Logger's 41-Second Footage Shows Bigfoot Carrying Missing Partner

Forty-one seconds. That's all the footage amounts to. Forty-one seconds shot on a battered Sony HandyCam back in October of 1996, sitting in a gun safe in a basement for nearly three decades, shown to exactly three people. And now, finally, it's out there. A video surfaced recently from the YouTube channels The Forest Sentinel and The Deep Forest Tales that tells the story of Dave Griffin, a faller who spent 26 years cutting timber in the Clearwater country of North Idaho. In the fall of 1996, Dave was 36 years old and working a contract sale way up the North Fork of the Clearwater River, deep in country that has more elk than people. His logging partner was a man named Rich Coleman, 52 years old, the best faller Dave had ever seen, a quiet man who had been teaching Dave the trade for 12 years. The video describes a chain of strange events that started the second week of October. Lunch buckets opened with lids set neatly beside them, untouched except for the missing food. Then Dave found the tracks across a muddy skid trail, barefoot prints about 16 inches long, five toes, sunk deeper into the mud than his 190-pound boots. Rich looked at those prints a long time, put his hand down beside one, and told Dave to leave it be. Rich's grandfather had worked out of Headquarters back in the 1930s when it was a company town, and the old-timers had stories about the high country up the North Fork. The rule in those camps, Rich said, was simple: if something took your lunch, you brought a bigger lunch. Then the knocking started. One hard crack like an axe handle hitting a dead tree, then two more, sometimes answered from far off across the drainage. Gerald, the crew owner, went out one night with a flashlight to investigate when the knocking came close to the trailers. He came back in five minutes and never said what he saw. He locked his trailer door that night, something Dave had never known him to do. Rich would lie in his bunk and listen. One night Dave heard him say very quietly into the dark, "Evening, neighbor." On Thursday, October 17th, the weather turned bad. Rich walked off into the timber to flag a boundary for a new unit and didn't come back. The snow came down heavy and wet. Search and rescue showed up Friday morning with a dog, but the fog was so thick a helicopter out of Lewiston couldn't even fly. They tracked Rich's scent to the head of a steep, brushy draw full of cedar and devil's club and lost him there. At 2 AM that Friday morning, Dave sat in the trailer listening to the snow on the roof and heard the knocking out in the timber to the east, the direction Rich had gone. Three knocks, then quiet, then very far off, three more. Then came the morning of October 19th. The fog was so thick Dave could barely see the tree line. He was holding his camcorder, hands shaking, and a figure about eight feet tall walked out of that fog, upright, carrying a grown man in its arms. It crossed the landing, laid Rich down next to the burn barrel where the coals were still warm, straightened up, and looked at Dave. The video describes what happened next in Dave's own words, and it's the kind of account that sticks with you. Whatever walked out of that fog that morning had been out there for two nights with Rich in the snow. Whatever it was, it brought him back to the one place where there was warmth and someone waiting. The Clearwater region of North Idaho is exactly the kind of country where these encounters keep surfacing. Old-growth cedar, grand fir, and western white pine, the kind of remote, roadless drainage that a large, intelligent, forest-dwelling being could move through without ever being seen if it wanted to be. The North Fork has been part of Sasquatch country in local lore for generations, long before the term "Bigfoot" was even coined. The stories from the old logging camps, the company towns, the trappers and the fallers, they all carry the same thread. Something lives up there. Something that knows the trails better than the people who think they own them. What makes this footage different is the camcorder. Dave wasn't trying to prove anything that morning. He was filming because he wanted his nine-year-old daughter Jessica in Boise to see what her dad did for a living. He filmed the big trees coming down, the skidder dragging logs up the hill, elk crossing the road in the morning. He had no reason to think he was about to capture 41 seconds that would sit in a gun safe for almost 30 years. Forty-one seconds. A figure, a man in its arms, a burn barrel, the fog. That's all that's on that tape. The video goes into much more detail about what Dave saw, what Rich remembered when he came around, and what happened in the days after. It's worth every minute of your time. Head over to The Forest Sentinel or The Deep Forest Tales on YouTube and give it a watch. Stories like this one are why the woods still feel the way they do at first light.