The 1.3-million-acre Gifford Pinchot National Forest is wild country. In the shadow of Mount Adams, the southern Washington wilderness is home to elk, bears and cougars. And many legends.
Kelly Stolp, 45, is an avid outdoorsman and Army veteran who grew up in rural Montana and now works as an electrician outside Vancouver. He served eight years in the infantry. When his youngest son was scared at night, Stolp convinced him not to fear the dark because monsters were scared of Daddy.
But after his experiences in these woods, he said, “I’m not the scariest thing in the dark anymore.”
Stolp doesn’t say the word much — he knows how it sounds — but there’s no denying what he’s out here searching for. It’s the mysterious thing that he sensed in his campsite four years ago, and that hasn’t left his mind since.
He’s after Bigfoot.
His friend Tanner Hoskins, 31, of Gales Creek, often joins him on these trips. Hoskins is certainly interested in Sasquatch, but he’s also scanning the woods for bones and bits of clothing — anything that could offer clues about the handful of people who walked into this forest and never walked out.
Before they hike into the backcountry, Hoskins pulls himself into the bed of Stolp’s Dodge Ram 2500 and removes his titanium leg. Hoskins can better navigate rough terrain on one foot and crutches.
In the woods, a fancy, $28,000 prosthetic is just 8 pounds of dead weight.
Hoskins is about 5-foot-2, but the height is deceiving. He’s got a powerful upper body. As a security officer, he detained more than one guy by flipping him onto his back.
“If I didn’t have scoliosis, I’d be 6-foot-3, based on my wingspan,” he said, adding with a grin, “and I’d be a huge asshole.”
But that’s not how things played out.
“I can either be depressed or upset with what life dished me,” he said, “but instead I’m a better person.”
Both men are searching in the forest for answers they know they might not find, but the hunt proves irresistible.
“It brought magic back into my life in a way,” Stolp said. “Mystery came back, because it didn’t exist before that. It’s like being a kid again.”
The incident
Four years ago, during a camping trip in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Stolp and an old Army buddy, Mike Palagi, 38, experienced what they now refer to as “the founding incident.”
It was July 17, 2020, and the camping party included Stolp, his two sons and young nephew, Palagi and Palagi’s fiancée.
Stolp wanted to camp near Forlorn Lakes, but other campers had taken the spot he had in mind. So, Stolp’s party ended up at a remote site, several miles east down an abandoned logging road.
The group set up camp, cooked dinner, then settled in for the night. Around 3 a.m., a sound — a scream, really — woke Stolp.
“It sounded like a washboard sound, like a brat-tat-tat, but it was so guttural,” he said.
An outdoorsman all his life, he had never heard anything like it.
“I don’t know if I thought Sasquatch,” he said. “I thought fear.”
The campsite was laid out across thick pine beds, and Stolp could feel the ground vibrate as something passed his tent.
He grabbed his shotgun, stumbled outside, and yelled to Palagi and his fiancée, who had finished off a bottle of whiskey that night and were not roused. (Palagi confirmed this part of the story, saying, “The first night, I might have drank a little too much Pendleton, so I didn’t hear a whole lot.”)
Outside the tent, Stolp didn’t see anything. Whatever had stomped through the campsite was gone without a trace.
The next morning, Stolp relayed the story. He didn’t think what he heard was a bear. Palagi had left out food that was untouched overnight. It didn’t seem like an elk either.
“If I were to yell, and there was an elk near my tent, it’s going to crash, it’s going to make sounds getting out of there,” Stolp said. “Bear’s going to do the same thing. They’re not sneaky. Bears are big dumb dogs, and they make a lot of noise. This thing didn’t make any noise.”
The group camped a second night, and around the same time — 3:06 a.m. — it happened again.
“The next night, let’s just say I was out of Pendleton,” Palagi said. “So, I did hear the croak. It seemed to be elevated, not on a ground level.”
His fiancée, Olivia Corbin, heard it, too.
“It sounded like it ran right past our heads,” she said. “Very heavy footed. We could feel the ground move as it was running past the tent.”
Palagi racked a round in a .45. Stolp had the shotgun.
“We both got out, and we’re checking our corners and looking at things and shouting, scared as hell,” Palagi said. “It’s very, very dark, but you could still hear thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. It wasn’t a four-legged thing. It was something on two legs.”
Palagi called out, “If anybody’s there messing with us, you better come out now because I will shoot you.”
But whatever it was had disappeared.
They slept in their cars the rest of the night and left the following day, nothing but a shared, strange story as proof.
Bigfoot Country
Washington has more reported Bigfoot sightings than any other state, and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest is a particular hotbed. The area is home to Skookum Meadows, whose name comes from a Chinook Jargon word that means “powerful” or, in some contexts, “monstrous.” There, in 2000, members of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization made the famous “Skookum cast,” which they claim shows a Bigfoot lying in the mud.
There were so many Bigfoot reports that the Skamania County Board of Commissioners passed an ordinance in 1969 (on April 1) making it illegal to kill a Sasquatch. Today, the unlawful taking of a Sasquatch within the county could lead to jail time and a $1,000 fine.
Stolp isn’t sure what he heard in the woods that night, but he’s convinced it wasn’t an animal known to science.
“I’m good in the woods,” he said. “But that thing was better.”
Corbin and Palagi call themselves skeptics. Corbin thinks it may have been a combination of frogs croaking and a deer running through camp, but Palagi doesn’t have a good explanation.
“It’s hard for me to say that I completely disbelieve,” he said.
‘There’s something out there’
At the time of “the incident,” Stolp, Palagi and Hoskins were co-workers at Shriners Children’s Hospital in Portland, where Hoskins was a security officer, Stolp was an electrician and Palagi was a maintenance engineer.
“I told my wife, I told my best friends, and that was about it,” Stolp said. “I mean, who wants to hear that? I didn’t need people thinking I was crazy. But anyone who meets Tanner knows he’s got a really good nature about him, so I told him.”
Hoskins grew up hearing his great-grandma’s stories about “hidebehinds,” the creatures blamed for snatching loggers who went missing in her part of rural Idaho. And the story from Stolp — not a guy prone to telling tall tales — piqued Hoskins’ interest.
In August 2020, Stolp and Hoskins returned to the campsite, but whatever had appeared before did not return. Still, Stolp’s story motivated Hoskins to create a website, asking if others had experienced similar things in the woods.
He called it the Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search.
“We started getting reports almost right off the bat,” Hoskins said.
A sheriff’s deputy reported hearing a similar brat-tat-tat sound near Saddle Mountain in northwest Oregon. Another person thought they saw a hairy, bipedal creature outside Vernonia. Vocalizations were reported near Bloom Lake in the Tillamook State Forest. To date, Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search has received more than 100 reports of unexplained sights and sounds.
“Those things never crossed my mind before that trip,” Stolp said. “But now, it’s kind of fun. A little bit of an adventure.”
About a year into their Bigfoot hunts, Hoskins got an online request: As long as you’re out there, can you look for any sign of Glenn Austin Oldfield II? The camper had vanished from the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in 2015.
“It blew my mind,” Hoskins said. “I don’t know why I wasn’t thinking about it at all.”
Hoskins contacted Washington State Patrol, which sent him a list of 34 people reported missing, and never found, in the Gifford Pinchot from 1979 to 2021.
Suddenly, Pacific Northwest Bigfoot Search had another mission, and Hoskins created another website: The Pacific Northwest Missing Persons Project.
The missing
Hoskins put those 34 names on an online map that noted what each person was wearing and where they were last seen. Using a variety of sources, he eventually compiled a list of more than 500 people missing across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and California.
“Once search and rescue is done, they don’t have the funding or the personnel to come back out and look,” Hoskins said. “They’ve got to save their funding for life-saving missions. We’re already out in the woods looking for a Bigfoot. Might as well do something.”
Oregon search and rescue teams were called out on 975 missions in 2023 alone. In 79 of those cases, the missing person was never found. Washington had 939 search and rescue missions in 2023, though they don’t track the outcomes.
At least three people are still missing in this part of the Gifford Pinchot. Kristopher Zitzewitz, then 31, got separated from his hiking partner in 2013 near the Big Lava Beds area and vanished. In 2015, a Honda Civic belonging to Sarah Roecker, then 52, was found along Forest Service Road 23, but no sign of Roecker was ever found.
Then there’s Glen Austin Oldfield II, a 39-year-old Kentucky man who was solo camping in the area and didn’t check in with family after his scheduled return. He was spotted Sept. 17, 2015, by a pair of hunters who said he ran off when they offered help. Two days later, a father and daughter gave him a ride toward Trout Lake. They said he was friendly but not making much sense. No one has seen Oldfield since.
Hoskins says the woods are so dense and so vast, anyone — or anything — could be out there.
“We found glasses at Panther Creek a few times,” Hoskins said. “We found some shoes. But nothing that’s really matched anybody’s description from the area.”
Last year, Hoskins started the Pacific Northwest Missing Persons podcast, in which he reads from old news articles and case files about people who vanished in the wilderness.
“I get to put names out there that people maybe haven’t heard in 20 years,” Hoskins said. “I started telling people, ‘Hey, before you go out in the woods, just look up who’s missing in the area. You might, while you’re hiking, see something that just happens to bring answers.’ ”
The most recent episode features Shane Sprenger, who went missing from his Vida, Oregon, home in November 2021. Ten months later, his partial remains were found near the Blue River Reservoir.
His sister, Misty Uecker, still considers the circumstances around Sprenger’s disappearance suspicious. She asked Hoskins for help, which he offers to anyone free of charge.
“There’s a need, a definite need,” Uecker said. “It’d be awesome if there were 200 other groups like his in that area.”
Between updating the map, recording the podcast and going into the field, the missing persons project has become a full-time, unpaid cause for Hoskins.
“It gives me a weird purpose and mission,” he said. “I feel like there’s something bigger out there, and we all have to look out for each other.”
‘Trying to make a difference’
If the lottery of life had turned out a little differently, Hoskins would have been a cop.
He was born with physical disabilities that included a severely curved spine, two clubbed feet and a right leg with no tibia. The leg failed to develop and was amputated when he was 3 years old.
“I had a lot of things wrong,” Hoskins said. “There was a good chance that I probably was not going to live very long if things didn’t work out right.”
He had 14 major surgeries as a child and learned to run on a prosthetic leg when he was 10 years old.
“I was told that I probably wasn’t going to run, I wasn’t going to be able to do half the stuff I’ve done in my life,” he said.
Hoskins was in third grade at the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His most vivid recollection of that day’s news coverage was of the people running toward danger to help others.
“That … part of American history drove me to want to do something with my life,” he said.
When he was 18, Hoskins became a volunteer cadet with the Portland Police Bureau, which he called a life-changing experience.
“You’re just thrown into the mix of the world,” he said. “You experience every aspect of life, things you don’t want to experience, things that you do, happiness, sadness, everything.”
To become a police officer in Oregon, candidates must pass the Oregon Physical Abilities Test, known as the ORPAT. It’s a timed obstacle course that includes running, controlled falls and the dragging of a dummy to simulate pulling another person to safety.
“I did the ORPAT 30 seconds too late to qualify every time I’ve done it,” Hoskins said. “You have to pass under six minutes and 30 seconds, and I am at seven minutes, no matter how hard I train and push.”
He tried to join every branch of the military but was denied each time.
So, instead of public service, Hoskins went into private security. He worked for a Portland-area security company before getting a job at Shriners Children’s Hospital in January 2019 — the same hospital where he was once a young patient.
“To work for them was a little bit of giving back in some way,” he said. “It felt full circle.”
But in August 2021, Shriners decided to outsource its security services, and the local team, including Hoskins, was laid off. He took another job as a training coordinator for a private security firm, but it wasn’t the same as working for Shriners, and his muscle spasms were getting worse. He retired last year, and now receives Social Security disability benefits.
“I live at a constant six out of 10 on the pain scale,” Hoskins said. “I wake up in pain, I go to sleep in pain. I’m in pain. But life’s painful. You can either mope about it, or you can just drive through it and do what needs to be done. I can’t do the thing that I wanted to do in life, but I found something else I actually really enjoy.”
Nothing about Hoskins’ disabilities slows him down in the woods. Last year, he and Stolp did a 12-mile hike in the backcountry.
“He’s more athletic and better in the woods than most people, with one leg,” Stolp said. “He’s incredibly capable. Anybody with a brain can see that.”
‘He’s got an arrow’
Over the past four years, Hoskins has assembled a team that ranges from four to 15 volunteers willing to look for Bigfoot or missing people.
Among them is Alberto Quinones, a Portland warehouse inventory manager who became friends with Hoskins when he married Hoskins’ cousin. He, too, has heard strange things in the woods.
“We know why we’re coming out here. Obviously, it’s to enjoy the scenery, get away from everyone, de-stress,” he said. “But there’s also that little bit of, hey, there’s something else out here. Things that we don’t understand yet.”
In 2023, the team made 10 trips to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Hoskins, Stolp, Quinones and Palagi were there in June for an annual return camping trip to the site of “the incident.”
A typical trip starts with Hoskins leading the group in a briefing.
“I give a rundown of what this person looked like, their last known description, what items they had with them,” Hoskins said. “Depending on how long they’ve been gone, you’re looking for clothing and items. Bones are going to be hard to find.”
This isn’t an official county search and rescue team — and for these cold cases, there’s no “rescue” involved — but Hoskins relies on his training in evidence collection. He’ll lead a grid search, people spaced 5 feet apart, looking for both footprints (belonging to Sasquatch) or clothing (belonging to people).
“Tanner is the focal point. He designs where we’re going to be, where we’re going to look, and when we’re going to do it,” Palagi said. “He’s got an arrow. I’ll follow it.”
The team also places trail cams in areas near Bigfoot sightings. So far, the motion-activated cameras, which run off batteries for months at a time, have captured video of bears, elk and moving grass — but no Bigfoot.
Realistically, these are searches for a needle in the world’s largest haystack. They have yet to find any needles.
But never mind the odds. Stolp is excited to be in the woods. Hoskins is ever hopeful he’ll find answers for a grieving family.
“I feel like I’m making an impact in some way,” Hoskins said. “We haven’t found anybody yet. We haven’t found Sasquatch, believe it or not. But there’s a mission here. There’s a sense of purpose.”
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