Two Men Die Searching for Sasquatch in Washington Forest

A case out of the Pacific Northwest has been making the rounds online, and it's the kind of story that sticks with you long after you've heard it. Two Portland men went into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in late December 2024 looking for something most people would never consider hunting. They never came home. What was found afterward has researchers and witnesses talking, and a short clip of footage that surfaced weeks later has only deepened the mystery. The video from Wild Discovery lays out the timeline in detail. On December 22nd, the two men loaded up a silver-gray pickup and crossed into Skamania County, Washington. They had a location marked on a map, gear chosen for a specific purpose, and a plan that had been building since November. They weren't scouting for elk or prepping for spring season. They went into those mountains to put a Sasquatch on camera. The older of the two, a man described by friends as a genuine wilderness survival expert with decades in those mountains, had his own reason for going back. Years earlier, while dozing outside his tent on a warm afternoon, he woke to a smell and found a massive hair-covered shape standing upright nearby, watching him. The moment he reached for his rifle, it vanished into the trees faster than anything that size had a right to move. That encounter never left him. He wanted to find it again, and he wanted company. He met his hunting partner in July of 2024. The younger man worked a bank job during the week but came alive in the outdoors. Over five months, they built a real friendship. The survival expert taught him how to read tracks and call in deer. The bank employee helped sort out finances. By November, they weren't just hunting partners anymore. They had a plan. The site they chose was a place known locally as Paco's Rock, deep inside the Gifford Pinchot. From there, they hiked southeast off the main trail into a stretch of forest almost nobody has a reason to walk through. December was deliberate. Longtime researchers have long argued that sightings climb in the colder months, that when food runs thin at altitude, Sasquatch widens its range and drifts closer to human camps than it otherwise would. The older hunter believed it. He picked winter on purpose. They were due home by Christmas Eve. They never came out. A family member called the Skamania County Sheriff's Office around 1:00 a.m. on Christmas Day to report them overdue. What followed became one of the largest search operations the county had run in years. More than 60 volunteers mobilized within hours. Investigators pulled footage from a license plate reader and traced the truck to a spot off Oklahoma Road near Willard, Washington. Ground teams pushed in with search dogs. Drones went up. A Coast Guard helicopter out of Astoria worked the area with infrared, sweeping the frozen canopy for anything warm enough to be a person. For three days, the infrared found nothing. On December 28th, that changed. Both men were found lying in an isolated stretch of forest southeast of their campsite, roughly 50 feet from their own tent. Their rifles were near them. The younger man's weapon was still loaded. It had never been fired. The older man's rifle had three spent rounds in it. Three is not a panic number. Three is a man tracking something. The tent was untouched. Not torn, not collapsed, not dragged. Food was still inside. Water was still inside. Nothing about that camp looked like men who had run out of supplies and gotten desperate. And sitting in the corner of that tent was a 10-pound clump of something, raw, uncut, roughly the shape of a hand, coated in what looked like spices. Nobody who worked that scene has ever publicly said what it was, why it was there, or what it was for. The official cause of death listed by the Skamania County Sheriff's Office was exposure. The brutal weather that week, and two men underprepared for it. Except one of those two men had spent 30 years learning how not to freeze to death in exactly those mountains. Both were carrying proper cold-weather gear. They had navigation equipment. They had food, water, and firearms. And they were 50 feet from a stocked tent. Exposure kills you when you cannot reach shelter, or when you are too disoriented to recognize it, or when you have nothing left to burn. These men had shelter within shouting distance, and both of them ended up outside of it in the dark holding rifles, one of which had been fired three times into something. Then came the footage. A clip running just over 10 seconds surfaced online weeks after the search ended. Whoever posted it claimed it came from a motion-activated camera the two men had set up inside their own tent. That claim has never been verified by anyone. No agency has confirmed a camera was recovered from that campsite. There is no chain of custody, no source, no name attached to the upload. In a case shared this widely, a fabricated clip is not just possible, it is the likeliest explanation. But what spread was never the part where the two men leave. It was what came after. The footage shows both men inside at night, reaching for their rifles and pushing out through the flap in a hurry. Not startled awake, but already up, already reacting to something outside the frame. Then they are gone from the shot, and the camera keeps recording an empty tent. The flap is open. A beat of nothing but nylon. And then something fills the tent opening, too tall for the frame. It stops there. It does not come in. The Wild Discovery video walks through all of this in detail, including the parts the official record has stayed silent on. The physical condition of the two men has never been publicly described. No detail about position, no account of what the recovery team actually saw when they reached them. That silence is a large part of why this case will not die. Officially, this case is closed. Almost nobody who has actually read the file believes the answer. These two had not gone camping. They had gone into that forest specifically to hunt something that, in every version of the lore, does not respond well to being hunted. And then, a few days after the bodies came out of those woods, a video appeared. The full breakdown is worth watching over on the Wild Discovery channel. It's one of those stories that raises more questions the deeper you go, and the footage at the end is the kind of thing you don't forget.