Trail Camera Captures Elderly Bigfoot Raising Hand to Lens
Posted Saturday, October 03, 2026
By Squatchable.com staff
A trail camera photograph captured in the western Cascades of Oregon back in 2018 is making waves again, and for good reason. The image shows what appears to be an extraordinarily aged Sasquatch, and according to a retired forest ranger, that same face has shown up in records going back decades.
The story comes from a forest biologist named Tessa, who had been running a standard wildlife survey in late October 2018. She wasn't out hunting for cryptids. Her job was to assess whether a proposed management road would cut through important corridors used by deer, bears, and large predators. Twelve cameras had been placed along game trails and old growth sections, and for nearly three weeks, the data came back exactly as expected. Black-tailed deer at dawn. Black bears near berry thickets. A mountain lion on camera seven.
Then came the final camera, mounted beside a Douglas fir so massive that two adults would have struggled to reach around the trunk together. When Tessa pulled the memory card and started reviewing the files at the temporary field station, she noticed a large shape entering the right side of the frame. What followed was a sequence of images that stopped her cold.
The creature turned toward the camera, stepped closer, and then leaned directly into the lens. One enormous hand reached forward, palm and fingertips blown out by the flash. The face that filled the frame was deeply wrinkled, with brown eyes that looked slightly cloudy, heavy folds around the lids, and gray-white hair around the cheeks, chin, and neck. The forehead had thinned enough to expose deeply lined skin. Tessa estimated the creature stood more than eight feet tall based on the Douglas fir trunk and the camera's mounting height.
Two identifying marks stood out. A small section was missing from the outer rim of the right ear, as if torn away long ago and healed over. And an old split ran down the right side of the nose toward the nostril, with lighter skin in the scar tissue. Those features were distinctive enough that Tessa felt confident she could recognize them again in any future image.
What makes this case particularly compelling is what happened next. Tessa took the clearest photographs to Calvin, a 68-year-old retired ranger who had spent more than 35 years working the same western Cascades region. Calvin wasn't known for telling Bigfoot stories. Most of their conversations over the years had been about fallen trees, old wildfires, and roads that had vanished from modern maps. But when he studied the close-up image at his kitchen table, his silence stretched on far longer than Tessa expected. He pointed toward the scar on the nose without touching the photograph and asked which ridge the camera had been on.
His first words had nothing to do with whether the image was real. He simply said, "I've seen this face before." Not in the forest. In a file. Years earlier, he had helped move boxes of old records, and somewhere in that paperwork, the same distinctive features had appeared.
The western Cascades have long been considered prime Sasquatch territory. The old growth forests there provide exactly the kind of dense canopy, water sources, and secluded corridors that these beings are reported to favor. Stories of multi-generational encounters, where the same individual is recognized across decades, are not uncommon in Indigenous oral traditions throughout the Pacific Northwest. Some researchers have suggested that Sasquatch populations may have lifespans far exceeding our own, which would explain why the same face could appear in records spanning generations.
Tessa did her due diligence. She checked the metadata, timestamps, battery levels, and sequence numbers. Everything matched. She returned to the site the next morning and found the camera still locked in place, a streak of mud on the housing where the hand had reached forward, and compressed leaf litter beneath the tree. A single clear footprint lay several feet away, far longer than any human track and wide across the front. No fresh bootprints led from the forest road.
Whether this represents a single Sasquatch that has been roaming these slopes for well over a century, or something else entirely, the photograph raises questions that deserve serious consideration. The video covering this case goes into much greater detail about the sequence of images, the field investigation, and Calvin's reaction, and it is well worth watching for anyone interested in historical evidence and photographic documentation.
The Cascades keep their secrets well, but every now and then, a camera catches something that refuses to be explained away.