Ape Canyon Attack
In July 1924, Fred Beck and four miners said apemen stoned their cabin by Mount St. Helens. Forest rangers found nothing. Here is what is documented.
The Ape Canyon attack is a claim made by five gold miners in July 1924. They said large ape-like creatures pelted their cabin with rocks through the night on the east side of Mount St. Helens in Washington. One of the men, Fred Beck, said he had shot one of the creatures earlier that day. The story reached The Oregonian on 16 July 1924 and spread across the country. Forest Service rangers who went to the site found no creatures and concluded the evidence could have been faked. The gorge has been called Ape Canyon ever since, and the case is one of the oldest stories in Bigfoot lore.
Ape Canyon: Where Is It?
Ape Canyon is a gorge cut into the southeast flank of Mount St. Helens. At one point its walls close to about eight feet apart. It sits below the Plains of Abraham, a high pumice plain on the east side of the volcano. Today the Ape Canyon Trail, number 234 in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, climbs along the rim from a trailhead at the end of Forest Road 83. It runs for roughly five miles to a junction with the Loowit Trail, which circles the mountain. The road is gated by snow for much of the year and usually opens in late May or June. The trail is popular with hikers and mountain bikers.
What Happened in July 1924
The miners were working a gold claim near the canyon and had built a small cabin there. By Beck’s account, the trouble began in daylight. The men saw large hairy creatures that walked upright and stood around seven feet tall. Beck said he fired at one three times and saw it fall over a cliff into the canyon.
That night, the men said, the creatures came back. Rocks struck the cabin walls and roof for hours. In the accounts that followed, the roof was damaged and Beck was knocked unconscious by a rock. The men fired their rifles through the walls. In Beck’s later telling, the creatures climbed on the roof and one reached into the cabin through a gap. At first light the attack stopped. The men left the mountain the next morning.
The Miners
Fred Beck is the only miner named in nearly every source, because he told the story for the rest of his life. Later accounts list his companions as Marion Smith, Smith’s son Roy, Gabe Lefever and John Peterson, though the lineup differs from one source to another. Beck described the claim as the Vander White mine.
The 1924 Newspaper Story
The Oregonian published the account on 16 July 1924. It described a fight between prospectors and “gorilla men” in a gorge near Mount St. Helens. Other papers picked it up within days. Some treated it as an adventure tale and others as a joke. The coverage is the reason the gorge took the name Ape Canyon.
The Ranger Investigation
The Forest Service sent rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch to look into the claims. They went down into the canyon where the creature was said to have fallen and found nothing. Large footprints about 14 inches long had been reported near the cabin. The rangers showed how easily such prints could be faked. They also concluded the miners had probably placed the large stones around the cabin themselves to support the story.
Fred Beck’s 1967 Book
Beck put his version in writing more than forty years later. His booklet I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens appeared in 1967. In it he gave the creatures a spiritual meaning and suggested the apemen were not ordinary animals. Writers who see the case as a real encounter rely heavily on this book. Skeptics point out that it was written four decades after the event, by the man at the centre of it.
Hoax Claims and Other Explanations
In 1982, a Toledo, Washington logger named Rant Mullens said that he and other foresters had carved large wooden feet in the 1930s and used them to make tracks that scared huckleberry pickers. Mullens and his group also claimed to be behind the Ape Canyon incident in 1924. Mullens’s claim came 58 years after the event and has never been confirmed either.
Other theories are local. One fireside story from a youth camp at Spirit Lake says campers threw pumice into the canyon, and that the narrow walls distorted their voices. Speleologist William Halliday suggested a version of this idea. None of these theories explains every detail of Beck’s account, and none has been proven.
Ape Canyon After the 1980 Eruption
Mount St. Helens erupted on 18 May 1980 and killed 57 people. The eruption heavily changed the canyon area. The name survived on maps and on the trail.
Why the Case Matters
Ape Canyon came more than thirty years before 1958, when the word Bigfoot entered newspapers after tracks were found at Bluff Creek in California. It shows that stories of hairy giants in the Cascades were circulating well before the modern name existed. Local stories of “mountain devils” were already being told in the area before 1924.
What is documented is limited. There is a contemporary newspaper report of the miners’ claim and a Forest Service investigation that did not support it. Everything else rests on the men’s testimony, most of it written down much later. Believers see a sustained encounter with an unknown animal. Skeptics see a prank, a tall tale or a mix of both. A century on, the name on the map is the most solid evidence that something set those five men running off the mountain.