1924 Ape Canyon: Miners Attacked by Sasquatch at Mount St. Helens
Posted Friday, July 31, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
There's a video floating around YouTube right now that absolutely deserves a spotlight, especially if you're into the deeper history of Sasquatch encounters. The channel Deepfield Unknown put together a gripping retelling of one of the most legendary incidents in Bigfoot lore, and honestly, the way they tell it gives you chills.
The piece focuses on the events of July 1924, when five miners were working a claim in a gorge below Mount St. Helens, a place that would later become known as Ape Canyon. The video walks through the buildup in a way that really lets the tension breathe. Fred Beck, a 31-year-old miner who had survived a near-fatal mining accident and believed he had a kind of second sight, had been noticing strange things for days. Massive footprints, fourteen inches or more, pressed into the mud near the creek. The kind of tracks that don't belong to any bear, cougar, or elk you'd expect in that terrain.
Then one of the older miners, Marian Smith, went down to the creek for water and came back pale as a ghost. He described seeing something upright, hairy, seven feet tall or more, just standing across the water watching him. Patient. Unbothered. Like it had been there the whole time.
The video does a fantastic job capturing what happened next. The men debated leaving. Some wanted one more night, one more shot at finding something before winter shut them down. They stayed. And that decision haunted them forever.
What unfolds is the kind of encounter that has fueled a century of debate. Rocks hurled at the cabin. The structure shaking. Hairy arms reaching through gaps in the logs. Multiple shapes circling outside, communicating in low guttural whistles that seemed to come from every direction at once. The miners fired blindly through the walls. Nothing hit. Nothing bled. Nothing screamed.
By dawn, the creatures simply withdrew back into the timber. The men grabbed what they could and sprinted down the mountain like frightened children.
What makes this retelling so compelling is the attention to the physical evidence. The cabin damage was real. The chinking between the logs was photographed and documented. People traveled up specifically to examine it. Whatever hit those walls hit them with enough force to crack and dent solid timber. And Fred Beck never walked the story back, not once, not even decades later when he wrote his book in 1967. He just got quieter. More reflective. More haunted.
The video also touches on something that often gets overlooked in these retellings. Beck talked about regret. About the warning his instincts gave him and how he ignored it because leaving felt like giving up. That kind of raw honesty from a witness who had every reason to soften the story over time carries weight.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Ape Canyon incident, this is essential viewing. It's one of the foundational stories in Sasquatch research, and the way Deepfield Unknown narrates it, with that slow, atmospheric pacing, really lets the horror of that night settle in. The video ends on the question that has never been answered. What was strong enough to shake a cabin, patient enough to circle it all night, and smart enough to vanish before sunrise without leaving a single body behind?
Ape Canyon still exists today. You can hike the trail. And the story still has no ending. Check out the video when you get a chance. It's worth every minute.