Ape Canyon

In the summer of 1924, five gold prospectors working a remote claim on the southeastern shoulder of Mount St. Helens came down off that mountain with a story nobody wanted to believe and almost nobody could forget. They claimed that a group of 7-foot, hair-covered creatures had laid siege to their cabin through the night, hurling boulders against the walls, tearing at the chinking between the logs, and reaching a massive arm through a window before the men drove it back with an axe.

The men were Fred Beck, his son George, John Peterson, and 2 unrelated prospectors who shared the surname Smith, Marion and Roy. By the time they reached the little settlement of Cougar, the tale was already taking on a life of its own, and within days the Oregonian ran the headline that would echo for a century, "Ape Men Sought in Mt. St. Helens."

This episode walks the whole thing from the ground up. We lay out the verifiable history first, the daylight sighting across the canyon, the 3 rifle shots Fred Beck swore struck one of the creatures and sent it tumbling into an inaccessible ravine, and the long night that followed back at the cabin.

We cover the Forest Service investigation that came after, when rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch hiked to the site, climbed down into that supposedly unreachable canyon, found no body and no blood, and then demonstrated how those 14-inch tracks could be faked by a man walking in his sock feet and twisting his heel in the soft dirt. Their conclusion was blunt.

The men had probably spooked themselves, maybe seeded a few rocks near the cabin to dress up the tale, and let the dark and the isolation do the rest. And yet, as one writer put it decades later, people still wanted to believe, and the story refused to die.

From there we move past the record and into the cabin itself, into a long-form dramatization built entirely on the facts as the men reported them. We imagine the weight of that first footprint pressed into the earth at dusk, the bar dropping across the door, the first rock hitting the roof just after midnight, and the slow, sickening realization that whatever was outside was working together, testing the walls, learning where the men were weakest. It is a reconstruction, not a transcript, and we are honest about that line.

But every beat of it sits on something Beck himself described.We also follow the story forward in time, through Beck's 1967 booklet "I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens," where an aging man added a strange spiritual dimension to the account, suggesting the creatures could come and go as they pleased and were never entirely of this world. We talk about how the 1924 incident got folded into the Bigfoot phenomenon decades later, after Bluff Creek and the coining of the name itself, and how a narrow gorge on the mountain came to be called Ape Canyon as a permanent marker of the legend.

And we close on the mountain as it stands now, its old cone blown open by the 1980 eruption that buried the cabin site forever, leaving the truth of that summer locked somewhere under the ash. You can take the rangers' side or you can take Beck's. What you cannot do, once you have heard it, is pretend the story doesn't get under your skin. As always, my read is a flesh-and-blood one.

Whatever those men met on that mountain, I don't think it came from another dimension. I think it walked in on 2 legs, and I think it walked back out.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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