Trapline Worker's 17-Year Diary Chronicles Unknown Being Encounters

There's something about a quiet, methodical account that hits harder than any scream in the woods ever could. A video recently surfaced on the YouTube channel A Friend In The Pines that delivers exactly that — a 68-year-old man named Gerald Parish sitting at his kitchen table in Vanderhoof, British Columbia, reading from a diary his late wife Nora's father kept for 17 years while running a trap line north of Fort St. James. And what that diary contains is, frankly, one of the most remarkable long-term observational records of Sasquatch behavior I've ever come across. Gerald found the diary in 1989 but honored a promise to Nora not to read it. It wasn't until October 2001, three weeks after Edouard Corbeil's death, that Nora finally opened it herself and called Gerald in. What Edouard had written across 411 pages was a sustained, careful, almost clinical documentation of his encounters with a being he never once tried to name. He just described it. With the precision of a man who had worked as a surveyor and packer, he logged track dimensions, stride length, substrate depth, and bearing — the kind of detail that makes researchers sit up and pay attention. The first formal entry is dated the second week of November 1953. Edouard was alone at the main cabin while his trapping partner Felix Dumont had gone south for supplies. On Tuesday evening, something heavy circled the cabin and stopped at the door. Gerald reads that Edouard described hearing breathing he could not account for — low, regular, not agitated — lasting about four minutes before footsteps moved away. In the morning, a grouse was laid neatly on the step, neck broken cleanly, not torn. The same tracks from the prior week were in the snow. Wednesday brought the same pattern. Thursday, Edouard opened the door. The discussion cuts off right there, which honestly makes this video worth watching on its own — to hear Gerald's voice as he reaches that moment, and to learn what Edouard saw when he finally looked. What makes this account stand out isn't just the duration — 17 years of consistent documentation — but the temperament of the man writing it. Edouard Corbeil was a Quebec-born trapper who came west in 1947, married Doris Hebert, built a farm east of Vanderhoof, sat on the co-op board, went to mass when the roads allowed, and kept his silence about the bush for the last 30 years of his life. His wife Doris, Gerald believes, knew the shape of the secret without needing its contents. When Nora was a girl, Doris told her that her father carried a country inside him that she would never fully enter — and that this was not a failing, but a fact, the way certain mountains have their north faces and their south faces. That kind of framing matters in Sasquatch research. The interior of British Columbia — the Stuart Lake region, the Nechako plateau, the vast stretches of spruce and muskeg north of Fort St. James — has long been considered prime habitat by researchers. The terrain is exactly what you'd expect: dense old-growth, remote, sparsely populated, with plenty of water and game. Stories from trappers, loggers, and First Nations communities in this part of the province have circulated for generations, often with the same qualities Edouard's diary shows — quiet, precise, and reluctant to name what was seen. What Gerald Parish is doing in this video is something rare. He's not performing. He's not selling a story. He's a man who realized he is the last person alive who can speak to what Edouard Corbeil put in those pages, and he's setting up a recorder on his kitchen table the way Nora's niece showed him, and he's telling it straight. The battered tin cup sitting beside the diary on the table — he promises to explain it before he's finished. If you haven't watched this one yet, do yourself a favor and go find it. It's the kind of video that reminds you why the old trapline accounts still matter — and why the people who kept them rarely talked.