I didn’t want this to be a sasquatch encounter story. For the first two weeks, I thought it was a prank. Somebody on the crew messing with the new guy. That’s what trail crews do. But nobody on our crew could have built those stacks, and by the end, none of us were laughing. We were following them.
In the summer of 2018, I was twenty-two and working my first season on a backcountry trail crew in the North Cascades of Washington. Five of us. We’d hike in with heavy packs and stay out for eight days at a time, rebuilding washed-out trail, cutting logs, setting stone steps. Our crew lead was a woman named Robin who’d been doing it for eleven years. The rest of us were college kids.
The First Stack
We were camped by a creek in a high valley, about twelve miles from the nearest road. Old cedars, huge ferns, a big talus slope on one side. On the first morning, there was a rock stack on the trail just outside camp. Five flat river stones balanced on top of each other, about knee high. Hikers build them all the time. Robin knocked it over. She said cairns on a maintained trail confuse people. Leave no trace.
The next morning, there was another one. Same spot. Taller. Seven stones this time, and the top one was huge. A flat slab of granite that must have weighed eighty pounds. It was balanced perfectly on a stone the size of a softball.
Robin asked who did it. Nobody had. She looked at each of us for a long time. Then she knocked it over too, and it took two of us to move the top stone off the trail.
A Sasquatch Encounter Story Needs Witnesses
Every morning for six days, there was a new stack. They got bigger. And they started to point. Not just one stack. A line of them, a few hundred yards apart, leading off the trail and up the valley toward a notch in the ridge. Places none of us had been.
One night, our youngest guy, a kid named Marco, took first watch with a headlamp because he was sure it was one of us. Around two in the morning, he woke me up. He was white. He said he’d heard rocks clacking down by the creek. He’d turned his headlamp toward the sound and seen something crouched at the water’s edge, picking up stones one at a time and turning them over in its hands. Like it was choosing.
He said it was huge. Dark. Covered in hair. When the light hit it, it stood up. He said it kept standing up for a long time. He said it was taller than the tent was long. Then it turned and walked into the cedars. It didn’t run. It just walked away, slowly, holding a rock in each hand.
In the morning, there were footprints in the sand by the creek. Seventeen inches long. Five toes. We measured with a tape. And there was a new stack right next to Marco’s tent. Nine stones. The top one was a flat rock with a smear of red on it. Old red. Like paint.
What Robin Decided
We had a satellite messenger for emergencies. Robin could have called for a helicopter. She didn’t. She sat by the creek for a long time with her coffee, looking at the line of stacks going up the valley. Then she said, “It’s showing us something.”
We argued about it. Two of the guys wanted to hike out. Robin said she was going to follow the stacks, and anyone who wanted to come could come. We all went. Nobody wanted to be the one left at camp.
The stacks led three miles up the valley, through brush and over deadfall, to a little bench of flat ground under a rock overhang near the ridge. There was an old campsite there. A rusted stove. A tent so rotted it was just green rags on aluminum poles. And a backpack, an old external-frame pack, faded orange, with a sleeping bag still strapped to it.
Inside the top pocket was a wallet. A Washington driver’s license from 1994. A man named Gary Lindell, age forty-one. Robin had heard the name. A solo hiker who’d gone missing in these mountains in September 1995. They searched for weeks. They never found him.
The red smear on the rock by Marco’s tent was the same faded orange as his pack.
The Last Stack
Robin called it in on the satellite messenger. A ranger and a recovery team came in by helicopter two days later. They found Gary’s remains a little way beyond the campsite, at the bottom of a short cliff. A fall, they said. His family finally got to bury him.
On the morning the helicopter came, I walked down to the creek alone to fill the water bags. Across the creek, at the edge of the cedars, maybe sixty yards away, something was standing. Watching. Eight feet tall, maybe more. Dark brown hair, long arms. Its face was in shadow. It didn’t move. Neither did I. I don’t know how long we stood there.
Then it bent down, picked up one stone from the creek, and set it on top of the last stack, the one by our camp. Very gently. Like it was finishing something. Then it walked back into the trees.
People share real life scary stories about Bigfoot all the time. Screams in the night, rocks thrown at tents, scary things in real life that chase hikers off mountains. Popular horror stories need the monster to want something terrible. Ours wanted something found. Robin still guides out there. She told me she leaves one stone on top of that stack every season. My sasquatch encounter story is the only one I know that ends with a thank you.
Have you found something in the woods you weren’t meant to see?
Hikers, trail workers and backcountry campers, share your sasquatch encounter story in the comments.
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