SASQUATCH COUNTRY

A veteran journalist delves into a virally mocked local tragedy.

In late 2024, the story of two Sasquatch hunters from Portland, Oregon, who froze to death in a Washington state forest on Christmas Eve spread rapidly from a public information press release to news sites and social-media forums around the world. Author Thompson was one social degree removed from the widow of Dean Pommerville, a middle-aged diabetic who, with his younger-by-two-decades friend Eric Straughter, went on that fatal hike into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Skamania County, heart of Bigfoot country, and returned in body bags. Thompson felt immediate empathy for the victims’ families, who were seeing their late loved ones become global laughingstocks—all because of one word in those reports. “Did someone say Sasquatch?” Thompson writes. “Every editor in the world knew clickbait when they saw it. Within days, near-identical headlines appeared around the world, backed by the biggest names in news,” including CNN, Fox News, NPR, and the BBC. Although Pommerville once claimed to have seen a large, ape-like animal in woods near where he would die and had an interest in others’ sightings, his widow had never said her husband had gone looking for Sasquatches that day. Thompson launches a personal quest to get to the bottom of not just what happened to the two men that Christmas Eve, but also what turned their tragedy into a punchline for social-media trolls. He pulls back to show the multiplicity of circumstances that combined to form this perfect internet storm, from local economics that turned a logging powerhouse into a tourist trap for Big Foot hunters to the technological disruptions of the 21st century that have depleted newsrooms.

A well-told, deeply researched story of institutions failing ordinary people.