1952 Rail Watchman's Mysterious Deer Meat Deliveries in British Columbia

There's something about a story that's been carried in silence for over three decades that makes it hit differently. That's exactly what you'll find in this video from the YouTube channel Beyond The Treeline, where a 71-year-old man finally shares what his father told him on a hospital bed back in 1991. The narrator's father, Hector Coleman, spent 18 years as a section foreman for CN Rail, working the Rogers Pass corridor in the Selkirks near Revelstoke, British Columbia. If you've ever studied Sasquatch reports from that region, you know the Selkirk Mountains are practically sacred ground for sightings. The dense old-growth forests, the rugged terrain, the heavy snowfall that keeps human presence limited for months at a time, it's the kind of country where a large, reclusive hominid could thrive undetected for generations. The story centers on the winter of 1952 into 1953. Hector's crew was staged above Revelstoke doing maintenance on a timber trestle when an avalanche closed the supply road in early December, far earlier than anyone expected. The narrator actually went through CN archives in 1994 and found the maintenance log confirming a 69-day gap between supply deliveries. Fourteen men in camp, food stores for about 30 days, and hunting supplementing rations through January. By the end of January, the main camp was on less than half rations. Hector drew watchman duty at the trestle shelter three times across January and February. The shelter sat about two miles from the main camp, a small 8-by-10 structure with a sheet iron stove, positioned below an overhanging rock face. During his second posting, when rations had become genuinely difficult, he woke on the second morning to find a package outside the door. It was wrapped in fresh inner bark from a fir tree, folded over and around something, tied with a strip of the same bark. Inside was a hind quarter from something in the deer family, with a clean, deliberate dress cut at the joint. Not a jagged break, not a tear, but a clean cut that told Hector whoever processed it knew exactly what they were doing. Here's the detail that the narrator says he's spent 33 years returning to: there were no tracks in the snow around the shelter door. This happened three times across six weeks of starvation. Hector never saw who, or what, was leaving the meat. He never heard anything approach. He just woke up to find food wrapped in bark outside his door, with no footprints to explain how it got there. What makes this account stand out is the credibility of the witness. Hector Coleman wasn't a man prone to storytelling. He spent nearly two decades in a job where precision meant the difference between life and death, where you were responsible for whether a track was safe enough to put 100 tons of steel across at 60 miles an hour. When he finally told his son this story from his hospital bed, he made him promise not to repeat it until everyone who might have used it against the creature was gone. The men from that camp are dead. The supervisors are dead. And now, 33 years later, his son has decided the time is right. The narrator also mentions his own 18 years doing similar work on the same corridor, which is why he can translate his father's account into such precise detail. He knows the sound of the creek under ice at night. He knows the kind of structure his father is describing. He's not embellishing, he's translating. This is the kind of firsthand account that researchers dream about. A credible, steady, working-class man with no reason to fabricate, describing a direct, repeated interaction with something that left him food during a starving winter, wrapped in bark, with no tracks to be found. The Selkirks have a long history of similar reports, and stories like this one only add to the weight of evidence that something is out there, watching, and occasionally, choosing to help. Definitely worth the time to sit down and watch this one. The level of detail, the emotional weight of a son honoring his father's dying wish, and the archival verification of the supply road closure all come together to make this one of the more compelling Sasquatch encounter stories to surface in a while.