Two Hikers Dead in Snow, Sheriff's Bigfoot Tale Disputed in New Book

SKAMANIA COUNTY, WASH. — A claim that two Portland men died while hunting Bigfoot is the subject of a new book, Sasquatch Country, by writer Chuck Thompson, according to an interview published on Jack Boulware's Substack. The two men, Dean Pommerville and Eric Straughter, were reported missing on Christmas morning 2024 in Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Rescue volunteers found their frozen bodies three days later.

Headlines then described the pair as "Sasquatch hunters," a label the interview calls untrue. Their families, according to the account, became targets of mockery online. One widow, who wished to avoid the media, asked through a relative whether Thompson could advise on obtaining corrections.

Thompson says he traced the story to a press release posted on the Skamania County sheriff's office Facebook page. The sheriff, he says, told him the Sasquatch detail came from the families via a 911 call. He then filed a public records request for the recording. By his account it runs about four and a half minutes and never mentions Sasquatch.

The interview notes that Skamania County has an ordinance penalizing the hunting or harming of Sasquatch, with up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Thompson says he was reluctant to put the word in his title, but was persuaded by author Robert Michael Pyle, who told him his only royalty-paying book had Bigfoot in its title.

The Anomalist's digest also links to an account of the Foxboro Yeti, a 25-foot creature reported in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in 1965. Police largely called it an early Halloween prank, and the story faded with nothing proved or disproved.