Bigfoot Guides Son to Father's 36-Year-Old Disappearance Site

There's a video that recently crossed my feed that I can't stop thinking about. A man named Boyd, now 63 years old, shares the story of his father and two other hunters who vanished into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness back in October of 1986 and never came back out. What makes this account so compelling isn't just the disappearance itself, it's what happened 36 years later when Boyd finally got his answers. The three men, Boyd's father Jean, along with Royce and Lonnie (names changed to protect their families), had hired an outfitter named Dutch Hollandbeck to pack them into a remote spot along White Cap Creek, a tributary of the upper Selway River in what is now the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. For those unfamiliar with this country, it's over a million acres of roadless backcountry straddling the Idaho-Montana border, the kind of place where you can disappear and the forest just swallows the evidence. The Bitterroot Divide forms the state line, and the upper Selway drainage is some of the most rugged, beautiful, and unforgiving terrain in the Lower 48. Boyd was supposed to be on that trip. His dad had even bought his tag money out of his chainsaw repair jar. But Boyd had just started a job with the Ravalli County Road Department three weeks prior, and his foreman wasn't about to give a new hire ten days off for hunting. So Boyd stayed behind, and his father, his uncle by marriage, and their friend Royce rode off into the wilderness on October 3rd, 1986. They were supposed to come out on the 13th. They never did. For 36 years, Boyd went back to that same creek every fall, searching for any trace. A boot. A rifle. A button off his father's coat. Anything. He never found so much as a cigarette butt. Then, two Octobers ago, Boyd went in alone for the first time. On the second morning, he found a rifle cartridge case standing upright on the stump beside his fire ring. The brass had gone green with age. The headstamp read 300 Win Mag, the exact cartridge one of those missing men had been carrying the week they disappeared. Over the next four days, something walked Boyd through what happened to all three of them. Start to finish. Like a foreman walking a new hand through a job. It showed him where the first shot was fired and what that shot hit. It showed him where the first man died, and it used its own hands to demonstrate how it happened. It showed him where the second man went down. And on the last day, it took him to his father. The details Boyd shares about his father paint a picture of a man so vivid you can almost see him. Jean Extramm ran a CAT for a logging contractor, drove a D8 mostly, building roads into timber sales across the Bitterroot and the Lolo. He wasn't a big talker. He'd come home at dark smelling like diesel and pitch, eat whatever his wife put down, and fall asleep in his chair with the newspaper on his chest. On Saturdays, he fixed chainsaws in the garage for beer money. He chewed Copenhagen and spit in a coffee can under the workbench that his wife never once threw out. He hunted for meat first, the walk second, and the horns a distant third. He'd killed an elk every year but two since he was 14. He didn't own a scope until he was 40, and when he finally bought one, he never mounted it. He shot a Winchester Model 70 in .306 with iron sights that he'd bought used from a widow in Corvallis, kept in a canvas case with a broken zipper behind the seat of his truck from September to Thanksgiving. Royce was the loud one, a car salesman in Hamilton, big and generous, the kind who'd buy the whole bar a round and remind you about it for a year. He was also the best rifle shot Boyd had ever seen, carrying a Remington 700 in 300 Win Mag with a scope that cost more than Boyd's first car. He'd been chasing a color-phase black bear for his den for six or seven years, a cinnamon or a chocolate, and every fall he came home without it, the bear in his head getting bigger each time. Lonnie was Royce's brother-in-law, quiet like Boyd's father, worked the green chain at a mill up the valley, carried a Savage in .270 and a red and black wool cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He laughed with his whole body at things nobody else thought were funny. He was 36. He had a four-year-old daughter. The country itself is worth understanding if you want to grasp the weight of this story. White Cap Creek runs into the Selway right at Paradise, which is a Forest Service guard station, campground, and trailhead, and past it there's nothing but wilderness. The drainage is a patchwork of old growth spruce and grand fir along the creek bottom, then up into old burns full of standing gray snags and young lodgepole, then into stringers of subalpine fir that never caught, then into another burn. In the early 1970s, White Cap was one of the first places in the country, maybe the very first, where the Forest Service wrote a plan to let lightning fires burn in the wilderness instead of suppressing them. So the forest there tells a story written by fire. And in October, the sun leaves the bottom of that drainage by 3:00 in the afternoon. What Boyd describes over those four days is something that will stay with anyone who has ever wondered whether the tall ones who share these forests with us are simply animals passing through, or something else entirely. Something that remembers. Something that, after 36 years, decided a man who had been searching for his father long enough deserved to know what happened. The video is long, and Boyd tells it as straight as he can, with the kind of detail that only comes from someone who lived every minute of the waiting and the searching. It's the kind of account that reminds you why people keep going back to these woods year after year, and why some of them come back with stories that don't fit neatly into any box. If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and track it down. It's worth every minute.