The Impossible Pursuit: I Tried to Outrun It—But True Terror Began When the 400-Pound Predator Closed In

There is a specialized kind of terror that exists only when you realize your role in the forest has shifted from spectator to prey. For Derek Hullbrook, a man who built his life on the adrenaline of downhill racing, the mountains were a playground—until a six-mile descent through the Mount Hood National Forest revealed that some shadows don’t just flicker; they hunt. What began as a routine test of a world-class bike trail transformed into a visceral, high-speed flight from a creature that shouldn’t exist, captured on a camera he can never show the world.

Derek Hullbrook was forty-eight, a veteran of the “gnarly” era of 90s mountain biking. A shattered collarbone had ended his racing career, but he had reinvented himself as a master trail designer. In October 2003, he was deep in the Oregon wilderness, working on a $15,000 contract for a private estate. The terrain was perfect: steep, technical, and isolated.

On the morning of the test run, the air was a crisp 55 degrees. Derek geared up with his 2003 Specialized Enduro—a four-thousand-dollar masterpiece of engineering—and a bulky VIO POV 1.5 camera mounted to his helmet. He wanted to show his client the “flow” of the three-mile descent. He didn’t know he was about to record a biological impossibility.

The First Anomaly

The run started perfectly. Derek hit the “rock garden” with the precision of a surgeon, his suspension soaking up boulders the size of basketballs. But at the bottom of a four-foot vertical drop, he saw them.

Fresh tracks.

Derek unclipped from his pedals, staring at the moist dirt. These weren’t bear prints. They were bipedal footprints, sixteen inches long and seven inches wide, with a stride length of nearly five feet. Most unsettling were the dermal ridges—the “fingerprints” of the feet—visible in the tacky mud.

“That’s weird,” Derek muttered, the bulky camera on his head capturing his growing unease. The nearest house was five miles away. Cell service was non-existent. A low-level anxiety began to replace his adrenaline.

The Stench of the Woods

A quarter-mile further down, the forest changed. A powerful, musky odor hit him—a sickening mix of wet dog and rotting vegetation. It was so thick he could taste it through his full-face helmet. Then came the sound: heavy, purposeful crashing through the salal bushes.

Derek stopped. The forest went dead silent.

Forty feet off the trail, a face emerged from the shadows. It wasn’t human. It had a massive, prominent brow ridge and deep-set, calculating eyes. The head was twice the size of a man’s. When it stood up, it eclipsed the sunlight, rising to nearly eight feet.

It let out a roar that vibrated in Derek’s teeth—an aggressive, territorial challenge. Derek didn’t think; he pedaled.

The Six-Mile Descent

What followed was a chase that defied the laws of physics. Derek was a professional; he knew how to “open it up” on a steep pitch. He was hitting speeds of 35, 40, and then 50 mph on a section he called “The Devil’s Run.”

But the creature didn’t stay behind. It ran parallel to the trail, bulldozing through ancient timber and thick undergrowth as if they were made of paper. Derek could feel the thud of its footfalls through the frame of his bike. Every time he glanced to his right, he saw a blur of dark fur keeping pace with his 40-mph sprint.

The creature was smart. It began cutting corners, anticipating Derek’s route through the banked berms. At one point, it leaped over a fallen three-foot log in a single fluid motion—an obstacle that would have taken a human athlete significant effort to climb.

The Mechanical Failure

In a desperate bid to lose his pursuer, Derek veered off-trail into the virgin forest. He threaded his handlebars through cedar gaps with inches to spare, bark scraping his knuckles. He re-entered the trail over a series of massive tabletop jumps, flying forty feet through the air.

But the impact was brutal.

His rear suspension linkage sheared under the stress. A metallic snap echoed through the canyon. His bike began to “wallow,” the rear wheel eventually seizing as metal ground against metal. He skidded to a halt near a wooden bridge he had built over a fifteen-foot creek.

Derek looked back. The creature was standing on the far side of the bridge, chest heaving. Their eyes locked for a heartbeat. In that moment, Derek didn’t see hunger; he saw recognition. The bridge groaned under the creature’s weight, and it stopped. It watched him go, its dark eyes following him until he disappeared around a bend.

The Coordination

The nightmare wasn’t over. As Derek began to push his broken forty-pound bike down the trail, he heard them: vocalizations from multiple directions. Grunts, clicks, and low “whoops” echoed from the ridges above and the valley below.

They were coordinating. There were three of them.

Derek abandoned his bike, grabbing only his water, radio, and the helmet camera. He ran until his lungs burned, eventually stumbling into a two-acre meadow. Halfway across the golden grass, he looked back.

The largest creature stood at the treeline, flanked by two others. All three were massive, powerful, and perfectly still. The largest one raised a long arm and pointed directly at the log Derek was about to hide behind. They knew exactly where he was. They had caught him.

But then, they turned and walked back into the timber.

The Silence of the Records

Derek was rescued two hours later by Rangers Chen and Morrison. He told them a “half-truth”—that a large animal had spooked him, causing him to crash and break his wrist.

Ranger Chen, a veteran of the woods, saw through it. “You saw something unusual,” she whispered as they hiked back. She told him of her own discovery years ago—seventeen-inch tracks near Lookout Mountain that were never officially identified. Her advice was chilling: “Once you share that footage, you can’t control what happens to it—or to the creatures you filmed.”

The Secret in the Safe

Back in his Portland apartment, Derek watched the footage. It was clear. It wasn’t the blurry, shaky film of the 1960s. It was high-resolution, multi-angle proof of a living, breathing intelligent species. He could have been the most famous man in the world. He could have vindicated every “crazy” witness in history.

Instead, he edited the creatures out of the video he sent to his client. He told the entrepreneur that the land was home to a sensitive, rare habitat that must be protected. The project was killed.

In 2010, the client donated the 200 acres to a conservation trust, ensuring development would be permanently prohibited. Derek received a clipping of the news with a note from Ranger Chen: “Thank you for making the right choice.”

Derek is sixty-one now. His wrist still aches when the rain rolls in off the Pacific. He hasn’t designed a remote trail in over a decade. He keeps the original mini DV tape in a fireproof safe, encrypted and hidden. Once a year, on the anniversary of the chase, he watches it—not for fame, but to remember that the world is still full of things we aren’t meant to master.

“I never believed in Bigfoot,” he writes in his final logs. “Until he decided I was worth sparing. I intend to honor that mercy for the rest of my life.”