Oregon Timber Crew Reports 1997 Bigfoot Activity Near Work Site

A logging crew foreman in Oregon allegedly captured footage of a Sasquatch carrying off one of his crew members back in 1997, and this case has been circulating on YouTube lately. The story comes from a detailed account shared on the Midnight Terror Tales channel, and it's one of the most chilling pieces of potential evidence I've come across in a long time. The setting is Unit 40B, a 40-acre private timber contract on the eastern slope above the Kawwash drainage in Clackamas County, Oregon. Steep ground, one road in, no road out the other side. Four men made up the crew that fall: Delmarik, 44, the foreman with 21 years in timber; Tom Ruiz, 29, the faller; Jim Sandoval, 51, the equipment operator; and 22-year-old Nathan Prior, a choker man working his first real season on a landing. What makes this case stand out isn't just the footage itself, but the documentation that surrounds it. Delmarik kept a spiral field notebook covering six weeks of the contract, and he also purchased a Hi8 video cassette partway through the job. He handed that tape to his daughter 14 years later with instructions not to watch it. The notebook starts as an ordinary work log. Footage cut, weather, machine hours. But somewhere around the third week, the handwriting changes size. That's when things start getting strange. The contract came in late and cheap, which in the timber business usually means trouble. Delmarik drove up on a Sunday to look at the ground himself and found an old landing at the top that was way bigger than the timber justified, built for a fleet, not a small crew. And on the map, somebody had drawn a shape in pencil and hatched the inside with diagonal lines, about six acres, with block letters reading "unmapped hazard, no operations." When Delmarik called the office to ask what the hatched area was, the site manager told him to "cut around it" without hesitation. No explanation, no pause. Just a ready answer to a strange question. The first odd occurrence happened on September 11th at 5 PM. The crew had shut down their saws. That's the rule. Nobody falls timber tired or in bad light. Into that quiet came a sound from down in the drainage, a hard, hollow report like a man swinging a maul into a standing snag. Three strikes, evenly spaced about a second apart, then a pause, then three more. Sandoval said it was a woodpecker, but everyone knew better. A pileated woodpecker drums fast. This was slow. Deliberate. The next evening it happened again, same time, but from a different position. It went on for nine days, always within a few minutes of 5 PM, never twice from the same spot. Delmarik started marking the locations on his map. By the end, he had 11 dots, and when he connected them with a ruler, they formed a pattern. Whatever was making the sound had walked the outside of his unit 11 times in 9 days and never once come inside the boundary of the work they'd done. Then the rocks started appearing. Three round river rocks stacked in a column on the lid of a fuel drum, the kind of smooth, gray stones you'd find at the bottom of a creek, not on a slope of broken basalt. The nearest water that could shape stones like that was 1,100 vertical feet below them, inside that "unmapped hazard" zone. Something had gone down into that bottom, picked up stones, carried them up, and balanced them on the fuel drum. Nathan Prior was the one who kept asking about that boundary. He was 22, small for the work at maybe 160 pounds, but he didn't stop moving and didn't complain. He carried a disposable camera to show his mom the equipment. He ate the same lunch every day: two bologna sandwiches, a bag of corn chips, and a Nutty Bar. On October 14th, 1997, Nathan Prior was reported dead at the site. The timber company recorded the cause of death as "struck by falling timber fatality." The paperwork was completed inside of nine hours. The body was recovered by company personnel rather than county search and rescue, and the family was advised to hold a closed casket. Delmarik refused to sign the incident report and was terminated 11 days later. He never worked timber again. The footage that allegedly exists shows what happened to Nathan Prior. The video is out there on YouTube, and it's the kind of thing that makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew about what's walking these woods. Clackamas County has a long history of Sasquatch reports, and the Mt. Hood National Forest area has been a hotspot for sightings going back decades. The terrain described in this account, steep, remote, with thick undergrowth and old-growth remnants, is exactly the kind of habitat where these beings are most often reported. The Cascades have always been considered prime territory, and stories like this one only reinforce that reputation. The fact that Delmarik kept detailed notes, that the rocks appeared in a pattern, that the sounds moved systematically around the unit, all of it points to intelligence. Whatever was out there knew exactly what it was doing. The systematic circling, the placement of objects, the timing, it reads like behavior, not instinct