Glen Thomas and the Rock-Pile Family, Burnt Granite Ridge, Oregon

Mt. Hood National Forest, Oregon. Autumn 1967. Glen Thomas, a logger from Colton, was supervising the construction of logging roads in the mountains. Sources disagree on the month, some saying October and others November. John Green later wrote that Thomas first told his story after the Patterson-Gimlin film became public, a film shot on 20 October 1967.

The place already carried a legend. Nearby Tarzan Springs was apparently named for a prospector who lived in the woods with a family of "ape-like" creatures.

Thomas left the work site and walked up onto a rocky ridge. On the talus below him he saw three large, hair-covered bipeds. An adult male. An adult female. A young one, which stayed on the far side of its mother from the male.

The adults worked their way across the rock slide. They picked up rocks, sniffed them and set them down again in stacks, much like the cairns on a hiking trail. Then the male smelled something he liked and dug down into the broken rock. About five feet down, he began pulling up hibernating ground squirrels in nests of grass and ferns. The male and female ate most of them, and the young one got one.

Then the animals noticed Thomas. They ran off into the forest. "I just couldn't believe what was happening. It just couldn't be, but it is," Thomas told Green in a taped interview in 1968.

No photographs, no film and no track casts came from the encounter, for Thomas carried a gun but no camera. What remained was the ridge itself. Green described the pit as "five feet deep, as steep-sided as a well," and said people could not have dug it without machinery. Lines of cairn-like rock stacks ran along the crest. A 1969 photograph reportedly shows René Dahinden with Thomas on the rock pile.

Wildlife biologist John Bindernagel visited twice and photographed the pit and the stacked rocks. He treated the account as important evidence of feeding behaviour. James A. Hewkin, who first visited with Green in 1973, reportedly found a newer pit about 30 yards from the main one, dug after that visit, and argued that great force was needed to lift the rocks. It also meant someone, or something, kept moving rocks there, which makes the original features harder to read.

Doubts followed. Thomas claimed four separate sightings, and Green himself said that was "enough to raise suspicion." Researcher T. A. Wilson surveyed the site in 2017 and 2018 and argued that the accounts were made up. He read the pits and the lines of cairns as Native American vision-quest structures, pointing to a rock flake in a smaller pit that points due east. He also found a remote talus slope nearby with no pits and no cairns at all.

Today the rock pile at the southern end of Burnt Granite ridge is a well-known Bigfoot research site, reached by hikers on the trail toward Tarzan Springs. Oregon Hikers calls it "the deepest 'vision quest' pit you might ever see." Green's 1968 tape survives, and the case reportedly appears in his chapter "Ape Canyon to Estacada". In August 2026 the trails were closed because of the Austin Fire. The pit still waits on the ridge, and the question of who dug it is still open.