Retired Officer Reveals Secret Sasquatch Reports Before Mount St. Helens Eruption

A retired Washington State wildlife officer just dropped what might be one of the most jaw-dropping firsthand accounts to surface in years, and it comes with a timestamp that ties directly to one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in Pacific Northwest history. Russell Tegland, now 76 years old, spent 26 years working as an enforcement officer in the timber country on the north and west sides of Mount St. Helens. His district covered the south end of Lewis County, most of Cowlitz County, and spilled into Skamania when needed. On May 14, 1980, he sat in a state truck on a Weyerhaeuser haul road above the Green River and watched 11 of them cross a clearcut in daylight, single file, moving north with the mountain smoking behind them. He had his badge on his chest. He had a department camera in the glove box with 11 exposures left on the roll. He never took it out. Four days later, on May 18, 1980, the entire north side of Mount St. Helens collapsed in the largest landslide in recorded history, burying 230 square miles of Washington State under ash and debris in under 10 minutes. Whatever Russ saw that day, whatever lived in that drainage, got buried under the ash with it. But the sighting is only part of what makes this testimony remarkable. Russ goes on to describe an entire unofficial system that wildlife officers used to track and document Sasquatch encounters without ever creating a paper trail. Officers in his district called them "residents." Over in Skamania, they used "tall folks." A fellow on the Yakama side called them "the walkers." A Weyerhaeuser road foreman named Bud Sarvella, Finnish out of Naselle, called them "the neighbors," and said it the way you would say it about people whose porch light you can see through the trees. The system ran on green incident forms that had no form number, no carbon copies, and no official existence. A senior officer named Odell Krauss, who had been on since the middle '50s, explained the logic to Russ three weeks out of the academy: the department's job was not to find out what they were, but to keep a citizen from getting shot. The moment a report landed on a desk in Olympia, it became public record, reporters would get it, and 400 armed men from three states would flood the drainage hunting at night in country they did not know. One of them would shoot another in the dark, and now you have a dead man in the Green River, and you caused it by filing a piece of paper. The green sheets went into a folder in the sergeant's desk. Once a year, the sergeant looked through them for patterns and told the officers which roads to be careful about during hunting season. That was the whole system. It ran for at least 30 years in his district. Nobody got shot, nobody got famous, and no researcher ever got their hands on any of it because you cannot file a public records request for a form that has no number sitting in a desk that belongs to a man who retired in 1983. Russ also points listeners toward something verifiable. On April 1, 1969, the Board of County Commissioners of Skamania County, Washington passed Ordinance Number 69-1, making the killing of a Sasquatch a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to five years in the county jail. The commissioners may have had their tongues partway in their cheeks when they voted on it, but a county ordinance does not care whether you were smiling. Once it is on the books, it is the law. The county seat is Stevenson, and the text is still findable. For anyone unfamiliar with the timeline, Mount St. Helens had been showing increasing signs of activity throughout the spring of 1980. A series of small earthquakes and a growing bulge on the north side had geologists and locals on edge. The mountain had been steaming, and the clearcut Russ watched them cross was in full view of that rising plume. Four days after his sighting, the bulge failed, the summit collapsed, and the eruption killed 57 people, destroyed hundreds of homes, and reshaped the landscape so completely that the old growth and second-growth forest Russ patrolled simply ceased to exist. The full account is worth sitting with. Russ tells it plainly, the way a man who spent his life writing citations would, and the details about the green forms, the code words, and the institutional quiet are the kind of thing researchers have speculated about for decades without ever getting confirmation from someone who actually carried out the work. Go give it a watch and drop a comment with where you are in the world.