Skamania County in Washington State has enshrined its status as a Sasquatch refuge in a local ordinance.¹ Killing Sasquatch within the county is punishable by up to one year in the county jail, a fine of $1,000, or both. As native sons of the state who grew up with blue tarps and clothesline in the trunk of the family car for all our campsite needs, my brother John and I have seen geoduck but not murder hornets, killer whales (Orcinus orca), sockeye salmon, and spotted owls, though not a single Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) in the wild. Nor have we ever seen Sasquatch. Believing perhaps the species had converged on the safe harbor provided by the Skamania County ordinance and curious whether such a creature ate ham and eggs for breakfast, could wiggle its ears and curl its tongue, and might be keen for a hand of poker, we headed for the western reaches of Gifford Pinchot National Forest seeking an irrefragable encounter with bigfoot.

In July 1924, five miners claimed to have been attacked by seven‐foot‐tall mountain devils who were covered in long, black hair. The attack was reported to have taken place as the miners slept in a cabin they had built in a narrow canyon and consisted of the attackers throwing large stones at the cabin and attempting to force entry. The attack lasted through the night and ended when the miners fled at daybreak.² John and I decided to survey the landscape from Windy Ridge, the end of the road and eight miles short of the site of the 1924 attack, reached from Randle via Forest Road 25 and Forest Road 99. The ridge overlooks Spirit Lake and was in the center of the blast zone when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. Prior to that eruption, the lake was encircled by old‐growth forests. The eruption tore those forests from the earth; their debris strewn across the lake, leaving a panorama of pumice and ash. Landslides caused by the eruption raised the lake bed by 200 feet. The following photo, taken by the state DOT shortly after the eruption, shows the ridge and lake just below the crater.

Today the mountain is quiescent, although in the decades since its eruption in 1980 it has built an 876‐foot lava dome inside its crater through a series of much less destructive eruptions. Periods of intense seismic activity waned after the last such spell in 1999. On this day as we parked at Windy Ridge to take it all in, the sky was blue with a few clouds drifting near the mountain summit; the surrounding vistas, though disfigured by the scars of the firestorm, were serene as nature continued its task of restoring forests and wildflowers to the flayed earth. We sipped water and read the interpretive signs, as I wondered how long it had been since the nearby amphitheater built for audiences of Ranger‐given talks about the eruption had fulfilled the ambitions of its designers. The infrastructure of national parks and monuments languishes in various states of disrepair even as a pandemic creates unprecedented demands on those public spaces, and this amphitheater was not exempt from the ravages of the outdoors unchecked by maintenance long deferred in those parks and monuments. It was fitting, actually, to regret the decay of the amphitheater while in the shadow of a mountain missing an entire flank vanished in an explosion that devastated an area of about 150 square miles.

No remains of Sasquatch — indeed, no evidence whatever of their presence — were found in the ruins left by the volcano. Fifty‐seven people were killed, and estimates are that 7,000 large animals were also killed. In a moment during which a breeze stirred the grass and the bits of desiccated leaves gathered at the parking lot curb, I underwent a horripilation in kinship with those 57 strangers — some more notorious than others, and of those others some heroic or duty‐bound, but most simply out of time — reminded as I was of how puny I am standing on this rock as it hurtles itself through the abyss, waiting for the fire or the ice to claim me.

We did not achieve our Sasquatch objective, but felt no regret. We had a motorcycle ride on a beautiful summer day to a place in the presence of the revolving wheel of extinction, observing that the very Earth is at no risk from the activities of our kind, even as our kind does its utmost to render it uninhabitable. Perhaps Sasquatch lead submontane lives often disturbed yet never disclosed, and prefer to remain untroubled by the attentions of overweening cousins exhibiting interest in nought but the sounds of their own voices. Could it be that these cryptids elude us to confound their annihilation? In answer, a brunneous peripheral form withdrew beneath the rayless trees as I rode homeward through the forest.