Oregon Boom Man Shares 1972 Bigfoot Encounter for First Time

There's something about a first-hand account from someone who spent decades working in remote timber country that just hits different. A video surfaced recently featuring a 71-year-old man named Dale Morris recounting an experience from fifty years ago that he says he's never shared with anyone outside his wife. And honestly, the details in this one are the kind that make you lean in. Dale grew up in Roseburg, Oregon — a town shaped entirely by the timber industry, where his father ran a small engine repair shop on Garden Valley Boulevard and his mother taught fourth grade at Hucrest Elementary for over three decades. After graduating from Roseburg High School in 1971, he found his way into one of the most demanding jobs in the logging world: boom man on the South Fork of the Coquille River in Coos County. For anyone unfamiliar with the work, a boom man's job was to walk out onto floating logs in moving water — wearing calk boots with metal spikes, carrying a ten-foot pike pole — and sort, brand, and grade timber into tow bundles that could be pushed downriver to the mill at Myrtle Point. The South Fork of the Coquille runs through some of the heaviest timber country in southern Oregon, and the men who worked those booms had a relationship with the river that went way beyond scenic appreciation. They knew every bend, every current pattern, every sound the boom made at different water levels. Dale worked that river from the summer of 1972 until the early 1980s, when the industry mechanized enough that men walking logs in calk boots became obsolete. His mentor was a man named Gilly — Clarence Gilmore — who'd been working boom operations on the Coos County rivers since around 1945. Gilly taught by demonstration, once, and if you weren't paying attention, the lesson was gone. Dale learned the sound a log makes right before it rolls left, and he never forgot it. But that's the backdrop. The real story is what happened one morning when Dale freed a young Sasquatch from the log boom — and what showed up at the edge of camp that same night. The details he gives about that night are the kind that stick with you. The crickets going silent. The horses in the corral pressing themselves against the far fence. Something standing at the edge of camp that made a twenty-one-year-old man who'd grown up in timber country understand, in a single moment, that he hadn't actually seen anything yet. Oregon has a long and rich history of Sasquatch sightings, particularly in the dense forested regions of the Coast Range and the southern Cascades. The Coquille River watershed — with its heavy timber, remote canyons, and limited human access — is exactly the kind of terrain where reports tend to cluster. What makes accounts like Dale's stand out is the specificity. He wasn't camping in the wilderness looking for something. He was at work, doing a job he'd done hundreds of times, and something found him. The behavior he describes — the horses reacting, the sudden silence of the crickets — lines up with patterns reported by witnesses across decades. Horses, mules, and other livestock have long been considered reliable indicators of Sasquatch presence, often reacting before humans notice anything at all. The sudden absence of normal nighttime sound is another recurring detail in encounter reports, and it's one of those things that sounds dramatic until you realize how loud a healthy forest actually is at night. When all of that stops at once, something has changed. Dale says he's telling the story now because he's old enough that keeping it doesn't serve any purpose. That's a powerful framing, and it carries weight. Fifty years of silence, broken because the man has reached a point where he figures the truth matters more than whatever consequences might come from sharing it. The video itself is worth the time. Dale's delivery is unhurried and grounded — he's not performing, he's remembering. The pacing of the story, the way he builds the setting before getting to the encounter, gives the whole account a credibility that rushed retellings never achieve. And the fact that he's recounting specific sensory details — the sound of the boom, the smell of bark tannins in afternoon sun, the feel of weight shifting on a log underfoot — tells you this is a man who paid attention to his world long before something extraordinary interrupted it. Anyone interested in Sasquatch encounters from people who actually lived and worked in remote Pacific Northwest timber country should definitely check this one out. It's a reminder that the most compelling stories often come from folks who never set out to be storytellers at all.