with a low shelf of bone across the brow, a broad flat nose and no muzzle to it at all. And on the left ear, drawn small and drawn on purpose with a little arrow beside it so no one could mistake it for a slip, there was a torn notch — a clean wedge gone from the outer edge, healed. Under the drawing, Einar wrote a single line. He had reported it to the district ranger. The ranger had reassigned the crew to the east fork the following week. The matter was not to be spoken of. Then the notebook goes back to board feet and culverts and stays there for the rest of its pages. What gets me about stories like this is the pattern. Three generations, same drainage, same spring, same kind of encounter — and in two of those cases, official reports that were deliberately buried. Einar's notebook sat on a shelf in Harlon's house for 13 years before Harlon loaded his truck and drove his son up the Lost Horse Road to the very same spring where his own father had drawn that notched ear. Micah has said since that he doesn't believe his father believed it. Einar had written it down the way a man writes down a bad dream. And Harlon didn't keep room in himself for other men's dreams, not even his father's. He believed it the way you believe in a bearing failure you've never actually seen — which is to say he didn't believe it at all until the third night, and by then they were already inside it. The full account, including Micah's retelling of that week in his own words, is worth sitting down for. There's a level of detail here that you don't often get — the kind of small, specific things that ring true, like Harlon letting Micah steer for the last mile of the road, or the way a man coils a rope he means to use again. Head over to Bigfoot's Trail and give it a watch when you get the chance. This one stays with you.