Two men who set out on a quest of find bigfoot in the remote forests of Washington state over Christmas were found dead after an intense three-day search. They likely died of exposure, search and rescue officials said.
The bodies of the men, ages 37 and 59, were found Saturday after a three-day search in a remote area of Skamania County, Washington, according to the county sheriff’s office.
As of Tuesday, authorities hadn’t released the names of the men, who were from Portland, Oregon.
The loss suffered by the men’s families is even more devastating because they died looking for something that probably doesn’t exist, a Wyoming archeologist said. It’s a tragic example of what can happen when people don’t believe when science disproves certain conspiracies or beliefs.
“People have so convinced themselves that there’s something out there, but logic rules that there’s nothing out there,” retired University of Wyoming archeology professor Robert Kelly told Cowboy State Daily.
“It’s just sad that people died chasing something that isn’t there,” he said.
Bigfoot Believers
Kelly is unconvinced that there’s any such thing as bigfoot or Sasquatch.
But many people think the creatures — described as a huge, hairy primates that walk upright — are out there somewhere.
Shannon and Stetson Parker of Cheyenne swear they saw a Sasquatch during a train ride in Colorado in October 2023.
They told Cowboy State Daily at the time that they watched the towering creature take a few strides across a mountainside before sitting down, while another passenger took cellphone video of it. The video appears to show what the couple described, but the images are blurry far away.
The couple also said that a video taken in the Utah Mountains in February 2024 reportedly showing a bigfoot running through the snow at seemingly impossible speed seems legitimate.
There have been reported Sasquatch sightings all across the United States and Canada for decades. The dense forests in Washington’s rugged Cascade-Sierra mountains are said to be bigfoot’s favorite hangout with the most reported sightings.
It makes sense that the men, as believers, would have gone there in hopes of being the ones to prove once and for all that Sasquatch is real.
Winter Is A Dangerous Time To Go Out
A family member reported the men missing and endangered at about 1 a.m. on Christmas Day after they failed to return home to Portland from their Sasquatch hunt as scheduled, the Skamania County Sheriff’s Office reports.
With almost no details available about how the men became lost and died, Kelly said it’s impossible to say exactly what went wrong.
It’s likely they were unprepared for the weather, particularly if it changed while they were out looking for Bigfoot, he said.
That also was the preliminary conclusion by the search and rescue teams.
“Both deaths appear to be due to exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness,” the SCSO reports.
“The real problem is weather,” added Kelly. “That’s probably what caught these guys, and I think that’s what catches most people.”
During his career, Kelly spent time at remote archeology research and dig sites across the Western U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
He never ventured out without such things as waterproof cold-weather clothing and fire-starting materials.
“Even in July or August, if you’re up high in the mountains, man, the weather can turn really quickly,” he said.
Kelly has been in the Sierra Mountains, but never during winter.
And even though he’s an avid snowshoer, he said going out anywhere during the winter can be dicey.
“I don’t know what they (the bigfoot hunters) were doing back in the mountains in December,” he said. “Good grief, that’s not a good sign.”
Myths And Monsters
Kelly said that after his own career and all those years working alongside other experts, his disbelief in bigfoot boils down to a lack of evidence.
“Every piece of evidence that’s ever been cited kind of mysteriously disappears every time somebody wants to see it,” he said.
He also thinks it’s impossible that a breeding population of 8-foot-tall man-apes could be stomping around North America without ever leaving any bones behind.
Archeology digs have turned up the bones of every species in North America — living or extinct, he said.
“From my professional perspective, I know that paleontologists and archeologists have excavated all sorts of bones,” he said. “That’s a huge sample of dead animals. We’ve got everything from ground squirrels to mammoths, and nobody has ever found a single primate bone that wasn’t human.”
He said that everywhere he went in the world, there were stories of mythical creatures that nobody could find.
In Madagascar, for example, there are tales of Haku, which are sort of the polar opposite of Sasquatch.
“In this case, they’re like little people and they live in little holes in the ground, and they can run across the landscape without leaving footprints,” Kelly said. “These kinds of ideas are everywhere in the world. That there is something out in the forest, and it’s mysterious and rare.”
Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com
Still image from a video a Cheyenne couple says they believe is a bigfoot taken during a train ride in Colorado in October 2023. (Courtesy Photo) 
In a long-range, shaky and blurry video, a figure that appears to be on two legs sprints across a steep snowy slope in Utah. (Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization via Facebook)
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
