FOR those who don’t believe in bigfoot or sasquatch or aren’t sure, one skeptic has changed his mind after two recent sightings.
“Believe it or not, I did see one. I was skeptical before this but I am not anymore,” said Cpl. Nathan Dame stationed at the Lisims/Nass Valley RCMP detachment.
In late October, he was travelling from New Aiyansh to Greenville while on duty and in the middle of a long, straight stretch of road about halfway between the two communities saw “something leap across the entire highway and disappear into the trees.”
“That’s what caught my attention. Seeing it leap across the entire highway. It took me a few seconds to process what I saw,” says Dame.
“Pretty interesting stuff. It leapt across the highway landing on the other side on the shoulder of the road. It then walked slowly into the trees. It did not seem to care about me.”
He arrived at that same location within three seconds, stopped and looked into the trees but didn’t see anything, he says.
“It it were an animal, I would have been able to see it before it disappeared into the trees. I have no doubt of what I saw,” says Dame.
He describes what he saw as approximately 10 feet tall, with dark chocolate brown hair, long arms that stretched past its waist and long legs. “It was not a moose or a bear standing up. I have nothing else to explain what I saw other than a sasquatch,” Dame says. “There are not other animals that come close to that description.”
Then in early November, he stopped on the highway approximately 5 km past his first sighting.
“I heard a noise and looked over into the trees. Twenty metres away I saw something large and brown duck behind a tree,” says Dame. He moved closer to investigate but could not find what he saw.
“I do not know what this was but again it was not a moose or a bear standing up and I should have been able to see something as the trees were not very thick in this spot,” he says. “I spoke with a couple of local Greenville ladies and they both saw what they think is a sasquatch as well in the area.”
In the past, several area residents have reported seeing bigfoot or sasquatch or found evidence of them.
In 2008, local sasquatch hunter Larry Sommerfield showed a cast of a 16-inch long footprint he said was made in mid-August of that year from a footprint found in a gravel pit just east of the Kitselas First Nation’s Gitaus subdivision east of Terrace on Hwy 16.
The footprint was 10.5 inches wide and Sommerfield said it probably belonged to a creature weighing 1,000 pounds that stood at least 10 feet high.
Some of the earliest and best footprints of sasquatch were found in the Skeena Valley in 1976. The tracks — about a dozen of them 15.5 inches long and 6.5 inches wide — were found by some children near a slough in the Terrace area. According to researchers, they had a walking stride of just over seven feet.
A sasquatch researcher named Bob Titmus lived in the area at the time and made plaster casts from the footprints that were left in the hard clay.
In 2000 a New Aiyansh resident spotted something. At eight o’clock in the morning one day Mark (not his real name) was getting ready for work. As he looked out his back window toward a forested area Mark saw a man walking toward his house.
The man was average height, maybe 5’5”, walking upright just like a normal person would. But when the man got closer Mark realized that what he saw was neither human or animal. The creature came into the clearing between his house and his neighbour’s and searched out for a branch on a tree.
“I just thought it was a person. Its arm went down to the branch and pulled the branch down and I saw that his arm was hairy,” he said. “I saw the hair very clearly it was really kind of freaky.”
Sasquatch creatures have different names among First Nations, The Haida call it Gogit, the Kwakiutl call it Bukwas and Bowis is the name given by Tsimshian.