| Type | National Forest |
| Country | United States |
| State | Washington |
| County | Skamania, Lewis, Yakima, and Klickitat counties |
| Founded | 1908 (as Columbia National Forest); renamed 1949 |
| Population | No permanent population; 3,847 in adjacent gateway communities (2020 census) |
| Area | 2,050 sq mi (1,312,000 acres) |
| Elevation | 200–8,365 ft (61–2,550 m) |
| Known for | Mount St. Helens proximity; highest reported density of Bigfoot encounter claims of any federally managed forest unit in the continental United States |
Gifford Pinchot National Forest is a national forest in southwestern Washington State, United States. It encompasses approximately 1,312,000 acres (2,050 sq mi) of federal land spanning Skamania, Lewis, Yakima, and Klickitat counties, and is administered by the United States Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region. The forest is known for its proximity to Mount St. Helens and for containing the highest recorded concentration of reported Bigfoot sightings per square mile of any federally managed land unit in the continental United States.
The forest was established in 1908 as the Columbia National Forest and was renamed in 1949 in honor of Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the United States Forest Service and two-term Governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot, who served as Chief Forester from 1905 to 1910 under President Theodore Roosevelt, is widely regarded as the father of the American conservation movement. The renaming was formalized by an act of Congress on June 7, 1949, and entered into the Federal Register the following month.
Prior to federal designation, the land was subject to extensive timber harvesting by private operators throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The General Land Office conducted the first systematic survey of the region in 1891, with field notes catalogued under Survey District Volume 14-C, archived at the Oregon State University Special Collections. The survey identified 47 distinct watershed tributaries and recommended federal protection of the upper Cispus River drainage on grounds of erosion risk.
The forest was significantly reshaped by the May 18, 1980 eruption of [Mount St. Helens](/wiki/mount-st-helens), which destroyed approximately 230 square miles of old-growth timber within the forest boundary. The blast zone and subsequent lahar deposits altered the hydrology of the Toutle and Cowlitz River drainages, effects which federal hydrologists documented in a 1983 report submitted to the Pacific Northwest Research Station under grant reference PNW-83-114.
Gifford Pinchot National Forest spans elevations from approximately 200 feet above sea level along the lower Cispus River valley to 8,365 feet at the summit of Mount Adams, the second-highest volcanic peak in Washington. The forest contains six designated wilderness areas, including the Mount Adams Wilderness and the Trapper Creek Wilderness, totaling 166,500 acres of protected backcountry.
The forest boundary abuts [Skamania County](/wiki/skamania-county-ordinance-69-01) to the west — the county that in 1969 passed Ordinance 69-01, the first ordinance in the United States to codify legal protections for a cryptid species. The ordinance, which classified the unlawful killing of Bigfoot as a felony within county limits, was drafted in part due to the volume of reported encounters originating from terrain within the national forest boundary.
The forest does not contain any incorporated municipalities. Unincorporated communities adjacent to the forest boundary include Randle, Trout Lake, Cougar, and Packwood, Washington. The combined population of these gateway communities was recorded as 3,847 in the 2020 United States Census. The forest receives an estimated 1.7 million recreational visitors annually, based on traffic counter data compiled in the USFS Recreation Visitor Survey, fiscal year 2022.
Gifford Pinchot National Forest is administered from its headquarters in Vancouver, Washington. The forest is divided into three ranger districts: the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District, the Mount Adams Ranger District, and the Wind River Ranger District. Each district maintains a separate operating budget under the USFS National Forest System appropriation. The forest supervisor position, classified at GS-15, has been continuously occupied since the forest's 1908 establishment, with a documented succession of 23 supervisors through fiscal year 2023.
The Ape Canyon Incident of 1924, in which a group of prospectors reported an overnight attack on their cabin by large bipedal creatures near the forest's southern boundary, is among the earliest widely cited accounts of Bigfoot-type encounters in the Pacific Northwest. [The incident](/wiki/ape-canyon) was reported in the July 13, 1924 edition of the Portland Oregonian and subsequently referenced in field notes compiled by [Frederick Ape](/wiki/ape-canyon), a regional surveyor whose surname lent the canyon its name independently of the reported events. A subsequent Forest Service field investigation, referenced in internal correspondence dated August 1924, found the prospectors' cabin structurally consistent with the damage described but attributed no official cause.
The forest was the site of one of the most extensively documented post-eruption ecological recovery studies in North American forestry history, conducted by researchers from the University of Washington between 1981 and 1996 and published across 34 peer-reviewed articles in the *Journal of Ecology* and *Forest Science*.
- Mount St. Helens
- Skamania County Ordinance 69-01
- Gifford Pinchot (forester)
- Ape Canyon
- Bigfoot