Giant Hairy Apes in the North Woods: A Bigfoot Study
Believers theorize that he came down from Mt. Hood, the 14,000-foot blizzard-shrouded peak just outside Portland, Oregon. Massive, standing nearly nine feet tall and weighing all of 900 pounds, he strode down the wooded ridges, north and east to the 7,000-foot level where the spring snow lay wet and heavy in forests 50 miles from the nearest road. At the 4,000-foot level, the thick coniferous forests thinned and the deep mountain gorges leveled out. It was late June, 1971, and the lower rivers raged with the waters of the melting snow pack.
At the 3,000-foot level the first growths of douglas fir and oak gave way to a few scrub oak, growing singly. From a high point on the ridge that runs down from Mt. Hood called Seven Mile Hill, he could see the lights of The Dalles, Oregon, where 11,000 people lived.
Fifteen miles upriver the Wy-am Indians, roped to their platforms perched over the boiling river, netted spring chinook salmon by the hundreds with their long poles. This they had done every spring since prehistory. The Great Food is what the Wy-am call salmon; and perhaps he had come down to the semi-arid insecurity of The Dalles to scramble on the banks of the river for the Great Food during one of the largest salmon runs on the North American Continent. Some who theorize about him think that he came down to this narrow point in the river where there is little current because an island breaks the swim to Washington and the Cascade Range—where the deer and huckleberries are plentiful in the summer.
East the land opens to treeless rolling hills. Great high-tension towers converge on the Chenowith Converter and scar the land as far as the eye can see. There was no cover for him there. But to swim the river from here, four miles west of The Dalles, he had only to cross two roads: the old highway to Portland, US 30, and the new Interstate, 80N.
Things had changed since he had last been down to the river. There was an aluminum plant nearby, a new shopping center, a Rocket gas station, a new and used car lot, and—strangest of all for him during the nights—The Dalles drive-in which specializes in films like Deathmaster and The Two-Headed Thing. In the early daylight hours of this first day of June, 1971, he stood in a small meadow above what had been a large foothill apple orchard. It was now filled with flat electrified platforms and called The Pinewood Mobile Manor.
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Joe Mederios, maintenance man for the trailer court, was watering flowers near his trailer that morning. Directly across US 30 is a large fenced meadow. At about 150 yards a rocky ledge of perhaps 35 feet banks a higher meadow. Mederios caught a movement along the ledge from a corner of his eye. He assumed it was George Johnson, the owner of the land, and went back to watering his flowers. But his mind was engaged in a curious and unconscious arithmetic. He had seen Johnson on the land previously—it wasn’t unusual—but this figure was too big … the arms were too long … the shoulders too broad.
Mederios turned to the ridge for a longer look. What he saw was a shaggy, gray figure he took to be at least ten feet tall. It had an oval face and a crest or dorsal ridge along the top of its head. The face was flat, brown and hairless.
The man turned back to his flowers and considered his situation. He was responsible to some Portland businessmen who would be down to The Dalles the next day. If he were to report the sighting, there would be deputies and curiosity-seekers tromping all over his carefully watered flowers about the time his bosses arrived. Mederios later told Sheriff’s deputy Rich Carlson that he didn’t report the incident for fear he’d “be called a nut.”
The next day, around noon, the three businessmen met Mederios and were in the midst of discussions in a trailer office fronting the meadow when Mederios again saw an erect ape-like figure through a window. The four men ran outside and watched from across the road as it moved through a break in the ridge and came into the lower meadow where it walked among the sparse scrub oak near the rocks. It stopped near a small tree, and from where the men stood, it appeared to be somewhat taller than the tree. The four men and the other creature stared at one another for perhaps a minute, before it turned, went up through the break in the rocks and disappeared into the upper meadow.
This time the sighting was reported and deputy Carlson went out to investigate.
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