Retired Canadian Warden Shares Decades of Sasquatch Family Sightings

A retired Canadian park warden has come forward with what might be one of the most detailed and sustained accounts of Sasquatch activity ever recorded by a credentialed professional. The testimony, shared on the YouTube channel A Friend In The Pines, comes from a man named Gil Sove, who spent 26 years as a backcountry warden for Parks Canada, with the last 22 stationed in Zone 4 of Jasper National Park, a remote watershed district covering roughly 340 square kilometers between the Snake Indian River and the Wilmore Wilderness Boundary. What makes this account stand out isn't just another sighting story. It's the documentation, the duration, and the deliberate choice this man made to protect what he found. Sove describes his first encounter on October 23, 1979, while on horseback patrol in the Adolphus Lake Basin. His horse, a bay gelding named Corbo who had never spooked at a grizzly in three years of service, went completely rigid. At the treeline, approximately 130 meters away, stood a figure fully upright, dark chestnut brown fading to charcoal at the shoulders, broader than any man he had ever seen, watching him with a steadiness that carried no animal panic. The encounter lasted only moments before the figure stepped backward into the spruce and vanished. But Sove didn't stop there. He returned on foot five days later and found what the snow had preserved: humanoid footprints measuring approximately 20 inches long and 8 inches wide, with a stride of roughly 5 feet. He documented these measurements in a private notebook, separate from anything he ever submitted to the district office. Over the following years, Sove's observations expanded. By autumn of 1980, he realized he wasn't tracking a single individual. He describes waking before dawn to a vocalization, two tones held at once, a lower and higher note running together in a repeating pattern that he insists was neither animal nor human but something that "knew the difference between those categories and lived in the space between them." When he investigated at first light, he found three sets of prints: one matching his original measurements, one slightly smaller, and one small enough that he knelt beside it and placed his hand next to the track, contemplating what a proportionate being would mean. This is the kind of detail that researchers dream about. A trained observer with decades of wilderness experience, using professional track-documentation tools, keeping meticulous private records over 22 years, and choosing silence over institutional recognition because he understood what government attention would bring to sensitive wildlife situations. Sove explains his reasoning plainly. He was a warden. His obligation was to the park service, to documentation, to the chain of command running from his patrol district to Ottawa. But he had seen how institutional attention resolved in other wildlife cases, always in the interests of the institution rather than the subject. So he falsified his patrol logs. He kept the Adolphus Basin off the official records. And he watched over a family for over two decades. The emotional weight of this testimony is significant. Sove recorded this on April 14, 2024, at his kitchen table in Hinton, Alberta, five months after his wife Colette passed away in November 2023. His closest friend and fellow warden, Denny Ashenol, had died in March 2021. These were the only two people who knew what he knew. He promised Colette he would someday tell the story, and someday, as he puts it, ran out of room. This is exactly the type of account that deserves attention from anyone serious about Sasquatch research. A credentialed professional with 26 years of service, private documentation spanning decades, physical evidence including track measurements, vocalization descriptions, and behavioral observations of what appears to be a family group maintaining territory in one of the most remote wilderness areas in the Canadian Rockies. The Jasper region has long been part of the broader Sasquatch territory that researchers have mapped across British Columbia and Alberta, with the dense wilderness and limited human access providing ideal habitat. Zone 4, with its watershed country, open meadows, and the kind of terrain that elk herd to in October and grizzlies use late into November, fits the profile of areas where sustained Sasquatch habitation would be plausible. Sove's account raises important questions about how many other professionals may have made similar choices over the years, choosing protection over documentation, knowing that official channels would likely do more harm than good. His private notebook, kept in a cedar box under his bed for over four decades, represents a kind of evidence that rarely surfaces in this field. This video is absolutely worth the time to watch in full. The pacing, the detail, and the emotional honesty of a 74-year-old man finally telling a story he carried alone for most of his adult life, it all adds up to something that feels genuinely significant. Whether you're a longtime researcher or someone just curious about what might be living in the deep woods of Alberta, this is the kind of testimony that sticks with you.