Mount St. Helens Bite-Marked Bone Stacks

Mount St. Helens has long drawn Bigfoot hunters. Mitchel N. Townsend was one of them. He lived in Winlock, Washington, and taught Bigfoot courses in the Continuing Education program at Centralia College. Online he was "Jonny Dagger," the Bigfoot Tracker.

Near Ryan Lake, northeast of the mountain, Townsend found a pile of black-tailed deer bones. Ribs. Foot bones. Partial hooves. Two damaged skulls. Not scattered. Stacked. Predators normally scatter remains quickly. To him, a tidy pile made no sense. "What resident animal species would kill deer with blunt force trauma on the head, position them in the same directional orientation, eat the animals and drop the bones in a pile?"

Two of his students from Lower Columbia College, Aaron Mills and Gerald Mills, found two more stacks on the south side of the mountain. Elk this time. Ribs, a vertebra, leg bones, tufts of elk hair. The finds came in 2013 and 2014. There were footprints too. About 16 inches long.

No one saw the animal. Everything about it came from what it left behind. From the footprints and the stride, the claimants calculated a height of about 8 ft 8 in. The bite was about 2.5 times the width of the average human dental arcade. Single tooth impact marks measured 1.5 inches wide. About 90% of the marks, they said, were beyond "the range of human possibility." The teeth were "very large but very human-like."

Townsend's verdict: "it's not an ape, it's a hybrid." A cross between Native Americans and a giant ape, interbreeding for about 80,000 years. Several individuals, the authors concluded, had fed on the carcasses. Townsend said that after consulting the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, all natural predators were ruled out. "The evidence stands on its own, you prove the evidence wrong."

May 2015. The Chronicle in Centralia ran the headline "Proof of Bigfoot Is in the Bones, Winlock Man Says." A self-published paper by Mills, Mills and Townsend followed in June. On March 26, 2016, Townsend presented the work at the 69th Annual Anthropological Research Conference in Tacoma.

Steven Streufert of Bigfoot News & Review called the paper "complete overblown pseudoscience." He did not claim the bones were faked.

Forensic anthropologist Lisa Bright wrote a rebuttal in October 2015. "The bones are highly weathered and sun bleached," she noted. At least six months old. "Incisors typically don't leave impressions on bone, aside from small scrapes and furrows." Her own trail cameras had caught black bears, sometimes more than 12, scavenging pig carcasses. She suspected bears or coyotes.

Archaeologist Andy White saw a human pattern. The stacks held mostly heads, feet, ribs and spine, the parts with little meat. The meaty limbs seemed to have been carried away, as human hunters do. Perhaps bait piles from illegal hunting. WDFW carnivore specialist Richard Beausoleil put it plainly: "To me, the bones look like they were placed there by a human." White ended with a question. "Is Bigfoot really that tidy?"

The Wikipedia article on Bigfoot lists the case among its evidence claims, naming "professor Michael Townsend." Every primary source spells his name Mitchel, and none calls him a professor. Townsend went on to write Bigfoot is Solved and promote a Bigfoot learning center in Winlock. MonsterTalk revisited the case with Andy White in an episode titled "Bone Stacks of Mt. St. Helens." The mountain remains a Bigfoot hotspot. Its classic case, Ape Canyon, dates to 1924.