Veteran Foreman Stops Crew From Shooting Bigfoot at Glacier Peak

A logging camp deep in the Washington Cascades became an unlikely sanctuary recently, and the story coming out of it is one of the most unusual accounts to surface in a long time. A crew working a salvage contract on a fire-scarred ridge had a visitor show up at their lower landing one Tuesday afternoon, and what unfolded over the next 24 hours has researchers buzzing. The account, shared in vivid detail by a faller who hired on with the crew in Darrington that September, describes a dark-haired Bigfoot descending from the burn above camp. The crew was eating on the tailgates when it simply sat down on the cold deck with its hands on its knees. Nobody moved. Ruel Castanya, a 70-year-old logger with 50 years in the Suiattle country, came around the crummy with his Winchester hanging at his side but never raised it. He just looked at the creature, then looked up the burn where it was looking, and said, "That's a river one." What makes this account stand out is what came next. A helicopter pilot named Cyrus Pendergraft, who had been flying freight in the North Cascades for 22 years, landed at camp that afternoon and dropped a bombshell. He told the crew he had seen pale Bigfoots from the air four times since September, up high on the burns between their location and the sulfur drainage. These pale ones were longer in the arm than the dark one sitting on the deck, and they were carrying off the dark ones. Four times he watched it happen. Cyrus also mentioned something that should get any field investigator's attention. He asked if anyone had been cutting on the north face of the ridge. Ruel told him nobody cuts that area but them. Cyrus described a stand of snags laid down all one way, 20 or 30 of them, with tops downhill like they had been felled by a crew that knew what it was doing. Nobody felled them. The dark Bigfoot stayed at camp through the night, eventually settling in the slash near the narrator's trailer with its back to a stump and its face to the ridge. The crew could hear it breathing through the wall of the trailer, slow and steady, like a man asleep in a chair. Once the breathing stopped for a long while before starting again. The next day, the narrator was sent up to fall timber on the top unit of the ridge. About 3:00 in the afternoon, with the saw shut off to refuel, he looked down into the snags about 200 feet below and saw the Bigfoot standing against a trunk, nearly as dark as the tree itself. It stayed with him the rest of the afternoon, moving when he moved, stopping when he stopped, keeping the same distance below him on the slope. The narrator recognized the behavior for what it was, the same way a hunter keeps its quarry above where it cannot get around. As the sun went behind the ridge and the south face went blue and cold, he saw them. Three shapes across the draw on the north side, pale as the ash, so pale he first mistook them for snags that had lost their bark. Then one moved, going from tree to tree upright and fast before dropping down onto its long arms and coming on that way a little, then standing again. Taller than the dark one and thinner through the body, with arms that hung down past where a man's knees would be. This account raises questions that researchers have been circling for years. The idea of different types or populations of Bigfoots interacting in ways that include predation is not entirely new in the literature, but firsthand accounts from working loggers and helicopter pilots in the high Cascades carry a certain weight. The Suiattle and the drainages around Glacier Peak have long been considered active territory, and the fire-salvaged landscapes seem to draw activity, possibly because the open visibility makes travel easier or because the dead timber attracts game that Bigfoots follow. The detail about the felled snags is particularly intriguing. Anyone who has spent time in burned timber knows what a professional cut looks like, and the description of trees laid down uniformly with tops downhill suggests either a deliberate clearing or something mimicking the work of a faller. Either possibility opens doors that are worth walking through. The full account is worth the time to sit with. The pacing, the restraint, the way the narrator describes what he saw without embellishment, it reads like something pulled straight from a field journal. Anyone interested in Cascades activity, fire-burn behavior, or the possibility of multiple Bigfoot populations sharing the same range should track this one down and give it a listen.