Hunters Vanish From Oregon's Steamboat Creek Every October

There's a video making the rounds on YouTube right now that every serious researcher needs to carve out time for. It digs deep into one of the most unsettling patterns of disappearances ever documented in Oregon's Umpqua National Forest, and it ties directly to what might be the clearest footage of a Sasquatch face ever captured in the state. The story centers on the Steamboat Creek drainage in the northeastern corner of Douglas County, a stretch of old growth timber about 40 minutes east of Roseburg. It's not the most remote country in Oregon, but it's wild enough that hunters have been vanishing from it with eerie regularity since 1964. Five separate hunting parties have disappeared from that same drainage, and every single one of them vanished during the same seven-day window of the calendar year: the third week of October. The most recent incident, and the one the video focuses on, happened in October 2006. Three men, Terry Hullbert, his son-in-law Shawn Picket, and Terry's cousin Ed Lamaro, drove into the drainage for a weekend hunt. Three nights before they vanished, they filmed something remarkable. According to the video, it was the clearest look at a Bigfoot face ever captured on film anywhere in Oregon. Most people would have packed up and left that same night. These three stayed for three more days. On October 22nd, 2006, Forest Service ranger Glenn Fitch walked into their camp and found it completely abandoned. The fire was still warm enough to boil water. The coffee pot sat on the grate with cold coffee inside. Three rifles leaned against a log with the safeties still engaged. Three cots were laid out in a canvas tent. And outside the tent flap, three pairs of boots stood laced in a neat row, with nobody left to wear them. Fitch radioed it in to Douglas County dispatch, and partway through his report, he stopped talking mid-sentence. When dispatch asked if he was still on the line, he said yes, and then he told them the birds had gone completely silent all at once, like someone had thrown a switch up the ridge. A few seconds later, something above him knocked on a tree several times, evenly spaced, almost gentle, like it was answering a question nobody had asked out loud. Fitch retired from the Forest Service just five months later and never spoke about the incident publicly for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2019. After his funeral, his daughter was cleaning out his garage and found six micro cassette tapes sealed in a shoebox behind old chainsaw parts. Recorded between 2008 and 2009 on a handheld recorder he never told anyone he still owned, those tapes contain Fitch's own account of what he experienced over his decades on the North Umpqua District. The video walks through those recordings in detail, and they paint a picture of a pattern that goes back much further than 2006. Fitch's first week on the job in 1987, a senior ranger named Harlon Dipmer drove him around the district and pulled the truck over on Forest Road 38, right where it crosses toward Steamboat Creek. Without being asked, Dipmer told Fitch to stay clear of that whole section during the third week of October every year, no exceptions. He didn't explain why. As they pulled away, something in the timber clacked two rocks together twice, sharp and deliberate, like punctuation on the end of a sentence Dipmer had refused to finish. In October 1990, a solo bow hunter named Dwayne Canella vanished from the same drainage after failing to check back in with his wife for two nights. Fitch was part of the four-man crew that found his camp. The compound bow was still strung, leaning against a hemlock with a full quiver of arrows beside it, none of them fired. His boots stood laced outside the tent flap. The sleeping bag had