Four Witnesses Describe Bigfoot Encounters on Alaska's Denali Highway

The Denali Highway in interior Alaska is one of those remote stretches of road that has long been whispered about in Sasquatch research circles. It runs 135 miles of gravel between the towns of Paxton and Canwell, with no cell service across almost the entire length and no fuel between the two ends in the offseason. The road is closed by snow from mid-October to mid-May — seven months of the year it simply doesn't exist as a place you can drive. For the few months it is open, it's the kind of place where if something happens out there, you're on your own. That's what makes what unfolded between June and September of 2024 so striking. Four separate drivers, none of whom knew each other, all reported the same thing on this same stretch of remote Alaskan road. And all four of them stopped talking about it afterward. I came across a video recently that walks through these accounts in detail, and it's the kind of thing that stays with you long after it's over. The first witness was Naen Proser, a 52-year-old fourth-grade teacher from Canwell who had been driving that road for years to meet her sister for lunch at a lodge by the McLaren River. On the morning of June 16th, she came over a rise and saw something standing on the far side of the McLaren River Bridge. At first she thought it was a person, then a bear, then realized it was neither. It was standing upright, holding a dead Dall sheep against its chest with both arms. It was taller than her car. Covered in dark, rust-colored hair that was wet and matted down on the shoulders and chest. The face was wide and flat with a heavy ridge over the eyes and a broad nose. The eyes caught the light and threw it back the way a dog's eyes do at night — except it was morning. What struck me most about her account wasn't just the sighting itself. It was what happened next. As she approached, the figure stepped back off the road to let her pass. It moved out of her way. Whatever it was, it understood that the road was hers, and it was polite about it. She crossed that bridge faster than she'd ever driven on gravel in her life, and for the next four months she told everyone — her sister, a ranger, herself — that it had been a grizzly. But she never drove that road alone again, and she never once looked in her rearview mirror on the Denali. The second witness was Rich Sandival, a 58-year-old registered hunting guide with 31 seasons behind him — a man who knew the Alaskan wilderness intimately and had packed out more meat than he could weigh. He was hauling a client's caribou back toward Paxton on the afternoon of August 28th when he felt his load shift about four miles west of the McLaren Bridge. The third was Dale Kettering, a 37-year-old welder from Delta Junction who was on the road in the dark on the night of September 8th. He left his truck at mile 122 and never came back for it. When a road contractor towed it in before the snow buried it that October, Kettering paid the fee over the phone and told the contractor to keep anything inside he wanted. Within a year, he'd moved out of Alaska. The fourth was a woman named Melody Olsen, 34, from Glennallen. She never told anyone else what she saw that September. What ties all four of these accounts together is that each of them used the same word in the Bureau of Land Management visitor contact log — a log that the BLM field office in Glennallen keeps for each season. None of them had spoken to the others. Two of them didn't even know the others existed. There's also a four-page written statement taken by an Alaska State Trooper at the Canwell Post in the early morning hours of September 9th, signed by Dale Kettering in a shaking hand. The video presents these accounts in the witnesses' own words, and it's worth watching just to hear how they describe what they saw — and how they describe the aftermath. Proser left Alaska in the spring of 2025 and moved to Washington State to be near her sister. Sandival let his guide registration lapse after 31 seasons and gave no reason. Kettering abandoned his truck and left the state. Only Olsen stayed, but she doesn't open the door when people come asking. For anyone who has spent time researching Sasquatch encounters in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, the Denali Highway corridor has long been considered prime territory. The Alaska Range, the vast open tundra, the remoteness — it all adds up to a place where a large, intelligent, reclusive hominid could exist without being detected. The Alaska wilderness has produced some of the most compelling Sasquatch reports on record, from the famous Lake Iliamna accounts to the ongoing sightings