It’s almost like the return of an old friend — even if it is a 2-foot plywood cutout that’s part of a 15-year history of pranking.
On Wednesday, the state Department of Transportation tweeted out webcam images taken from atop Sherman Pass on Highway 20 between the Ferry County town of Republic and Kettle Falls in Idaho.
“Sasquatch spotted! I’m not superstitious … just a little stitious … If you look closely by the tree on the left there looks to be something … might be Sasquatch … We will leave it up to you!” Ryan Overton, a communications consultant for the agency, wrote on the post on the WSDOT East Twitter feed.
Normally, Overton checks the highway webcam images for anything that seems newsworthy, like maybe 40 inches of snow at the pass.
But he couldn’t resist the image of the Sasquatch cutout, which has long been a part of the terrain. Usually, the cardboard cutout is not easily captured by the highway camera because of poor lighting, he says.
This time, the image looked eerily like the famous, blurry ape-like image taken from a one-minute movie clip taken in 1967 in Northern California by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.
By Thursday afternoon, Overton’s tweet was at 1,100 retweets and 2,500 likes — not bad for highway image.
Even former Washington State University football coach Mike Leach, now at Mississippi State, retweeted it, writing, “I think it’s a tree … I don’t think Sasquatch exists but I hope someone makes my dream come true.”
Overton says the Sasquatch cutout isn’t the only mysterious sighting captured by the WSDOT camera.
“It’s been different things. It started out with aliens. It was a blow-up. They even put up a fake Christmas tree with battery-powered lights. I figure it’s a local that goes up there in the summer and hikes,” he says.
By Thursday afternoon, I-90 Snoqualmie Pass WSDOT was tweeting its own Sasquatch video – “now he is on the wildlife overcrossing on I-90 just east of Snoqualmie Pass.” That was at 9,200 views.
The hashtag was “#doyoubelieve.”
