Two men who set off on a Christmas Eve hunt for Bigfoot in an old forest in Washington state have been found dead, three days after they were reported missing.
The pair, aged 59 and 37, from Portland, Oregon, had driven 60 miles east of the city to the southern fringes of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, a remnant of the ancient woodlands that once blanketed the mountain ranges of the Pacific Northwest.
A family member reported the men missing at 1am on Christmas Day. Six search-and-rescue teams and a helicopter crew from the US coastguard scoured the area in snow, rain and freezing temperatures.
A licence plate reader on a roadside camera identified the missing men’s car and allowed the Skamania County Sheriff’s Office to track it to a spot just off a road that runs north into the forest along the valley of a salmon river.
For decades, the forest has been a setting for sightings of the mythical Sasquatch, a hairy creature that is supposed to roam through the last fragments of the American wilderness.
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The Skamania County Chamber of Commerce offers an itinerary for Sasquatch hunters that directs them to the areas where the creature has supposedly been spotted. Encounters include a woman who says she was interrupted while trying to change a tyre and a man who ventured into a cave beside an extinct volcano.
The county, concerned that an over-excited Bigfoot enthusiast might mistakenly shoot a hirsute elk hunter, passed a law in 1969 making it illegal to harm a Sasquatch within its borders, with the possibility of jail and a $1,000 fine.
The county sheriff’s office said the search for the two missing Sasquatch hunters swelled to include more than 60 people, including dog teams, drone operators and volunteers who left their families during Christmas and “fought through freezing temperatures, snow, high water levels, heavy rain and heavily wooded terrain”.
Officials said the two men appeared to have been ill-prepared for such conditions. Their bodies were found on Saturday in a thickly wooded area. “Both deaths appear to be due to exposure,” the sheriff’s office said.