Climers Film Bigfoot Digging Up Buried Gear on Avalanche Slope

Posted Wednesday, September 30, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

There's something about old camcorder footage that hits differently. The grain, the weight of the camera in someone's hands, the way the person behind it is clearly just trying to keep the shot steady while their brain is processing something impossible. That's exactly the energy coming through in this clip that surfaced over on the Bigfoot Sasquatch Stories channel. The footage supposedly dates back to 1994, shot by a climber named Peter Caldwell who only meant to document avalanche damage on a mountainside. He had no idea his 8mm camcorder was about to capture something that would haunt researchers for decades. Here's what makes this one stand out from the usual tree-shaker clips. The setting is a freshly torn-up avalanche zone, the kind of unstable terrain most people would avoid at all costs. Peter's four-person climbing team had stopped on a rock rib specifically because the slope above them was still dangerous. Joel Hamrich, one of the climbers, had already pointed out a fracture line where more snow could let loose at any moment. They were planning their route around the slide path when Peter panned his camera toward the upper tree line and froze. A reddish-brown figure stepped out of the pines. Tall, broad, thick fur from shoulders to legs with a darker face. Old snow clung to its forearms and back. It stood at the edge of the avalanche zone for nearly twenty seconds, head tilted along the angle of the slope, almost like it was reading the terrain. Then it walked straight into the debris field the climbers had just decided to avoid. What happens next is what really got me. The creature moves diagonally downhill for about a hundred yards, picking its way carefully across compacted snow blocks, lowering its center of gravity on steeper sections. It holds a consistent line through broken trees and debris, avoiding larger snow blocks and fallen trunks with only minor adjustments. This isn't stumbling around. This is deliberate navigation through unstable ground. Then it stops. On a patch of snow that looks completely ordinary. No landmark, no visible feature, nothing that would tell a person this spot was any different from the rest of the slope. The creature circles once, returns almost exactly to where it started, drops to its knees, and starts digging with both hands. Eight minutes of digging. Peter is holding the camera steady while his arms are shaking. The hole stays narrow, growing deeper instead of wider. Snow piles up across the creature's shoulders and chest. Then Mara spots it. A patch of blue in the white and gray. The creature pulls out a faded strip of nylon, tosses it aside, and keeps digging right next to where the material appeared. The blue nylon was the remains of a shelter that had been buried under that slope for months. The avalanche had completely transformed the surface of the mountain, erasing every trace of what had been there before. Yet the creature walked straight to that exact location and started digging with the confidence of someone who already knew what was underneath. The avalanche awareness shown by the creature is another layer that makes this footage so compelling. When a low cracking sound moves through the snow, the creature reacts almost simultaneously with Joel. It stops digging, looks uphill, and moves quickly to a rock island exposed through the snow. It stands there watching the slope, its attention fixed on the fracture line and the area around the hole, not on the four humans watching from the rock rib. After several minutes with no further movement, it steps off the rocks and returns to the exact same spot to continue. Researchers have long documented that Sasquatch appear to possess an intimate knowledge of their territory, often far exceeding what any human map could provide. Stories from Indigenous traditions across the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, and beyond consistently describe these beings as caretakers of the land who remember places across seasons, even across years. The idea that a Sasquatch could remember the location of a shelter buried under an avalanche, and then walk directly to it after the entire mountainside had been rearranged by the slide, fits perfectly within that broader body of testimony. Peter kept the camera rolling through all of it. The zoom stays moderate enough that you can still see the surrounding terrain, which gives the footage a real sense of scale and distance. You can judge for yourself how tall the figure is, how it moves, how it reacts to the shifting snow above. That's the kind of documentation that matters. Whoever was behind that camcorder understood, even in the moment, that context was everything. This one is worth your time. The full clip goes into more detail about the team's reactions, the tension of waiting on that rock rib while the slope settled, and the moment they realized the creature had chosen that spot before it ever started digging. Go give it a watch and see what you make of it.