Alaska Bear Guard Details 1997 Encounter With 11 Bigfoots

This one stopped me in my tracks. A video surfaced on The Boreal Files channel featuring a firsthand account from a man named Gary Toliffson, a lifelong Alaskan who spent the summer of 1997 working as a bear guard for a small mining company called North Cape Minerals on the south end of Prince of Wales Island. What he describes is the kind of encounter that makes you sit up straight and forget to breathe. Gary grew up on boats in southeast Alaska, the long panhandle of islands that hangs down along the Canadian border. After blowing out his back hauling a skiff line in 1990, he transitioned from commercial fishing to bear guarding, a job most folks have never heard of. When mining companies send geologists into the bush, someone has to watch the brush while everyone else watches the rocks. That was Gary. He carried a 12-gauge loaded with slugs, knew his bears, and wasn't a man who scared easy. The woods were his office. The camp sat on a flat bench at the head of a long bay on the east side of the south end of Prince of Wales, opening out onto Clarence Strait. Six WeatherPort tents, a cook shack, a core shack, sleeping quarters, a Hughes 500D helicopter piloted by a quiet Vietnam vet named Terry, and an 18-foot aluminum skiff run by Lester Frank, a Haida boatman with hands carved from the same wood as a boat. The geologists were Pete from Calgary and Shannon from Fairbanks. The cook was Bonnie Rasmussen, who apparently made cinnamon rolls worth writing home about. Four drillers from Washington State worked around the clock because diamond drills don't take nights off. And Gary watched the timber. June and July were ordinary. Rain, bugs, black bears doing ordinary bear things. A sow with two cubs working the creek when the pinks came in. A big lone boar flipping rocks for crabs at low tide. The electric bear fence kept them out, and nobody worried. Then came August. The first thing Gary noticed was so small he almost didn't mention it. A trail ran from camp up the hill to where the soil crews were working, cut through old-growth spruce and hemlock with trunks five and six feet through. One morning, walking up ahead of Pete and Shannon, he came around a bend and found two sticks laid across the trail in an X. They weren't fallen branches. Things fall in the woods, but they don't arrange themselves into deliberate symbols. What happened next is the part that kept me glued to the screen. The crew had set a trap. A length of steel culvert pipe, four feet across and ten feet long, welded onto an old boat trailer frame and chained to two stumps at the top of a gravel beach. On the morning of September 24th, 1997, the gate on the back end was down. Gary was the first to walk up on it, carrying a shotgun he had no intention of using and a mug of coffee he'd forgotten he was holding. The first thing he saw was a hand. It had come out through one of the ventilation holes cut along the side of the pipe. Four fingers and part of a palm. Dark gray skin that went pale in the creases, pushed through a hole about the size of a coffee can lid. The fingers were opening and closing on the wet air. Gary says it reminded him of a little kid reaching for a railing in the dark. Two days later, the camp woke up and found itself standing inside a ring of them. They counted eleven. They stood in the timber at the edge of the clearing from first light until the fog came down to the water, and nobody fired a shot. Gary has spent twenty-nine years trying to find the words for what it felt like to be looked at by that many of them at once. This is the kind of account that stays with you. A working professional, not a hobbyist or a thrill-seeker, describing a deliberate trap catch and a subsequent standoff with multiple individuals who chose not to approach but absolutely made their presence known. The crossed sticks. The hand reaching through the vent hole. The silent ring of eleven standing watch in the fog. Every detail carries weight. Prince of Wales Island is no stranger to reports either. It's the largest island in southeast Alaska, with dense timber, steep mountains, muskeg meadows, and long bays cutting in from the water. The south end in particular is remote, rugged, and largely roadless. Worth noting that on Prince of Wales, anything big and dark in the timber is supposed to be a black bear. There are no brown bears on that island. That context matters when you think about what Gary saw through that ventilation hole. The full video is over an hour long, and Gary's delivery is the steady, unhurried cadence of a man who has had decades to sit with what happened to him. He doesn't sensationalize. He doesn't embellish. He just tells it the way he lived it, from the deck of his father's boat to the morning he walked up on that culvert pipe with a mug of coffee in his hand. Do yourself a favor and go watch it. This is one of those accounts that reminds you why people keep looking, keep listening, and keep going back into the timber.