Oregon Foreman's 1997 Bigfoot Encounter: Log Found Standing Vertically Alone

# This 1997 Oregon Logging Footage Is The Kind Of Thing You Don't Forget Okay, I need to talk about this one. A video popped up over on the Wild Discovery YouTube channel that left me staring at my screen for a good long while, and if you've got even a passing interest in Sasquatch reports, you're going to want to carve out some time for this one. The story centers on a logging foreman named Dale Merrick, a 44-year-old with 21 years in the timber industry, who took a contract in October of 1997 for a 40-acre unit on the east face above the Kawash drainage in Clackamas County, Oregon. Right off the bat, something was off. The contract came in late and cheap, which in timber work is a red flag. The 6 acres somebody drew in pencil on the map made it worse. Down near the creek, a section was sketched freehand with the inside hatched, and in block letters next to it: "unmapped hazard, no operations." It followed no creek, no contour, no property line. Just a shape that meant nothing on paper and everything in practice. When Merrick called the site manager to ask about it, the man already had his answer loaded. Cut around it. Stay out of it. Finish the unit. No hesitation. That kind of rehearsed response tells you everything. What followed over the next few weeks is the kind of account that makes your hair stand up. Every evening around 5, when the saws and yarder went quiet, something down in the drainage would strike a tree. Three hard, evenly spaced hits, an eight or nine second pause, then three more. Not a pileated woodpecker. Those hammer fast. This was slow. Deliberate. Like an arm swinging something heavy and waiting between swings. Three grown men who knew better said nothing, because the alternative was a conversation none of them wanted to have. The strikes came nine evenings running, never twice from the same position. Merrick marked each one with a pencil dot. When he laid a ruler across them in his motel room that night, the pattern told its own story. Nine dots running south, around the bottom, up the west side, across the north, and back. Not one fell inside his cut. Something had walked the outside of that unit nine times and never once come in. Then the rocks started showing up. Round river rock, smooth and gray, stacked in a column on top of the fuel drum that didn't fall over when he walked up to it. There is no round river rock on that slope. It's broken basalt and duff. The nearest water was the creek at the bottom of the drainage, 1,100 vertical feet below, inside that hatched area. They kept coming anyway. On the drums, the stumps, the step of the yarder. Nathan Prior, a 22-year-old first-season choker setter, photographed every single one with a disposable cardboard camera he'd bought to show his mom the equipment on his first real job. When Merrick asked him why, Nathan said, "Because nobody's going to believe this." Kid was 22 and already understood the whole problem. Then Ruiz found the saplings on the west edge where the cut met the hatched area. Six hemlocks, four to six feet tall, each bent from standing into an arch with the top end pushed into the ground and buried. Not broken. Bent. A broken sapling shows white splintered fiber. These had only split bark along the curve. The buried ends went 14 to 19 inches into the soil. You cannot push a sapling top into ground that far. It's a whip. Merrick tried a seventh sapling himself and it buckled in his hands at two inches. The six stood in a horseshoe, open on the downhill side, and the ground inside was bare the way a deer bed is bare. He put his hand flat on it. Hard as a road. The saplings were five or six years old. The floor inside them was much older. Somebody moved in. And then somebody improved the place. The log that stood itself up is the part that broke something in Merrick's understanding of what was happening. Last day of September, Ruiz fell a Douglas fir, 40 inches on the stump, bucked it into three logs, and left it for the yarder. Wednesday morning, the butt log was standing up. Thirty-eight feet long, vertical, butt end down, sunk a foot and a half into the duff, leaning into the crotch of two standing hemlocks. It could not have rolled. Rolling is horizontal. This was vertical. The yarder sat 200 yards off, cold and chained, with Sandival's keys in his pocket at a motel in Estacada. That log weighs somewhere between 11 and 13,000 pounds. To stand it up, you lift one end and walk it upright. That takes a machine with a boom. There was none on that mountain. There were no tracks. There was a trench, a gouge in the duff 11 feet long running downhill from the base, like something had dragged the butt end before setting it up. Sandival looked at it for about 90 seconds. Then he took his cooler out of the yarder and drove off the hill. He never came back. Merrick bought a camcorder on October 4th. He told himself it was to get out of the contract without eating the penalty clause. Put something on tape, mail it to the office, walk away clean. That night he watched it back in his motel room. Rocks on a barrel. A log leaning on a tree. Everything happening on that mountain was only real if you were standing on it. He'd told himself for three weeks he was gathering evidence. What he was actually doing was documenting how alone he was. That was the night he got scared. Five days later, he slept on the hill, parked at the edge of the landing facing the tree line. By 10 p.m. he was mostly just cold. The first thing was footsteps, unhurried, one then the other. A four-legged animal has a doubling in its gait. This had none. He sat up. He moved quietly inside the truck in the dark and the footsteps outside stopped. Then they started again, coming across the gravel. A man in boots is a crunch and a roll. This was compression, like somebody setting down a bag of cement. Then the truck went down on the passenger side. Not a bump. A steady descent. The way it goes when a large being leans weight through its arms on the bed rail. It held 20 seconds and came back up just as slow. Then there was breath on the passenger glass. The window fogged in a patch the size of a dinner plate, and the patch grew and shrank, much slower than his own. There was a spotlight in the door pocket. He didn't touch it. For 20 years, people told him he panicked. He didn't. It was a decision. If he put light on it, he'd spend the rest of his life as a man who had seen it. And there is no one doing that. So he sat with his hands in his lap and let it look at him through the glass. At first light, there was a handprint on the driver's side window. Outside. Which meant it had come all the way around the truck, and he never heard it. Eleven inches from wrist crease to fingertip. Five and three-quarters across the palm. His own hand measures seven and a half. The phone call to the office the next morning is the part that rearranged everything. Merrick laid it out flat, the way you'd report a mechanical failure. Sabotage. Trespass. Operator walked off. Requesting release without penalty. He got 90 seconds in before he realized what was wrong. The site manager wasn't surprised. When you tell a man something impossible, he interrupts. He asks if you've been drinking. This man let him finish, paused three seconds, and asked one question. He asked whether anybody had gone down into the hatched area. Not what did you see. Not who walked off. Not is anybody hurt. Merrick said no. The man told him to keep it that way and finish the unit. That one question changed the whole shape of the story. The man didn't need to know what Merrick had seen. He needed to know about the six acres. Which meant they were on that map before anybody set foot on the ground. They knew specifically enough to draw a boundary, and they handed it over as a pencil line and a phrase because a real explanation would have been a piece of paper with a company's name on it. This is the kind of account that stays with you. The footage itself, the camcorder Merrick left running on a stump, captured something that stands between 7'2" and 8'1". The tape sat in a grocery bag for 14 years. Wild Discovery has more coming, and honestly, after sitting with this one, I'm counting the days. Do yourself a favor and go watch the full video. Bring a flashlight. You're going to want one.