Ape Canyon

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Ape Canyon was heavily impacted by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Adjacent to the steep rocky canyon is the present Ape Canyon trail, popular with hikers and mountain bikers. On the south side of the mountain is another feature named Ape Cave.

History

Alleged Bigfoot attack

The Ape Canyon area has long been held to be a bigfoot refuge. Tribes in the area have believed that this is a home of the bigfoot. [Citation
title = Bigfoot Field Research Organization
url = http://www.bfro.net/GDB/state_listing.asp?state=wa
accessdate = 2008-07-01]

Ape Canyon was reportedly the site of a violent encounter in 1924 between a group of miners and a group of apemen. [Citation
last = Franzoni
first = Henry
title = Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy?
url = http://www.rfthomas.clara.net/papers/faq.html#q1
accessdate = 2008-07-01] Their situation was noticed and published contemporaneously in the July 16 1924 issues of "The Oregonian". [Citation
title = Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide
publisher = Houghton Mifflin Books, 1995
page = 131
isbn = 0395857015 ] One of the miners, Fred Beck, claimed the miners shot and killed one of the creatures and that night a large group of Sasquatch attacked their cabin and tried to break-in.

William Halliday, director of the Western Speleological Survey, claimed in his 1983 pamphlet "Ape Cave and the Mount Saint Helens Apes"' that the miner's assailants were actually local youths. Until the very last summer of Ape Canyon's existence in 1979, counselors from the YMCA's Camp Meehan on nearby Spirit Lake brought hikers to the canyon's edge and related a tradition that the 1924 incident was actually the result of young campers throwing light pumice stones into the canyon, not realizing there were miners at the bottom. Looking up the miners would have only seen dark moonlit figures throwing stones at their cabin. The narrow walls of the canyon would have served to distort the voices of the YMCA campers enough to frighten the men below.

However, Halliday's explanation may fail to account for several factorsOr|date=August 2008:
* Beck claimed that the "apes" were seen clearly enough to note that they were not human;
* Beck claimed that one of the "apes" was shot and killed, but its unclear if Halliday claims that one of the stone-throwing teenagers was shot and killed in 1924.
* According to a series of 1924 articles in "The Oregonian", multiple reporters and other eyewitnesses saw damage to the cabin, and enormous footprints at the scene of the "ape assault", and it's difficult to imagine how stone-throwing teenagers might have caused these details.

Missing skier

In 1950 a skier named Jim Carter was with a group of other men from The Mountaineers club, but went off by himself to film the group as they went down the hill. He was never seen again, despite a massive 1 week search. One of the search team members said he had a chilling feeling of being watched the entire time. Carter's ski tracks seemed to indicate that he took off at a very high speed, making tremendous jumps that no experienced skier would make unless he was frightened beyond reason or being pursued. His ski tracks led to the edge of a cliff, but a search below never produced his body.

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