Washington County Collects Bigfoot Trail Cam Footage From Five Properties, Never Released

There's something about a trail cam story that just hits different, and this one from the Bigfoot's Trail channel is no exception. It's the kind of account that sticks with you long after the video ends, not because of flashy footage, but because of the slow, methodical way this Sasquatch moved through the Wind River drainage in Washington back in the fall of 2019. The story centers on a man named Jib Thorley, a 54-year-old property owner outside Cardan Ferry who wasn't even looking for a Sasquatch when he bolted a cheap trail camera to a fence post. He was losing livestock. A goat vanished without a trace in mid-September, no body, no blood, no drag mark. His cattle were bunching into the far corner of the back pasture every morning, pressed so hard against the wire they looked like they were trying to climb out of the county. Jib figured cougar, because that's what you figure when stock starts acting strange in the Pacific Northwest. So he set the camera up at the back of the pasture, pointed it at the tree line, and waited. On the night of October 3rd, 2019, at 2:14 in the morning, the camera fired. What Jib saw on the SD card the next morning made him close his laptop and go do his chores, because he genuinely didn't know what else to do. There was something standing upright at the edge of the tree line, maybe 80 yards out. His first thought was bear. But bears don't stand like that. The proportions were all wrong. The shoulders were too high and too wide, the head sat low and forward, and there was no snout. Then it came back the next night. Closer. About 60 yards this time, standing near the center of the frame, facing the camera. Facing the house. Jib measured it against his own fence posts later, the ones he'd set himself, and the figure stood a good deal over seven feet tall. The infrared wash pulled out details that still give me chills just reading about them. Dark rust-brown hair hanging off the arms in matted strands, going near charcoal at the shoulders. A heavy bony brow over the eyes. A broad, flat face with no muzzle at all, and a wide, prominent nose sitting high on it. And those eyes. Two flat coins of light from the infrared, pointed directly at the camera the whole time. Night three was the one Jib told the dispatcher he didn't sleep after. The Sasquatch had crossed the fence. It was standing out in the open pasture, maybe 40 yards from the camera post, and behind it you could see the gap in the wire where the top strand had been pushed down and sprung. The post was leaning the next morning, the wire was slack, and there was a smell on it Jib couldn't name and didn't want to. But here's the detail that really got me. Close enough now to read a scar, the figure had a piece torn clean out of its left ear. An old, healed injury, right there in the frame. What makes this story hit on another level is what happened next. Jib wasn't the only one with a camera pointed at the trees. Ren Aldus, who ran sheep half a mile closer to town, pulled footage from October 6th showing the same figure at his lambing shed. Two of his ewes were dead against the back wall the next morning, not eaten, not carried off, just gone the way animals go when their hearts give out from pure terror. The rest of the flock had trampled the water trough flat trying to get away. And on Ren's clip, in the light of the shed lamp, you could see the ear. Same notch. Same Sasquatch. Then came Mara Quist, the next property in toward Cardan Ferry, 47 years old, grew up in that valley, didn't spook easy. She had a camera on her chicken coupe because she'd lost birds to a bobcat two winters running. The timestamps lined up like something out of a field study. October 3rd on Jib's post. October 6th at Ren's shed. Same hour of the night, near enough. Same direction of travel, down the drainage toward the houses. One Sasquatch, one old scar, walking a straight line out of the deep timber toward town and closing the distance every single night it was seen. Jib finally called the county nuisance wildlife line that morning. He couldn't make himself say the word on a recorded line, so he said "large animal." The clerk logged it as probable bear or cougar. Within two weeks, five separate cameras on four properties had recorded the same figure walking the same drainage each night, closer to the houses than the night before. By the end of October, the county roads department had pulled every SD card in the valley. The sightings stopped. They have not resumed. Nobody at the county has ever explained why the footage was collected, where it is now, or what walked down out of the deep timber toward Cardan Ferry that fall. This is the kind of story that reminds me why I keep coming back to these channels. The footage itself was never publicly released, but the account that came out of it, passed along by a man named Sig Brennan who worked the night desk at county dispatch and reviewed the cards before they went up the chain, is one of the most methodical, multi-witness trail cam progressions I've come across in a long time. If you want the full telling, definitely check out the video. It's worth every minute.