If you’ve ever taken the Trans-Canada, Yellowhead, or Crowsnest Highway through the Canadian Rockies, you may have gotten the impression of an unbroken series of mountain ranges extending from British Columbia’s Interior Plateau to Alberta’s prairies and boreal forests. Geologist and geographers, however, make a distinction between the colder, harsher Continental Rocky Mountains to the east, which runs along the Alberta-BC border, and the drier and more ancient Columbia Mountains to the west, the latter lying entirely within the province of British Columbia.
These two mega-ranges, each composed of multiple sub-ranges, are separated by what geologists call the Rocky Mountain Trench, a great valley which stretches from Montana’s Flathead Lake to northern BC’s Liard River. This dividing line between Canada’s Columbia Range and the Continental Rockies consists of the artificial Kinbasket Reservoir and segments of three rivers, namely the upper Fraser, the upper Columbia, and the Kootenay.
Geographic location is not the only characteristic which distinguishes these great conjoined mountain ranges. Unlike the world-renowned Rockies, whose resort towns like Banff, Jasper, and Lake Louise attract millions of tourists every year, Canada’s Columbia Mountains are comparatively silent and desolate, home to sleepy mountain towns like Nelson, Revelstoke, and Kimberly. Instead of the crisp, clear mountain air which drifts down from the snow-capped peaks of its eastern counterpart, the forests of the Columbia seem to be permeated by a thick, dreamy atmosphere redolent of enchantment and ancient secrets; an unnerving aura which stimulates the primitive urge to look over one’s shoulder. Mystery, rather than majesty, is the essence of this region.
For centuries, the indigenous peoples of Canada’s Columbia Mountains have maintained that they share their traditional territory with mountain-dwelling giants who abide in the region’s most desolate crags and canyons. The lower Kootenai Indians, who lived along the shores of the lower Kootenai River and Kootenay Lake, rarely venturing east onto the prairies for the annual buffalo hunt like their upper Kootenai cousins to the east, believed that the giants who haunted their country were simple-minded creatures who could be killed through trickery. In his 1918 book Kutenai Tales, German-American anthropologist Franz Boas included a traditional Kootenai story which told of a young hunter who transformed into a giant after eating some of his own flesh. When he started killing and eating his own friends and family, his fellow band members lured him into a cliff-side trap overlooking Kootenai Lake and pushed him to his death in the water below.
Throughout the 20th Century, residents of the traditional territory of the Lower Kootenay Indians, which make up the eastern half of what is known today as the West Kootenays, have come forward with reports of huge hairy wildmen reminiscent of the legendary giants of regional legend. In both his 1975 book The Search for Bigfoot and his 2015 book The Hunt for Bigfoot, Sasquatch researcher Peter Byrne claimed that he and his peers often collectively referred to the West Kootenays, the adjoining Interior Plateau, and northern Idaho as ‘Area II’, these regions cumulatively having the second highest concentration of Bigfoot sightings in North America after Area I: the Pacific Northwest. Apparently unaware of the many wildman stories to come out of northern and eastern Canada, Byrne wrote, “There are no records in the files of the Bigfoot Information Center, either from sightings or from footprint findings or other evidence, of any credible Bigfoot activity outside of [Areas I and II].”
In his 1973 book The Sasquatch File, Canadian journalist John Green listed an alleged encounter with one of one of the wildmen of Area II which took place near the town of Invermere, a popular summer vacation destination on the northwestern shores of Windermere Lake, located on the western face of the Rocky Mountain Trench. According to Rene Dahinden, Green’s friend and fellow Sasquatch researcher who collected this regrettably-vague report, an anonymous man saw a white or grey Sasquatch west of town sometime in the 1960s.
West of Kootenay territory, in the lonely lake country in the southwestern corner of the Columbia Mountains, is the historic domain of the Sinixt [sin-EYE-xt], an Interior Salish people whom anthropologists once called the Lakes Indians. Closely related to their westerly Okanagan cousins, the Sinixt hunted alpine game in the Valhalla Mountains, and paddled their unique pine bark sturgeon-nosed canoes up and down Slocan Lake and the Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes. Pressured by silver miners and Doukhobor settlers who took up residence in the area in the late 1800s, the Sinixt gradually relocated to the Colville Valley in Washington, and were officially declared an extinct First Nation by the Canadian government in 1956 – a policy which was revoked in 2021.
Although little formal academic work has been done on traditional Sinixt culture, there is evidence that the Lake Indians’ western kin firmly believed in the existence of alpine giants. In her 1892 essay, Account of the Similkameen Indians of British Columbia, Scots-Canadian pioneer Susan Allison described some of the giants stories told to her by her Okanagan Indian friends, who hailed from the Similkameen River west of Okanagan Lake. “There are numerous other stories that the old men are fond of relating while sitting round their camp fires,” she wrote. “One in particular struck me… In the mountains there live certain huge men; these men are so large that a deer, hung by its neck in their belts, looks no larger than a chicken would in a man’s – the earth trembles as it echoes their tread…” These giants, Allison’s informants claimed, resembled white men with long beards. Although they were kindly disposed to humans, they sometimes captured lone hunters and carried them back to their caves, where they kept them as pets. Natives who managed to escape such captivity related that the giants were sensitive to pain, and shed tears if they sustained the slightest injury.
Despite their relative seclusion, the ancestral hunting grounds of the Sinixt were the scene of several classic 20th Century wildman sightings, the subjects of which, it must be mentioned, bear little resemblance to the giants of Similkameen Okanagan legend. Among the most sensational of such reports was the experience of John Bringsli, a veteran woodsman from Nelson, British Columbia who had hunted and fished in the West Kootenays for more than 35 years prior to the adventure in question.
Over the years, several slightly different versions of Bringli’s story have appeared in print, not all of which agree on the date on which the experience took place. In his books The Sasquatch File, Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, and On the Track of Sasquatch, Green dated the encounter to August 1960. Nearly all British Columbian newspaper articles which covered the story stated or implied that the encounter took place in September 1960. And Bringsli himself, during an interview with John Green and his fellow Sasquatch researcher Bob Titmus, erroneously declared that the event took place on August 7th, 1962, nearly two years after his story first appeared in B.C. newspapers.
Another detail on which sources butt heads is the location at which the sighting occurred. Although most publications which covered the story agreed that the incident took place near the headwaters of a stream called Lemon Creek (often misspelled “Lemmon Creek”), few were able to pinpoint this area geographically, most newspaper articles erroneously stating that the headwaters were located six miles east of Nelson. In fact, Lemon Creek has its origins the Selkirk Mountains about sixteen miles northeast of Nelson, at the western edge of Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park, one of the oldest parks in the province. The creek flows west for about twelve miles before emptying into the Slocan River about four miles south of its head at Slocan Lake. According to an old local legend occasionally referenced in regional newspapers, a group of miners headed up Lemon Creek at the turn of the 20th Century and were never seen again.
In his various statements to reporters and Sasquatch researchers, Bringsli made it clear that his sighting took place in the bush off an old logging road which branched off Six Mile Road, the latter being a rugged mountain trail which veers off the BC Highway 3A about five miles northeast of Nelson before winding north into the Selkirk Mountains, terminating about seven miles southwest of the headwaters of Lemon Creek. Taken together, Bringli’s various statements place his encounter in the vicinity of a small body of water fittingly named Sasquatch Lake, which lies just south of Lemon Creek, about 3.5 miles north of the terminus of Six Mile Road.
Despite their spatial and temporal discrepancies, most sources which covered Bringsli’s story generally agreed on the substance of the woodsman’s encounter. On the weekend in question, at about 7:30 in the morning, Bringsli parked his 1931 coupe on a deserted logging road and headed into the bush with a bucket, intending to pick huckleberries. Bringli found a promising berry patch about 100 to 200 yards from the road and went down on his knees to harvest.
After about fifteen minutes, Bringsli rose to his feet, having stripped that particular bush of its fruit. As he did so, his eyes came to rest on an enormous hairy animal standing about 40-50 feet away, on a slight rise in the ground. “At first I thought it was… a bear,” the woodsman told Green and Titmus in their interview, “but then I looked closer at it and realized it wasn’t an animal. It was more like a human being.” The creature, which Bringsli intuitively believed to be male, stood from seven to nine feet tall, and had very wide shoulders. It had no neck, giving Bringsli the impression that its head was fastened directly to its shoulders. Its face was apelike, and its ears lay flat against the sides of its head. It had humanlike hands complete with fingernails.
Whether through mistranscription or Bringsli’s own inconsistency, various sources provide two opposing descriptions of the relative length of the creature’s arms and legs. An article in the October 4th, 1960 issue of Nelson’s Daily News quoted Bringsli as saying that the wildman had “long legs and short, powerful arms” – a statement echoed in other contemporary newspaper articles. Conversely, an article in the February 1961 issue of the magazine Fate quoted the woodsman as saying the creature had “long arms and short powerful legs.” In his interview with Green and Titmus, Bringsli reiterated the enormity of the wildman’s arms, comparing them to a man’s thighs.
Whatever the proportions of its limbs, the creature’s entire body was covered with hair, which Bringsli estimated to be about four inches long, and described as being smooth rather than shaggy. Unlike the dark or red-brown Sasquatch seen from time to time on the Pacific Coast, this creature’s coat was of a peculiar steel-grey colour with a bluish tint. “It looked terrible to me,” Bringsli said, “like a terrific human being.”
With a thrill of terror, Bringsli realized that the unusual creature was watching him with what he perceived to be an air of curiosity. “Its head was cocked to the side like it was trying to figure out what I was doing…” the woodsman said. “I wouldn’t say it looked menacing at all… but it was sure curious to see what I was doing.”
Paralyzed with fear, Bringsli stood and stared at the creature, which initially seemed content to study its human visitor from afar. After about two minutes, however, the creature suddenly began to walk toward Bringsli, spurring the woodsman into action. Abandoning his huckleberry pail, the terrified woodsman made a dash for his vehicle, leapt into the driver’s seat, and peeled down the logging road.
Bringsli returned to the scene of his encounter the following day, armed with a rifle and accompanied by several friends. Although the giant made no appearance that day, the monster hunters managed to find one of its footprints impressed in the forest floor. The track measured between 16 and 17 inches in length, and had what Bringsli described as a “sharp toe” print.
“At the time,” wrote Green in his book Sasquatch: The Apes Among Us, “I knew of no other reports from that southeast corner of the province, which made his story hard to accept, because my father had grown up at Kaslo, my grandmother still lived there, and they had never heard a rumour or even a legend of such a thing. Since that time, however, there have been more than a dozen additional reports from that vicinity.”
In the wake of Bringsli’s encounter, the Nelson Chamber of Commerce, recognizing that a distinction ought to be made between the alleged wildman of the West Kootenays and its more famous counterparts in the Pacific Northwest and the Himalayas, proposed that the monster of Lemon Creek be given its own moniker. An article in the Calgary Herald helpfully proffered the nicknames “Kooteneer,” the “Nasty Nonsuch of Nelson,” and, as a playful nod to the lone track discovered by Bringsli and company, “the “Lone-Legged Legend of Lemon Creek.”
In the decades following Bringsli’s encounter, other residents of the Slocan Valley, the Valhalla Range, and the Arrow Lakes region came to John Green and other Sasquatch researchers with their own wildman stories. In The Sasquatch File, Green described the experience of Dennis Merlo, an employee of the city of Trail, British Columbia, which lies on the Columbia River not far from the Montana border. Merlo told Green that in June 1970, he and one of his co-workers found large humanlike tracks in a patch of dry mud on a hillside near Trail fronting the Columbia River. These five-toed footprints had a length of 12-14 inches, and a width of six inches.
One year after Merlo’s discovery, a similar find was made in New Denver, British Columbia, a village on the northeastern shores of Slocan Lake. Sometime in the summer of 1971, locals Robin Flewin and Rick Dankoski came across mysterious humanlike footprints on a road near Silverton Creek, a waterway which runs west through the Silkirk Mountains, paralleling Lemon Creek, before draining into Slocan Lake at New Denver. The tracks were two inches deep, and were 17 inches long and 6 inches wide.
About a year and a half later, another set of mysterious footprints were found near the city of Castlegar, British Columbia, which sits at the confluence of the Columbia and Kootenay Rivers about 20 miles southwest of Nelson. On December 24th, 1972, a local named Mrs. Gail Davidson phoned Green to tell him that her husband had found 16-inch-long humanlike footprints on a trail on a hill behind their house. The tracks proceeded down the trail for about 150 yards before veering into the bush.
Two years later, Castlegar was the scene of another strange experience more conducive to the circulation. This story was picked by American Sasquatch researcher Peter Byrne, founder of the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles, Oregon, who heard it from the witnesses themselves. One night in 1974, a young American couple who insisted on their anonymity drove north of Castlegar, bound for the town of Silverton, just south of New Denver. “As they came around a corner on the Castlegar-Silverton highway,” Byrne wrote, “they saw a huge, dark brown or black, hairy figure standing on the edge of the hardtop. Both occupants of the car saw it at the same time and both were shocked at what they saw. They were adamant in their description that the creature was not a grizzly bear. They saw its arms, clearly, hanging by its side and they saw its head, well-rounded and not at all bearlike. The creature stood perfectly still as they passed. They did not stop. They did not turn around and go back. Theirs was an eerie feeling, seeing that giant lonely creature standing solitary on that bleak roadside. They felt, with a gentle philosophy which we admired, that perhaps it was best left alone.”
North of traditional Sinixt territory, from the Columbia River north of Upper Arrow Lake through Wells Gray Provincial Park, lies the homeland of the Shuswap, another Interior Salish people whose elders and storytellers spoke of mountain giants. Interestingly, according to the great Canadian geologist Dr. George Mercer Dawson in his 1892 Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia, the Shuswap “aver that unknown beings sometimes throw stones at them, particularly at night, when stones may be noticed occasionally falling into the fire.” Mysterious nocturnal stone throwing is an activity which both Sasquatch researchers and the natives of the subarctic have attributed to the Canadian wildman.
Like their southerly counterparts, the northern Columbia Mountains have produced several hair-raising wildman stories, many of which appear in classic Sasquatch books like John Green’s. In November 1951, for example, a prospector from Kitchener, Ontario, told Rene Dahinden of a disturbing experience he had near the village of McBride, British Columbia, which lies on the western shores of the Fraser River about forty miles downriver of the ghost town of Tete Jaune Cache. After a day of panning and rock sampling, the anonymous informant and his prospecting partner returned to their lean-to to find that someone or something had slept in it during their absence. Before fleeing the scene, this mysterious alpine Goldilocks had also helped himself a half-eaten mountain goat which the prospectors had suspended from a tree. The only clue as to the identity of their late unpaying tenant lay in the fresh snow that surrounded their campsite, namely barefoot, humanlike footprints measuring 15-16 inches in length.
More than two decades later, another set of mysterious footprints were discovered in the northern frontier of traditional Shuswap territory. In the late autumn of 1970, an anonymous engineer employed by B.C. Hydro, British Columbia’s main energy supplier, found large barefoot tracks in the snow near the northern end of Wells Gray Park, near the northern tip of the Columbia Mountains. He told his story to George Harris, a Sasquatch researcher from Nordegg, Alberta, who had investigated the Kootenay Plains wildman sightings of 1969, who, in turn, relayed the information to John Green.
Discoveries of strange footprints and sightings of mysterious sylvan giants continue to be made in the Columbia Mountains from time to time by workmen, outdoor adventurers, and local residents, justifying the reputation of Peter Byrne’s Area II. If you ever find yourself in this haunting stretch of British Columbia, keep your eyes peeled. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of the region’s elusive wildman, whom history has christened the ‘Kooteneer’.
Kootenay Legends
Sightings in the West Kootenays
Okanagan Legends
John Bringsli’s Encounter
More Bigfoot Sightings in the West Kootenays
Kootenay Legends