Shares of Sasquatch Encounters in Alaska

An Ahtna tribally enrolled woman named Mary recalled a profound historical account from her childhood in Chitina during the early 1970s, where a village elder shared an encounter from his youth on the eastern side of the Copper River. While hunting deep inland on an open flat situated directly above Horse Creek, the hunting party experienced an intense, creepy atmospheric dread and followed a strange chattering sound up a ridge line.

During the final cleanup phase of a seasonal placer gold-mining camp situated off the Yukon River drainage, an imported heavy equipment operator named Doug was running a loader in a deep mining pit. During his pre-dawn shift, he noted an edge-of-vision dark form darting into the tree line. At midday, while sitting in the camp smoking area, Doug heard a terrifying, screaming howl echoing from the pit, prompting him to ride a four-wheeler down to investigate under the assumption that a co-worker was injured.

In the fall of 2019, just before the pandemic, a local high school senior named Jane was babysitting five young cousins (ranging in age from roughly five to twelve) at a federal HUD housing unit in a remote northwest coastal village of under 500 year-round residents near the Bering Sea. After coming indoors, the two youngest children were caught staring out a bedroom window, giggling and waving at a 'silly man' standing inside the immediate willow and scrub brush lines. Assuming it was an overactive imagination, Jane dismissed the event.

During a fall caribou hunting trip along a trail leading past Swede Lakes down to the North Fork of the Gulkana River south of the Denali Highway, an eight-man group of experienced hunters successfully harvested five caribou. Late one afternoon, a solitary hunter stayed behind to watch a fresh carcass while his companions returned to camp for additional game bags and tools. Left alone in the gathering dark with only a headlamp, the hunter was aggressively confronted by a 9-foot-tall, bipedal creature that issued a highly abnormal, complex 'chirping and bellowing' vocalization.

Some thirty years prior to 2023, a Bristol Bay native woman named Julie experienced an encounter as a young girl during a combined moose hunting and salmonberry harvesting trip up the Kvichak River channel with her grandfather (Uppa), father, and uncle. Landing early before sunrise, Julie and her Uppa combed the tundra slopes for blueberries and blackberries.

Over forty-five years prior to 2023, an interior village native named Jonah was breaking winter trail with his six-dog sled team to transport supplies between a major hub and his 100-occupant home community. Armed with a moose rifle, Jonah spent hours packing the deep snow across flat muskeg segments that led into thick timber valleys. As his team negotiated a sharp 'dog-leg' curve on the packed trail, an immense, 350-to-400-pound dead beetle-killed spruce tree was violently hurled down onto the path directly out of the overhanging brush.

An experienced river guide named Rick ran a rinky-dink charter service on the Nushagak River for ten years, ultimately retiring after enduring four separate encounters with the Sasquatch population. His first event occurred near Sophie's Landing when three clients fishing for king salmon pointed out a large black figure that abruptly shifted from a crouched stance to stand erect and walk into the timber just 25 feet away from their anchored skiff. The second event involved five clients who were targeted by an intense shriek emerging from a slough near Portage Island.