Historically, the incident at Ape Canyon way back in 1924 remains a mystery that was documented without tangible evidence on whether it happened or not. The mystery is ambiguous to try to figure out, and it comes with more doubts than the documented information about it. The big question is whether the Ape Canyon incident happened in actual sense or it was a cooked story. The ape canyon is named after the historical attack that is believed to have taken place at the gorge. It remains the most iconic attack in pseudohistory, making Mt. Saint Helens a treasure of cryptozoology from way back in July 1924 (Lessmann & Steinkraus, 2017). Whereas many theories have been coined to explain the famous incident at Ape Canyon, more questions remain flowing than answers. Both the Oregon and Washington newspapers aired the incidence, even though it could be a made-up narration.
The Ape Canyon incident entails a small group of miners who were on their daily hustle at the mine when a group of wild apes like animals descended from the mountains and attacked them. All the five miners survived the incident and remained confident that the action itself happened. Interestingly, despite the seemingly open lie, the incident remains one of the most remarkable narration. The most fathoming fact about the Ape Canyon incidence is that the general public and the scholars seemingly bought the argument form the five miners and consumed the information in good faith. The miners were total asleep when the incidence happened and huge rocks started beating the canon that these miners had been built, and they are believed to have been thrown by the mountain devils from all sides of the cabin.
The attack happened continuously until sometime nearly morning when the men edged their way out of the forest. Additionally, nobody witnessed the incident, but the men involved, and the argument that they never witnessed anything in the night remains enough argument that the incidence happened, and the information is true (Alberty et al. 2017). The Ape Canyon incidence is believed to have been a sidelined story that is attached to other stories in the market that these miners did not want to talk about after the attempt.
Whereas the narration about the attackers at the St. Helens mountains remains an expanded argument to old, it is arguably the most creative pseudohistorical argument ever brought forth. It is an argument that is supported by the scholars as part of the history and raises the eyebrow of many readers who insist on knowing the identity of the five miners who witnessed the incidence. It is also backed up with a made-up environment of mountains that is rolled over by rocks that could be argued to have been solid from the mountains and roll down, hence developing the so-called Mt. Ape Canon incidence.
Ape Canyon is a gorge along the edge of the Plains of Abraham, on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington. The gorge narrows to as close as eight feet at one point. The canyon was formed by a fast-moving debris avalanche from the May 18, 1980 eruption. The eruption removed the southeast side of Mount St. Helens and left a deep open wound in the mountain's flanks. The canyon is lined by an impressive stratified vertical wall of pyroclastic volcanic deposits from 1 to 10 meters thick in places; dense, dark gray pumice above light colored tuff and breccia below. The floor of Ape Canyon ranges from 300 to 500 meters wide, reaching 650 meters at its widest point just south of Azalea Point - three times as wide as it is deep.
It’s been said that the most popular explanation for this story is that it was a gang of local youth bombarding the cabin with rocks. William Halliday, director of the Western Speleological Survey, alleged in his 1983 pamphlet Ape Cave and the Mount Saint Helens Apes that the miner’s attackers were actually local youths. Until the eruption of Mount St. Helens, advisers from the YMCA’s Camp Meehan on nearby Spirit Lake brought hikers to the canyon’s edge and related a tradition that the 1924 incident was actually the result of young campers throwing light pumice stones into the canyon, not realizing there were miners at the bottom. Gazing up, the laborers would have only seen shadowy moonlit figures hurling stones at their cabin. The narrow walls of the gorge would have served to distort the voices of the YMCA campers enough to intimidate the men below.
- The incident took place in 1924 at a place called Ape Canyon in the Umatilla National Forest of Columbia County, Washington.
- Numerous questions remain unanswered, and the story cannot be completed with certain answers.
- These allegations were reported in the July 16, 1924, issue of The Oregonian.