Mine Technician Spends 230 Days Living With Sasquatch in Idaho Wilderness

There's a video floating around YouTube right now that I can't stop thinking about, and if you've got even a passing interest in Sasquatch encounters, you need to carve out some time for this one. A man named Dale Porter, a mine safety technician with over two decades of experience working underground, sits down at his kitchen table in Salmon, Idaho, just after 2 AM, and tells a story he's been carrying alone for ten years. And what he describes is unlike anything I've come across in a long while. Dale went into the mountains of Idaho on August 28, 2016, for what should have been a routine job. His district had 41 abandoned mine openings on the list that summer, and his job was to find each one, assess the danger, and mark the worst ones with orange flagging so nobody accidentally walked into a rotting shaft in the dark. Standard, careful work. The kind of work that requires you to listen to rock the way some folks listen to horses. But almost immediately, something felt off. The forest was too quiet. No pikas whistling from the talus slopes, even though late summer is when those little rock rabbits are usually screaming at anything that moves. No Clark's nutcrackers working the whitebark pines during cone season. And the gray jays, those bold camp robbers that find every backcountry tent within an hour, never once came near his camp in six days. Dale tried to chalk it up to a dry year or a goshawk working the basin. What he eventually understood was that the silence wasn't empty. It was intentional. Something was holding still. Then the strange stuff started. He found old mine portals deliberately packed shut from the outside, not caved in, but built. Fir boughs with the needles still green, twisted off with such force the bark shredded like a dish rag, jammed into the openings so tight he couldn't pull one loose. And the branches were thick as his wrist. He tried twisting one himself on a nearby tree just to test it, and couldn't make it creak. Whoever, or whatever, was doing this had strength that doesn't fit any human frame. The moment that really got under my skin was when he returned to one of the worst hazards on his list, a 60-foot open shaft with rotted collar timbers, the kind of hole that swallows a hunter in the dark and never gives him back. He'd spent the previous evening driving four stakes around it and tying off every scrap of flagging he had left. By morning, the orange was gone. Not torn, not blown off. Every stake pulled, every hole pressed shut like someone had stepped on each one. And right on the edge of that rotten collar, where his first stake had been, someone had built a careful stack of three stones. If you've spent any time reading the older accounts, you know stone stacks, or cairns, have shown up in Sasquatch encounter reports for decades. Researchers like John Green documented them in British Columbia back in the 1950s and 60s, often found near tree structures, beds, or areas of apparent activity. The idea that whoever left those stones understood exactly what Dale had done, and responded with intention, is the kind of detail that separates a tall tale from something that sits heavy in your chest. And here's where the story takes a turn that I genuinely did not see coming. Dale says he spent 230 days living with them. That on day one, they sank every device he had and stood waist-deep watching the lights go out. That they fed him. Kept him alive. And that they bury their dead and sing over the graves. Ten years he's kept this to himself. His wife Janet, an ER nurse, watched his satellite messenger dots crawl across a map for 11 days, then watched the last dot stop moving. He says the next time he heard her voice, he wasn't allowed to answer it. He has scars across both palms, shiny and ridged, like something hot was pulled through his fists. He tells people it was a rope, which is true, as far as it goes. There's an old pocket watch on his kitchen table that isn't his. Tarnished, dented in the lid, hasn't run in years. A name engraved inside that took him months to track down. He keeps looking at it while he talks. I don't want to give away the rest. The video runs long, and Dale tells it the way a man tells something he's lived with so long it finally had to come out. Quiet, careful, and without a single note of performance. You can hear the weight of ten years in his voice. Do yourself a favor and go find it. Just search the channel name Sasquatch Archive on YouTube and look for the biologist and Sasquatch village title. Settle in. Make some coffee. This one stays with you.