Deep in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest, a crew of four friends spends its weekends scanning lake shores with thermal scopes, listening for howls, and walking old logging roads in the dark. Their original mission: find evidence of Bigfoot. What they've ended up building is stranger and more useful — a group whose wilderness skills now help track missing people.
The story starts with a camping trip in July 2020. Kelly Stolp and Mike Palagi, Army buddies who met in 2005, were camped with family near a lake when Stolp woke to a guttural howl and heavy, two-legged footsteps circling his tent. A second round of stomping at 3 a.m. sent two trained military snipers — men who don't rattle easily — to sleep in their trucks. Neither could reproduce the sound by jumping at full body weight the next morning.
When Stolp sheepishly told a coworker back in Portland, that coworker ran with it. Tanner Hoskins, a security guard whose great-grandmother had warned him about 'hidebehinds' in Idaho logging country, quietly built a website for the Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search. Since 2021 it has collected 287 reports — footprints, vocalizations, sightings — including some from loggers and law enforcement who wanted to stay anonymous. Washington leads the country in Bigfoot reports, with over 700 logged by the Bigfoot Field Research Organization.
The group is unusual: half its members don't believe in Bigfoot. Palagi, the resident skeptic, blames the 2020 encounter on 'a deer pouncing' with a bullfrog on its back. Even Hoskins says he's only 80 percent convinced. Still, the four — Hoskins, Stolp, Palagi and Alberto Quinones — head into the field every month or two, and their reporting network and backcountry know-how evolved into the Pacific Northwest Missing Persons Project, applying their search skills to cold cases in the woods.
For travellers, the story is a window into a genuine subculture and a genuinely wild corner of the Pacific Northwest. The crew operates around Mount Adams in a 1.3-million-acre forest of towering firs, dispersed campsites and rutted logging roads where you can be 47 miles from a gas station — the kind of place you'd go, as the writer put it, if you never wanted to be found. Bigfoot has become big business too, with podcasts, conferences, a themed cruise and nearly 300,000 members on Reddit. Whether or not Sasquatch is out there, the hunt itself is a fun, offbeat reason to explore one of Washington's least crowded forests. — Outside Online
