Hunters Stumble Into Bigfoot Territory in Northern Idaho
Posted Monday, July 27, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
There's a story floating around YouTube right now that every Sasquatch researcher needs to hear. A channel called Bigfoot Sasquatch Stories dropped a detailed account of a 1994 hunting trip in Northern Idaho that turned into something none of the four men involved would ever forget. The retelling is narrated by someone named Victor, and the way the story unfolds is genuinely gripping.
The setup is classic Idaho backcountry. Four friends, Harold "Hal" Mercer, Wade Harlland, Curtis Bell, and Nolan Price, load up a dark green Ford F250 in Orofino and head east toward Kelly Creek. The plan is elk hunting, but Hal notices early on that something feels off. Three long depressions at a closed ranger station, blurred by rain, with a stride that's unusually long. Curtis brushes them off as bear tracks overlapping bootprints. Hal stays quiet but keeps watching the tree line.
What makes this account stand out is the layering of evidence. The group finds a large cedar with four parallel scratches higher than a man's head, and Hal notices the cuts move sideways instead of downward, with no hair caught below. Six fist-sized stones placed in a straight row on a rotten log, with moss pressed beneath them showing they were moved recently. A young branch twisted into a loop at chest height, with exposed wood still bright and damp. When Hal tries to recreate the kink with both hands, the wood only bends down. It won't make that sharp shape.
Then there's the scat. Curtis finds a pile in the mud near the creek containing berries, animal hair, and pieces of bark, but the size is far larger than any black bear scat Hal has ever seen. The center is still slightly warm. For anyone familiar with Sasquatch research, these details align with patterns documented across the Pacific Northwest for decades, particularly in the remote drainages of the Clearwater and Selway regions where Idaho's wilderness gets thick and quiet.
The night brings the kind of escalation that makes these stories stick. A heavy odor rolls across the clearing, wet fur mixed with sour soil and animal sweat. Sharp knocks echo from the forest, answered from across the creek, then three even knocks from the east. Near midnight, heavy footsteps stop just outside the firelight. A young alder is still trembling, but nothing is there when the flashlight sweeps across.
The detail that probably got me the most is the tin cup. Hal wakes before dawn and finds the cup that had been beside a log the night before now lying near the outer edge of camp, almost 15 feet away. Intact. No bite marks. No drag marks. Whatever crossed the camp wasn't searching for food and was careful enough to avoid every cord. The food bags still hung untouched. The tent lines hadn't been moved. That's a level of deliberate, purposeful movement that doesn't match a bear, a cougar, or any other known forest animal.
By morning, Wade finds a deep depression beside where he slept. As light spreads through the pines, the shape becomes clear. A footprint nearly 20 inches long, more than 8 inches wide, with five distinct toes and a heel print. For anyone who has studied the footprint casts collected across North America, those numbers are right in the range that researchers like John Bindernagel and others have documented for years.
The video itself goes on to describe the moment the encounter peaks. A rock smashing into a crate, a figure nearly nine feet tall stepping out of the firelight with an injured arm, looking straight at the hunters before turning toward a smaller figure hiding behind a tree. The roar that shakes the ground beneath their knees. The realization that they weren't being hunted.
Victor, the narrator, is upfront that the story was compiled from witness accounts, forums, blogs, documents, and Bigfoot research communities, and that it can't be independently verified. That kind of transparency is worth respecting. But the internal consistency of the details, the environmental observations, the behavioral patterns of whatever was in those woods, all of it fits a pattern that serious researchers have been tracking for generations.
If you're into Sasquatch encounters with strong environmental detail and multiple layers of physical evidence, this one is worth your time. The narration builds tension well, and the pacing gives the strange signs room to breathe before the confrontation arrives. Definitely check it out.