It wasn't a bear.
The grandchild who shared this story had heard it a few times growing up in southern Oregon. It was only when they brought it up again as an adult that they understood how much it had changed the two people who lived it. Their grandfather has spent the fifteen years since reading everything he can find about Sasquatch. Their grandmother will not talk about it at all.
In August 2010 the couple were camping a few miles outside Crater Lake National Park. It wasn't a campground, just a pull-off on one of the forest roads near the Rim Drive area. They parked and walked down a slope toward a small ravine where they could hear water running.
They were climbing back up the gentle incline toward the car when the grandmother stopped dead and grabbed her husband's arm. About fifty yards up the slope, near the top of a ridge, a figure was standing completely still and looking down at them. Both of them described the same thing: upright, dark brown or nearly black, and at least eight feet tall.
The grandfather grew up hunting, and the line he repeats every time he tells it is simple: it wasn't a bear. Everything about it was wrong for any animal he knew. The arms were too long and the shoulders too broad. What stayed with him most was the way it tilted its head slightly while it studied them. He calls it "too human, but not."
His wife panicked. She started crying, turned her face away so she wouldn't have to look at it, and begged him to get back to the car. He says he stood frozen for what felt like a full minute, his mind trying to make sense of something it had no shape for.
Then the figure turned. It didn't bolt. It moved smoothly, walked back over the ridge and was gone. There was no crashing in the brush and no sound at all. It was simply there, and then it wasn't.
They never reported it. The grandfather told a few friends, but mostly he started reading. Over the years he filled whole binders with maps, sighting reports, weather records and local legends from the southern Cascades. He is, by his grandchild's account, a grounded and practical man, not someone given to fantasy, and he's convinced there is more going on in those forests than most people realize.
His wife won't even look at the binders.
He still drives back to the same area a couple of times a year and walks the same slope, still looking. When the story was posted, the grandchild asked anyone who'd had their own experience around Crater Lake to share it, because their grandfather would be thrilled to know he wasn't the only one.