Logging Crew Foreman Filmed BIGFOOT Carrying Off His Coworker in Oregon – Sasquatch Encounter

Logging Crew Foreman Filmed BIGFOOT Carrying Off His Coworker in Oregon – Sasquatch Encounter

The Unmapped Hazard and the Thing in the Pipe

On the afternoon of October 14, 1997, a 22-year-old choker setter named Nathan Prior was reported dead on a remote timber unit in Clackamas County, Oregon. The official cause was listed as blunt force trauma from falling timber during yarding operations. The manner of death was accident. Company personnel recovered the body. County search and rescue was never called. The family was advised to hold a closed-casket funeral. The paperwork was finished in under nine hours.

That is the official record. What follows is drawn from a spiral notebook kept by the crew foreman, Dale Merrick, and from a High8 videotape he later gave to his daughter with instructions not to watch it. The notebook begins as an ordinary work log. Somewhere around the third week the handwriting changes. These are the events as Merrick recorded them.

The contract was Unit 40B, forty acres of mixed Douglas fir and hemlock on the eastern slope above the Collawash drainage. It arrived late and it arrived cheap. In the timber business those two facts usually travel together. No one had walked the ground. The office sent a map and a rate and asked how quickly Merrick could put men on it. He took the job. He later wrote that everything that followed started with that decision.

He drove up on a Sunday to look it over. The spur road had been cut properly decades earlier and then left to grow in. Alder as thick as a man’s wrist ran up the middle. At the top sat a landing far larger than the timber volume justified—built for a fleet, not a single crew. On the map, down in the bottom where the ground dropped toward the creek, someone had drawn a freehand shape in pencil, hatched it with diagonal lines, and labeled it in block letters: UNMAPPED HAZARD. NO OPERATIONS. It followed no contour, no stream, no property line. Merrick called the site manager, Ray Kesler, from a pay phone in Ripplebrook. Kesler told him to cut around it and finish the unit. When Merrick pressed for details—contamination, burial ground, unstable slope—Kesler had the answer ready with no pause: “It’s nothing.”

Merrick told the crew the bottom six acres were off-limits. The equipment operator, Jim Sandoval, and the faller, Tom Ruiz, did not care. Nathan Prior, twenty-two and on his first real season, asked why. Merrick said he did not know. Nathan asked again, nine or ten times over the next five weeks. Every time Merrick told him to drop it.

The first anomaly came on the evening of September 11. The crew shut the saws down at five, as they always did. In the sudden quiet something down in the drainage struck a tree—three hard, hollow reports, evenly spaced, then a pause, then three more. It was not a pileated woodpecker. A woodpecker drums. This was a heavy arm swinging and waiting. The next evening it happened again, same time, different location. It continued for nine days, always near five o’clock, never twice from the same place. Merrick marked the positions on his map. The dots formed a rough perimeter around the cut. Whatever was making the sound had walked the outside of the unit eleven times and never once come in.

Then the rocks appeared. Three smooth gray river stones, grapefruit-sized, stacked in a perfect column on the lid of a fuel drum. There is no river rock on that slope—only broken basalt and duff. The nearest source was the creek eleven hundred vertical feet below, inside the hatched area. The stacks kept appearing, moving from the drums to the stumps to the step of the yarder. Nathan photographed them. “Because nobody’s going to believe this,” he said.

On the last day of September, Ruiz fell a forty-inch Douglas fir, bucked it into three logs, and left them for the morning. When the crew returned, the butt log—roughly thirty-eight feet long and weighing between eleven and thirteen thousand pounds—was standing upright, sunk a foot and a half into the duff and leaning into the crotch of two hemlocks. There was a shallow trench leading away from its base, as if something had dragged the butt end before setting it on end. No tracks. No machine marks. Sandoval looked at it for ninety seconds, collected his lunch cooler and jacket, drove off the mountain, and never returned. He never cashed the check Merrick mailed him in November.

Merrick bought a High8 camcorder on October 4. His stated reason was practical: he wanted out of the contract without eating the penalty clause. He filmed the rocks, the standing log, the trench, the drainage. When he watched the footage that night in a motel room in Estacada, the rocks looked like rocks, the log looked like a hung-up widow-maker, the trench looked like a smudge. Everything that was happening on the mountain was only real if you were standing on it. That was the night he got scared.

On October 8, Ruiz found six bent hemlock saplings at the edge of the hatched area. Each had been arched over and its top buried fourteen to nineteen inches into the ground. The wood was not broken; the bark had split along the outside of the curve but the fiber remained intact. Merrick tried the same maneuver on an untouched sapling and it buckled in his hands at two inches. The six formed a horseshoe open downhill. The ground inside was packed hard as a road—older than the saplings themselves. Something had used the spot for years and then, relatively recently, improved it.

Nathan wanted to pull one apart. Merrick grabbed his wrist harder than necessary and told him to leave it. He let the boy photograph them.

The next night Merrick slept on the landing in the crew truck with the camera on the dash. Around ten he heard slow, two-legged footsteps approach from the north. When he shifted inside the cab the footsteps stopped. They started again, crossed the gravel, and the passenger side of the truck settled under weight. Something leaned on the bed rail for fifteen or twenty seconds. Then warm breath fogged a dinner-plate-sized patch on the passenger window, slow and deliberate. Merrick did not turn on the light. He sat with his hands in his lap. When daylight came there was a handprint on the driver’s window: eleven inches from wrist crease to middle fingertip, five and three-quarters across the palm. His own hand measured seven and a half.

He called Kesler again. He reported equipment sabotage, trespass, an operator walking off, an unsafe site, and requested release without penalty. Kesler listened without surprise and asked one question: Had anybody gone into the hatched area? Merrick said no. Kesler told him to keep it that way and finish the unit. When Merrick asked what had happened to the crew that worked the parcel in the 1980s, the line went dead.

Nathan went down into the drainage on his lunch break on October 13. He was gone forty minutes. When he came back he was breathing hard and gripping his disposable camera. Merrick asked what he had seen. Nathan looked at him the way a person looks at someone he has finished with, said, “You told me to drop it,” and went back to work. That night the knocking returned—constant, from at least three positions, answering one another. Ruiz settled his motel bill at four in the morning and was gone.

On the fourteenth it was only Merrick and Nathan. They worked through the day talking about the Blazers and road conditions while something walked the edge of the cut in daylight. Merrick saw it once at mid-morning, roughly a hundred thirty yards out: height somewhere between seven and eight feet, shoulders that sloped from a low forward head, arms that hung past where a man’s arms stop. It did not move when he looked at it. Later Nathan saw it too. Neither man mentioned it.

Sometime after two o’clock Merrick was at the yarder. Nathan was downslope setting chokers alone. There was a sound like a saw kicking but louder, mechanical and not mechanical at once. Nathan’s hard hat rolled up over the lip of the landing. Then a shape came up at a walk—not climbing, walking—holding Nathan under one arm, clamped against its ribs, head down, one boot dragging. It crossed the landing in nine or ten strides and disappeared into the timber at the exact point where the cut met the hatched area. It never looked at Merrick. He stood beside a fuel drum for what he later estimated was twenty minutes, long enough for the yarder to run out of fuel. When he could move he picked up the hard hat and went down into the drainage.

He found the creek, the same smooth river rock that had appeared on the fuel drums, a large area of packed bare ground, bones that were not scattered the way an animal leaves them, and something on a flat rock at the upstream end. The final notebook entry ends mid-sentence. Eleven blank pages follow.

The High8 tape runs forty-one minutes. Roughly nine seconds show a dark bipedal shape crossing the landing at a walk, holding a smaller mass against its right side. Calculations based on the known height of a fuel drum in the same frame place the figure between seven feet two and eight feet one. Everything beyond that is interpretation.

Ray Kesler died in 2009 without ever being asked about the hatched area. The parcel was replanted in 1999 and has not been logged since. The spur was decommissioned in 2003. Nathan Prior’s disposable camera went with the body and was listed among personal effects in Kesler’s handwriting. Diane Prior asked for the film three times. She was told it had been sent for processing, then that it had been damaged. The third letter received no reply. She died in 2019. The photographs, if they were ever developed, have never surfaced.

Dale Merrick spent the rest of his working life maintaining equipment for a school district. He would not enter a forest of any kind, including parks. In 2011 he gave his daughter the notebook and the tape in a grocery bag and told her not to watch it. He died in 2014. She has said he described what he found on that flat rock only once, to a priest in Oregon City in the spring of 1998. The priest asked him to say it a second time. That priest died in 2006. Whatever rested on the rock has been in exactly two men’s heads, and both are now in the ground.

Seven years later and two thousand miles east, another man wrote another statement that would not be published while he lived.

On the morning of March 3, 2004, Wade Corbin, a thirty-eight-year-old road maintenance technician with the Menominee County Road Commission in Michigan, went into Culvert 17 at mile marker 6 on County Road 44. He came out at 9:34. He never went underground again. He quit the commission within a month and spent the last eleven years of his life sleeping with a light on.

The inspection log he filed that afternoon records a complete routine inspection with no deficiencies noted. It is signed in his own hand. Nine years later he gave a nineteen-page written statement to a private researcher on the condition that it remain unpublished during his lifetime. The gap between the log and the statement is the story.

Culvert 17 is a nine-foot corrugated steel arch, eighty feet long, installed in 1961 to drain a seasonal creek that in August a person could step across. The structure is massively oversized. The original construction file notes that it was built that way at the request of the property owner. No property owner is named. The land on both sides was, and remains, state forest. The man who held the route before Corbin, Ed Vosberg, wrote the same three words for Culvert 17 every spring for six years: “Visual from ends.”

In the winter of 2003–2004 the complaints began. Motorists reported an animal standing in the road near mile 6. Deer carcasses that Corbin had dragged into the ditch disappeared without drag marks or tracks in the snow. A long-time plow driver asked to be taken off the route after dark and would not put a reason in writing. Then the smell arrived—wet dog and standing water and something heavier underneath that Corbin had never encountered before or since. He wrote a work order for a full internal inspection and put his own initials in the technician box.

On March 3 the temperature was thirty-eight degrees and overcast. He parked on the north shoulder, walked down to the inlet, and noticed that the smell that had been strong enough to enter a closed cab at forty miles an hour was gone. He turned on his headlamp and went in.

Forty feet in, the expected disc of daylight at the far end was missing. The pipe bent to the right. The as-built drawing showed eighty feet of straight run. The steel was sound, the joints tight. On the floor, under and in the silt, lay layers of bone—mostly deer, split lengthwise along the shaft rather than chewed at the ends. Some were greasy and recent; others were chalky and old. Hair was pressed into the corrugation ridges in a continuous band four feet four inches above the floor on both sides.

Corbin called his position on the radio. Nothing came back, as expected—no repeater coverage. Then something came back: two clicks, a pause, two clicks. He answered, “Go ahead.” The rhythm stopped. The water against his wrists rose slightly for three seconds and subsided. Something eighty feet away had displaced enough volume to reach him.

He backed out. Each time his headlamp swung with the motion of crawling over the ridges, the eyes he had first seen low to the floor reappeared closer, now at the height of the hair band. The thing moved only in the gaps of the light. It did not rush. It managed the distance.

Near the mouth the beam came around and the shape filled the pipe from water to within a foot of the crown, out to the steel on both sides. It was folded on all fours in a way nothing built for four legs folds, shoulders high and bunched, head pushed forward and low. The corrugation flexed under its weight. Coarse dark hair went silver-gray at the edges in the light. The face was wide and flat, the brow a heavy bony shelf, the skin around the eyes bare and weathered. The eyes took the lamp flat, like coins. The mouth was open. Corbin has refused to describe the teeth further.

It never touched him. Warm breath reached his face in the cold pipe. He does not remember the last twenty feet. He remembers daylight, then lying on his back in the ditch at the inlet. Inside the pipe something moved unhurriedly back toward the bend, making a low pulsing sound of three or four notes that he felt through the ground.

He sat in the locked truck for eleven minutes watching both ends of the culvert. Nothing came out. At the yard he wrote “Visual from ends” on the inspection form. He understood exactly what he was doing. He flagged the structure for replacement citing deformation and joint separation—both lies. The steel was sound. It was the only language the commission would act on. The replacement was deferred twice for budget and priorities. In 2008 the culvert was grouted and abandoned in place, both ends sealed with concrete. It is the only structure on that road ever handled that way.

Between 1961 and 2008, four missing-person cases in Menominee County had a last known position within two miles of mile marker 6. None were ever linked. Ed Vosberg died in 2011 without being interviewed. His log books were destroyed in a records purge. Wade Corbin died in 2015 at forty-nine of a heart attack. The researcher who took his statement removed one passage at Corbin’s request and has kept that promise. Corbin’s only comment on the excised material was that he did not want anyone deciding the thing was intelligent.

Two men, two remote places, two sets of official paperwork that say nothing happened. In Oregon a hatched area on a map and a closed casket. In Michigan a nine-foot pipe sealed with concrete and a line of bones no one was meant to see. The notebooks and the statements and the nine seconds of grainy tape remain. The men who wrote them are gone. The ground is still there.

Real or fake, you decide.