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Bigfoot in Washington: Ape Canyon, Skamania County and the Making of a Legend

No state is more closely tied to Bigfoot than Washington. Sasquatch shows up on bumper stickers, brewery labels and highway souvenir stands from the Columbia Gorge to the Canadian border, and one county made it illegal to kill one. This article doesn’t try to settle whether the creature exists. What it can do is trace the paper trail, the newspaper stories, ordinances and admissions that turned a regional legend into a national one. Most of the key dates can be checked, and they’re more interesting than most of the sightings.

Before “Bigfoot”: the word sasquatch

The older of the two names came from Canada. Sasquatch is generally treated as an anglicized form of sásq’ets, a word from Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language of the lower Fraser River in British Columbia, usually glossed as “wild man” or “hairy man.” It reached a general readership through J. W. Burns, who worked with the Chehalis band (today the Sts’ailes First Nation) and collected their accounts for an article in Maclean’s magazine, published on April 1, 1929.

That Indigenous source deserves a careful note. Stories of hairy giants and wild people of the woods appear in many Indigenous traditions across the Northwest, and they are not one story. They belong to particular nations and carry meanings, spiritual and otherwise, that the modern cryptid doesn’t. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes, for example, that the Sts’ailes people describe a close bond with sásq’ets and a being able to move between the physical and spiritual worlds. This article is about the twentieth-century American legend, which borrowed the word but built something different.

July 1924: the battle at Ape Canyon

The story that launched the Washington legend comes from the east flank of Mount St. Helens. In July 1924, five prospectors, Fred Beck, Gabe Lefever, John Peterson, Marion Smith and Smith’s son Roy, came out of the woods near Spirit Lake with an alarming account, which The Oregonian reported. They said they had seen several huge, hairy “apemen” near their mining cabin, and that one of the party had shot at one, which fell into a gorge. That night, they said, the creatures bombarded the cabin with rocks until dawn, and one stone knocked Beck unconscious.

The story caused a local sensation, and the U.S. Forest Service sent rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch to look. According to The Oregonian’s coverage, one of them climbed down into the supposedly inaccessible canyon and found nothing. The rangers concluded the large stones had probably been placed by the miners themselves, and Huffman showed a reporter how the 14-inch “footprints” could be made with a knuckle and the palm of a hand.

None of that slowed the story down. The gorge has been called Ape Canyon ever since, and the name is on today’s maps and on a trail beside it. In 1967 Beck’s son, R. A. Beck, published a short booklet in his father’s name, I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens, which put the 1924 story back in circulation just as interest in Bigfoot was peaking.

The 1924 coverage also recorded that the creatures weren’t news to everyone. The Oregonian quoted a Cowlitz man, Frank Wannassay, on tall, hairy beings that elders had described, which traveled only at night and which he insisted were harmless.

1958: a newspaper names Bigfoot

The name Bigfoot came from just south of the region, in Northern California. In August 1958, Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator on a logging-road job at Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, found huge humanlike footprints around his equipment. The Humboldt Times in Eureka ran the story on its front page, and columnist Andrew Genzoli’s coverage popularized the name the road crew had been using: Bigfoot. Wire services picked it up and the word went national.

The road job belonged to Wallace Construction, run by Ray L. Wallace, who later settled in Toledo, Lewis County, Washington. When Wallace died in a Centralia nursing facility in November 2002, his family told The Seattle Times that he had made the 1958 tracks as a prank, with carved alder-wood feet that a nephew said he still had. Researchers who believe in Bigfoot disputed this, and the argument has never been settled.

1967: two men from Yakima and a film

The best-known piece of Bigfoot evidence also has a Washington connection. On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, two horsemen from the Yakima area, filmed a large, dark, upright figure walking away from them across a creek bed at Bluff Creek. The roughly minute-long film has been analyzed, defended and called a man in a suit for more than half a century. It has never been conclusively explained either way, which is exactly why people still argue about it.

1969: Skamania County makes it a crime

The most famous Washington Bigfoot document is a county ordinance. On April 1, 1969, the Skamania County Board of Commissioners adopted Ordinance No. 69-01, which made the “premeditated, willful and wanton” killing of a Sasquatch a felony punishable by a fine of up to $10,000, up to five years in the county jail, or both. The April Fool’s Day date has made people assume it was a joke, but the ordinance was real, and Skamania County is the county that contains Mount St. Helens and Ape Canyon. The ordinance’s own preamble explains the worry: the legend had brought “an influx of scientific investigators as well as casual hunters, many armed with lethal weapons,” which posed a threat to people in the county “as well as to the creatures themselves.”

In 1984 the county replaced it with Ordinance No. 1984-02, which made the whole county a Sasquatch refuge and reduced the offense to a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year in jail, or both. Neither ordinance was ever codified, and the county’s ordinance index still lists both.

Whatcom County followed in 1992 with a resolution declaring itself a “Sasquatch protection and refuge area,” requested by a local chamber of commerce. It has no penalties, which tells you something about how the legend had changed by then. It had become a regional mascot.

Why Washington?

Several things came together here. The state has huge areas of dense, wet, roadless forest where a large animal could plausibly go unseen and a hiker can easily feel watched. The logging economy put road crews, prospectors and timber cruisers into remote country, which is where the early stories come from. And there was a press that loved the subject: The Oregonian covered Ape Canyon closely in 1924, and Northwest papers returned to it for decades.

There’s also the plain fact that a good story feeds itself. Once Ape Canyon had a name and Bigfoot had a headline, every strange print and every unexplained crash in the brush had a ready-made explanation. Folklorists would call that a legend doing what legends do.

Bigfoot on Daily Creepypasta

The site doesn’t have a Bigfoot story, but several originals draw on the same feeling of being out in very big country and not quite alone. Thermal follows a wildlife surveyor counting elk from a helicopter over the Idaho backcountry, whose thermal camera picks up a circle of shapes that aren’t elk. Next Row Over is about a great-aunt’s huckleberry-picking rules in the Washington Cascades, and the voice that calls from the next row. Unsigned Turnout takes place on the North Cascades Highway while it’s closed for the spring snow clearing. For everything set in the region, see the Pacific Northwest tag.

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