A routine seasonal job turned into a nightmare for two cousins, Jacob and Charles, working at a small, remote placer mining operation off the Yukon River in the early 1980s. After a series of unexplained acts of sabotage—including massive trees pushed into the trommel—Charles was assigned to stand guard on an elevated scaffolding platform an hour before the nightly shutdown. The shift started ominously when Charles was nearly buried by a sloughing outhouse pit, and the eerie feeling of being watched quickly intensified into a suffocating dread.
As darkness fell, Charles was violently blinded by his own massive spotlight after falling off the back of a fleeing four-wheeler. The two cousins, injured and terrified, attempted to limp the half-mile back to camp in the pitch black while a massive, 13-foot-tall, incredibly swift entity thrashed through the brush directly beside them. When their coworkers finally arrived in a pickup truck to rescue them, their headlights illuminated the creature violently toppling Charles' scaffolding platform into the gravel pit before effortlessly scaling the steep quarry wall and vanishing into the Yukon timber. The next morning, the entire crew quit after discovering the creature had also managed to shove an impossibly heavy boulder straight up into the trommel's spray bar and violently shoved the operation's heavy front-end loader backward.
