Timber Cruiser Films Bigfoot Just 12 Inches Away in Arkansas

Now this is the kind of footage that makes you sit up straight and pay attention. A timber cruiser in the Arkansas mountains had a face-to-face encounter with a Sasquatch that has to be one of the closest recorded encounters in recent memory, and the details surrounding it are absolutely chilling. The video comes from the YouTube channel Bigfoot Den, and it tells the story of Dale Harges, a 52-year-old timber cruiser who had spent 26 years walking the woods of western Arkansas for a living. This wasn't some weekend warrior or casual hiker. Dale was a man who measured things for a living, trunk diameters, heights, board feet, distances. If he wrote down a number, you could bet your bottom dollar it was accurate. Back in September 2022, Dale started a new cruise on the north face of a ridge above the Ouachita River, west of Mena, working for a company called Redland Timber Partners. The tract was 1,100 acres scheduled to be cut before December 1st, and his job was to blaze the boundary trees with orange paint so the loggers would know where to stop. Pretty standard stuff for someone with his experience. But that's when things started getting weird. Dale painted 21 trees along his line that first morning. When he walked back to check his work in the afternoon, three of those trees were bare. Not scuffed, not rubbed by a deer, but cleaned down to bare wood in a clean rectangle about the size of a dinner plate. The strange part? The scrapes weren't at chest height. They were 8 feet off the ground. No ladder marks, no rope burn, no climbing spurs. Nothing. At the base of each of those three trees, someone, or something, had stacked three chips of white stone. Novaculite, to be exact, the same sharp white rock that sticks out of that ridge in sheets. Nine pieces total, carried from an outcrop and placed in little stacks like someone was keeping count. Dale being Dale, he repainted every blaze. By the next week, the scrapes had spread to nine trees along the line, all at exactly 8 feet 2 inches up. He painted them again, thicker this time. Stubborn. The next morning, all nine were bare again, and now there were five chips of white stone at the base of every tree instead of three. The escalation didn't stop there. Survey stakes got pulled out of the ground and laid in a line pointing downhill. A company trail camera set up at the saddle of the reach started capturing something on 17 different nights over 28 days. The same Sasquatch, every time. And here's where it gets really interesting: each visit came earlier. Each visit came closer. The camera was a cellular unit, the kind that sends every clip to an account on someone's phone. Dale thought of it as a deer counter. He didn't think about who else might be watching that feed. By the second week of November, the creature stood in the saddle for 31 minutes, staring into the lens for 40 seconds at a time. Then came November 12, 2022, the opening evening of modern gun deer season. Dale was out on the line when it walked right up to him. The clip was recorded at 27 minutes past 5, temperature around 29 degrees. His rifle hung from his shoulder. He stood 12 inches from something that, by his own later calculation, weighed close to 800 pounds. He measured that distance afterward with a tape measure. The clip is 11 seconds long. A Sasquatch bent at the waist, its face level with his, screaming. Dale never raised the rifle. He never stepped back. His cap got knocked crooked, and he stood there like a man nailed to the ground. Then it turned and walked away. By the next morning, every video that camera had ever sent to the company had been deleted from its account. Five days after the clip, Dale's contract was ended by email. The company's land manager had already offered him $40,000 for a single SD card. Dale said no. Eleven days after the encounter, Dale's younger brother Lamar, a county road crew grader operator, walked up that same mountain on Thanksgiving Eve with no weapon. Sixteen days later, a school bus driver found him sitting on a bridge at dawn. He was unhurt. His hair had turned white. He hasn't spoken a word since. Dale kept a log book of everything he measured on that mountain. Heights, distances, track depths, minutes after sunset. On the last page, written the night of the clip, is one sentence he underlined three times. The video hints at revealing that sentence, but you'll have to watch to find out what it says. His wife Teresa didn't burn the evidence like Dale told her to. She sent the channel three things: an SD card, a 31-page account Dale typed over 11 nights in December of 2022, and a hickory ramrod sealed in a freezer bag. Dale himself has declined to speak with anyone about what happened. The footage described in this video is the kind of thing that separates the casual observer from the serious researcher. The escalation pattern, the deliberate placement of rock stacks, the way the visits grew closer and closer over time, it all points to intelligence. This wasn't a random encounter. Whatever Dale met on that mountain had been watching him, counting him right back, and decided when the time was right to introduce itself. For anyone interested in Sasquatch behavior patterns, this case is a goldmine. The way the creature approached a man with a rifle, screamed at him for 11 seconds at point-blank range, and then simply walked away raises questions that researchers have been asking for decades. Why the scream? Why let him live? And why escalate the encounters over weeks rather than simply avoiding him? The video goes into much more detail about Dale's typed account, the strange conversation he had with a 79-year-old woman named Opel Reinhardt who lived under that ridge her entire life, and the history of that saddle that nobody in her family ever cut. She told him the last outfit that tried to cut through it quit inside of a week. When he asked what happened to them, she said that wasn't her story to tell. If you're a researcher, a witness, or just someone who pays attention to credible encounters, this is one video you don't want to skip. The Bigfoot Den channel has put together a detailed breakdown of Dale's account, and the implications of what happened on that Arkansas mountain in the fall of 2022 are still rippling through the community. Make sure to check out the full video for the complete story, including the details about the hickory ramrod, the deleted footage, and that final underlined sentence in Dale's log book. Some stories stay with you, and this one is going to be hard to shake.