Timber Owner Captures Bigfoot on Game Camera Near Mount St. Helens
Posted Thursday, September 03, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
A trail camera in the Mount Saint Helens foothills of Southwest Washington captured something in October 2024 that has the Sasquatch research community buzzing. The footage comes courtesy of Cabot Hargrove, a 46-year-old timber lot owner who has spent his entire life on the same stretch of forest his grandfather purchased back in the 1950s. What makes this case stand out isn't just the four frames caught on his game camera. It's the entire package of evidence that came with it.
The story unfolds over three nights, and it is genuinely unsettling to listen to. Cabot, along with two longtime hunting buddies, Dale and Jory, headed up to the family cabin for what was supposed to be a routine fall weekend. The property sits on roughly 40 acres of second-growth timber with a spring-fed creek, and Cabot runs 12 game cameras across the land at salt licks, creek crossings, and old logging cuts. He knows that forest better than most people know their own homes, and he knows every animal that lives in it.
That is why what showed up on his phone in the middle of the first night stopped him cold.
The game camera at the upper salt lick captured a shape at the far tree line. Tall, broad, standing fully upright on two legs, and turned at an angle that showed mostly shoulder and the side of a head against the darker trees behind it. Four frames total. In the first, it is there. By the fourth, it is gone, leaving nothing but an empty lick and the forest beyond. Dale, the group's resident skeptic, took one look and called it a bear standing on a stump. Cabot had 10,000 bear pictures on those cameras. He knew what a bear looked like from every angle and every light. This was not that.
What happened next is where things get really interesting from an evidence standpoint.
The next morning, Cabot walked up to the salt lick alone, hoping to find bear scat and a scuffed stump so he could laugh it off. Instead, he found a footprint in the soft, wet ground at the edge of the seep. Nineteen inches long. Five toes. Pressed deep enough into the mud to indicate something carrying serious weight. He placed his own size 12 boot next to it for scale, and his boot looked like a child's shoe beside it. The stride between prints was impossibly long, a distance he could not have covered without jumping, yet whatever made it covered it walking.
Then came the hair sample. While walking the old barbed wire fence line his grandfather had strung decades ago, Cabot found a clump of coarse, long hair snagged on the top strand at a height well above his own head, somewhere north of seven feet off the ground. Dark rust brown fading to charcoal at the tips. Not deer, not elk, not bear. Nothing he could name from any animal belonging on his land.
And then there was Ranger, the hunting shepherd who had treed bears and weathered every storm without flinching. On the first night, Ranger pressed himself into the farthest corner of the cabin and shook, producing a low, continuous whine Cabot had never heard from him before. By the second morning, the door was open for one minute to bring in wood, and Ranger bolted. He ran down the logging road and was never seen again. The sound of something large walking on two legs around the cabin in the predawn hours, a cadence Cabot described as weighing as much as three men, had been enough to send a seasoned mountain dog running for his life.
The connection to the famous 1924 Ape Canyon incident is impossible to ignore here. For anyone unfamiliar with that piece of Pacific Northwest history, in July of 1924, five miners working a gold claim on the southeast slope of Mount Saint Helens, at a place originally called the Van der White claim, were driven from their cabin overnight by a group of tall, hairy beings that threw stones at the roof and reached through the walls. The miners abandoned $200 worth of gear, which was a fortune at the time, and never returned. One of them, Fred Beck, documented the entire ordeal roughly 40 years later. The location became known as Ape Canyon because of what those miners reported.
Cabot's cabin sits roughly nine miles from that same abandoned claim, on the same mountain, in the same trees. Standing over that 19-inch print, the century-old story stopped being a campfire tale and became something far more immediate.
The video itself presents Cabot's account in his own words, layered with atmospheric narration that does justice to how terrifying those three nights must have been. By the third night, the distance between the cabin and whatever was out there had closed to nothing, and the three men were firing through the walls into the dark. The trail camera footage, the footprint photographs, and the phone clips Jory managed to capture before everything went sideways are all woven into the presentation.
This is the kind of multi-layered report that researchers dream about. Game camera footage, a castable footprint, a hair sample, a canine reaction, an audio account of bipedal footsteps, and a direct geographic link to one of the most famous encounters in Sasquatch history. The video is absolutely worth the time to watch in full, especially for anyone who appreciates a well-told witness account backed by physical evidence. The production quality is strong, and the pacing lets Cabot's story breathe the way it deserves to.
Check it out when you get a chance. This one has all the markings of a case that will be referenced for years to come.