Yukon Surveyor Disappears in 1957, Returns Years Later Changed

There's something about first-person accounts from elderly witnesses that hits differently, and this one stopped me in my tracks. A video posted by the YouTube channel What Walks the Woods features a 79-year-old woman named Dorothia Haskell recounting an experience her family has carried in silence for over five decades. It's the kind of testimony that doesn't come around often, and frankly, it's one that deserves to be heard. The story centers on Dorothia's uncle, Felix Betron Goier, a territorial government surveyor based out of Whitehorse who knew the Canol Road intimately from his earlier pipeline maintenance work. For those unfamiliar, the Canol Road is that legendary stretch of remote Yukon wilderness originally built during World War II to support the Canol Pipeline project. It's the kind of country that swallows people, and it's long been whispered about in Sasquatch research circles as prime territory for encounters. In October 1957, Felix went in with a partner named Harley Drummond to survey a section north of the Ross River junction. Harley came back alone on October 19th, having walked two full days to reach the survey office. He told his supervisor Bill Kraton that Felix had left camp before dawn on October 16th to take readings at a ridge and never returned. The description of Harley's condition is haunting, his supervisor later said he looked like "a man who had walked out of something rather than toward something." The search parties that went in found Felix's pack, his transit, his field notebook through October 15th, and one of his boots, a right boot, size nine, with a Vibram sole, standing upright in the mud beside a creek. Standing upright. Without explanation. That detail alone is enough to make any researcher pause. The third search party, organized by Dorothia's mother and her brother-in-law Gustav, included four men from the Kaska community near Ross River who knew that stretch from the war years. They went further than the government teams and came back with something that changed everything. According to Gustav, the Kaska men had seen sign that was not Felix's and not any animal's sign that any of them had a name for. They refused to go back in. For three years, Felix was presumed dead. His file was closed in January 1958. His wife Viven stayed in the house on Lambert Street, never remarried, kept his two shirts folded on the shelf in the bedroom closet, and at some point began leaving a plate of food covered with cloth on the back step. When Clement, Dorothia's brother, asked her about it, she simply said, "For the animals." Then, in September 1960, three years and eleven months after his disappearance, Felix walked into the survey office on 2nd Avenue in Whitehorse at 8:20 in the morning and asked for Bill Kraton. The woman at the front desk, Patricia Sved, told this story twice to Dorothia, thirty years apart, and it was the same both times. She said Felix looked like himself the way a winter birch looks like a summer birch, same structure, same placement, but changed in quality and color and the way it held the light. He was thinner, deeply tanned in a way that didn't belong to September in the Yukon unless a man had been living outside continuously. He had an unmanaged beard. He was wearing his gray flannel shirt, the one Viven had kept in the closet, because it had been in his pack. But the shirt had been mended in three places with a sinew or very heavy thread darker than the flannel, in stitching that Patricia didn't recognize as Felix's or any woman's, but neat and very strong, the kind done by a hand concerned with function above all else. His eyes had changed too. Not the color, still that gray-green the Gouier side carries, but the speed. Patricia described it as the looking of a man who had learned somewhere to assess a space before he occupied it. What Felix told Kraton in that back office, according to a letter Kraton wrote to Dorothia's mother fourteen years later shortly before he died, was that he had fallen on the ridge, suffered a concussion, moved north rather than south in his disorientation, and was eventually found and taken in. He said he had been taken in by a family in the mountains. He did not describe who. When Kraton pressed for more detail, Felix looked at him with what Kraton described as the look of a man who had promised something to someone and intended to keep it. He said he had been injured more seriously than he first understood, that he had been cared for over a long period of time, that he was grateful, and that he was home now. The video's title hints at what Dorothia suggests came next, that Felix returned with Sasquatch children. The full account goes deeper than the discussion captured here, and honestly, this is one of those stories that needs to be heard in its entirety. The pacing, the way Dorothia speaks about her uncle, the details about the Kaska men's reluctance to return, the food left on the back step, the mended shirt, it all builds into something that sits with you long after the video ends. The Canol Road and the surrounding Mackenzie Mountains have a long history in Sasquatch research. The remoteness, the dense spruce, the difficulty of the terrain, it all creates conditions where encounters could happen and remain largely undocumented. Stories like Felix's are exactly why researchers keep digging into these older cases, because the witnesses are aging out, and once they're gone, the details go with them. This one is worth your time. Go watch it.