847 images. One subject. Zero signs of leaving. The SD card is full and so is my notebook.

I want to be very precise about what is happening at Station 4 on the Pacific Crest Trail right now, because I have spent nine years covering incidents that people describe as unprecedented and most of them are not, and this one is. A large bipedal figure — consistent in height, gait profile, and general silhouette with what this network classifies as a Class A Bigfoot contact — has been standing in front of a remotely operated wildlife camera since last Monday. Not passing through. Not investigating the equipment out of curiosity and moving on. Standing in front of it. Adjusting its posture. Smoothing its fur with what multiple researchers I have now spoken to are describing, with varying degrees of reluctance, as deliberate grooming behavior. It has been doing this for six days. The SD card filled up this morning. I am already in the car.

What The Camera Recorded Before It Stopped Being Able To Record Anything

The camera at Station 4 belongs to Dr. Renata Solís, a wildlife researcher out of Oregon State who has been monitoring ungulate migration patterns along this stretch of trail for fourteen months. She is not a cryptid researcher. She has said this to me three times in forty minutes, and I have written it down all three times because I respect the record. Her camera is a Bushnell Core S-35, motion-triggered, positioned at approximately four feet off the ground facing a game trail near a seasonal water source. On Monday at 6:14 AM it captured the first image. By Tuesday afternoon the figure had returned six separate times. By Wednesday it had stopped leaving. The 847 images Dr. Solís has recovered from the card before it hit capacity show a progression she described to me as, quote, ‘a grooming routine with recognizable stages,’ which she then immediately asked me not to print, and I told her I was going to have to print it.

Community Notice

There’s a sequence — I counted it — where it tilts its head left, then right, then does something with its hand along the side of its jaw. It does that sequence seventeen times across six days. That’s not investigation of an object. That’s a habit.

— Dr. Renata Solís, Wildlife Researcher, Oregon State University

There are five witnesses on record as of this filing. Dr. Solís. Two members of her graduate research team, Marcus Thibodeau and a woman who asked to be listed only as ‘K,’ which I respect but I want the record to show I asked. A trail maintenance volunteer named Pete Aragon who encountered the figure from approximately forty yards on Wednesday morning and describes it as, quote, ‘not startled by me at all, which I found rude.’ And a PCT thru-hiker named Sandra Okafor who has been posting about it under the trail name ‘Blistered’ on three separate hiking forums since Thursday and whose account I am treating as corroborating testimony and not, as my producer Mara Vane suggested when I called her this morning at 5 AM, ‘internet noise.’ I have the forums printed out. They are in my notebook. The notebook is in The Evidence Vehicle. I am driving.

The Question Nobody Is Answering Yet, Which Means It Is The Right Question

Here is what I keep coming back to, and I have been coming back to it since Gallup, which is where I stopped for Dragon Ice and first read Dr. Solís’s incident summary. The camera lens is reflective. Not a mirror — it is a lens with a polycarbonate cover that, under the right light conditions, particularly the low-angle morning light you get on east-facing trail positions in the Pacific Northwest in October, would produce a partial reflection. Not a perfect one. Not a bathroom mirror. But enough. Enough that if you were a large, intelligent primate with no prior exposure to mirrors — and I want to be careful here because I am a reporter and not a primatologist, and I have a list of primatologists I am calling the moment I hit a cell signal — it is possible that what those 847 images document is the first recorded extended self-examination by a non-human North American primate. I have that sentence written in my notebook with two underlines and a question mark, which is my notation for ‘say this carefully but do not stop saying it.’

I’ve had cameras out here for over a year. Deer check them out for maybe forty-five seconds. Bears will investigate for a few minutes. Whatever this is has been here for six days. I don’t have a framework for six days.

— Dr. Renata Solís, Wildlife Researcher, Oregon State University

I called Claudia from outside Redding to let her know I would be in the field through at least the weekend. She asked if Dispatch had eaten. I said I didn’t know because Dispatch was with her. She said she knew that, she was asking if I knew. He had eaten. She told me that. I told her about the 847 images and she was quiet for a moment and then said, ‘Rico, that’s actually kind of sad,’ and I said why, and she said, ‘Because it kept coming back.’ I wrote that in the notebook too. That’s not a finding. That’s my sister. But I wrote it down because it is the kind of thing that sits in a story and you don’t always know where until later. I am three hours out. The second camera has not been deployed. The figure has not left. My outstanding answers list has four new entries and I have not crossed anything off since Tuesday. That is a working assumption I am taking into the field.