Sasquatch Chronicles Blog

A listener writes “I’m originally from Iowa but I’ve lived in the PNW for the better part of the last ten years, and I’m currently in Portland. I did live in Olympia for a few years in my early twenties, too. I’m 31 now, and since I was 21 I’ve gotten pretty into backpacking.

My buddy who’s also from Iowa and helped me move out here back then was hyped on the idea of backpacking and we sort of learned to do it together by winging it out in various trails in the Olympic Peninsula. Since then, I’ve done a ton of trails up in the Peninsula, as well as a few places in the Mt. Hood National Forest. Last summer, my backpacking buddy (who lives in Tacoma these days) was getting into class 3 scramble routes up in the North Cascades.

I had never done one before, nor had I ever backpacked up there, just driven through many times. He asked me if I wanted to try out Kaleetan Peak with his climbing buddies and then sleep on Melakwa Lake, which is still at least six miles or so from the parking lot, but five miles from the ascent so it’s an eleven mile approach. I said heck yeah and hopped on the Amtrak that Friday to go up and meet them.

We headed to the trailhead first thing in the morning on August 10th, 2024.At this point in my life, I had never experienced anything that strange in the woods other than once in the Peninsula in 2020 I woke up under our tarp in the rain (we always cowboy camp) seven miles down the Skokomish River at around 4am as though I’d heard something snap a twig or something, and when I looked into the darkness I saw a sort of “vision” or flash in my mind’s eye of a strange one-eyed potato-shape being looking at me. It was odd and felt like something was saying hello or something, but I just shrugged it off and tried to go back to sleep.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about contacting you about what I saw at Kaleetan for a while now and I just listened to the Round Butte story tonight while cooking dinner and decided to finally contact you. My story is nowhere near that intense, but I did see the same kind of orbs in the back country from Lake Melakwa. If you decide to talk to me about this one, it might be on the shorter side and I can share more detail. But basically, we made camp at Melakwa and took lighter packs up to summit Kaleetan. On the way up, one of our crew of five, plus a dog, had one of those single-lens binoculars.

We all passed it around and looked at people summiting what I think was Chair Peak across the way. When it was my turn, I saw two people on the peak, and they looked like little ants even through the binocular. But I could see them taking selfies and stuff like that. I then looked over at the next peak over, not very far to the left on the same ridgeline. That’s when I saw someone summit that one too right in that moment as I looked at it. I even yelled out, “oh wow there’s someone summiting the next peak too!” My friends thought that was cool and I took the binocular down to point out the peak to everyone.

Then I looked back through the binocular I noticed the person seemed like, really tall. That’s all the detail I made out though because right then, it looked like the person just jumped off. Like a huge leap off the other side of the mountain. No one I was with seemed to care really except for me saying that seeming weird (none of them are into thinking about the unknown really either, just rational explorers).Anyway so I had a weird feeling about that the rest of the day but we summited Kaleetan which was awesome, and got back down to our site before dark.

That night we were pretty excited because it was the night of the Perseids Meteor Shower. The three of us and the dog who stayed the night cowboy camped on the ground, and I had a dome tent posted up which we used to store our gear and hold the spot during the summit, but I set up my spot right on the ground in front of it. I could see Chair Peak and the other peak with the figure from where I was laying as well as the ridge line past it. Basically, after dark we were waiting for meteors to start and my friend’s dog started wigging out, like she was freaked out by something. Her owner thought that was super odd since she’s been a backcountry dog her whole life and took her for a walk.

I thought I had seen some lights up on the other ridgeline, the one behind Chair Peak, but my buddy and I determined it was a rising star creating the illusion of movement in the trees. We had seen a couple baby meteors by this time, but about two minutes after we debunked the lights in the trees, we saw a ripper of a meteor cut across the whole sky. Immediately after that I looked back at where I thought there had been lights and there were two huge and extremely bright white orbs of light suspended in parallel right above the ridge line, right where that star we had debunked had just been. As I looked at them and realized what they were, they both started moving in unison upwards and that freaked me out. So I yelled at my buddy and he looked at them upside down since he was laying the other way. But he confirmed he saw them and we both watched them stop and hover, then symmetrically sort of arced away from each other and went back behind the ridgeline. That’s all I saw but it definitely shook me being that far in the backcountry. It eerily felt like they were showing themselves to me specifically. I felt helpless because they seemed so close and we were so far away from the car and it’s super unsafe to hike in the dark with cougars and all that.”