Trail Contractor Photographs Juvenile Sasquatch Over 11 Days in BC Mountains

There's a story floating around YouTube right now that stopped me in my tracks, and I think anyone who has ever spent time alone in the deep woods needs to hear it. It comes from the channel Bigfoot's Trail, and it details an eleven-day encounter from October 1994 that has only recently come to light, complete with photographs and a handwritten account from the witness himself. The witness is a man named Joel Hartline. He was 34 years old at the time, working as a seasonal trail maintenance contractor for BC Parks in the Babina Mountains northeast of Smithers in interior British Columbia. His job was unglamorous but solitary: culvert repair and drainage work on decommissioned logging roads, the kind of forgotten backcountry that used to bustle with industry and has since been swallowed back by the bush. He worked alone, drove a truck, stayed in a rented cabin at the edge of the valley, and had done this for six seasons without incident. Then came October 3rd. On the walk out from a culvert repair on the old Driftwood Spur, Hartline felt that unmistakable prickle of being watched. He turned around and saw something pale and low to the ground standing in the middle of the gravel road about a hundred meters back. His first instinct was bear cub. His second instinct, the one that comes from years in the bush, was that if there's a cub, there's a sow nearby, and he needed to get to his truck. So he kept walking. It kept walking. He stopped, it stopped. The gap never closed, never widened. Bears don't pace you. Curious bears close in or leave. This thing just matched him, step for step. Then it stepped over a washout. Upright. One leg, then the other, the way a person steps over a puddle. And it never took its eyes off him. What followed over the next eleven days is the kind of account that researchers dream about and rarely get. The pale figure came back the next day. And the next. By the end of the first week, it was sleeping within sight of his cabin. Hartline started leaving food on a stump because he didn't know what else to do with the thing that had attached itself to him. He didn't tell anyone. Who would he have told? He fixed drainage on logging roads, and the thing following him was a young Sasquatch. On the last night, there were five of them standing at the tree line in the light of his cabin. Four full-grown adults and the small pale one. The adults wouldn't let the young one come to the door. Hartline took two photographs with a Canon Sure Shot 35mm camera he kept in the truck. He had them developed at a one-hour lab in Smithers in November of 1994, then put them in a tackle box and didn't show them to anyone for seventeen years. In 2011, he mailed copies of both prints along with a nine-page handwritten account to a researcher in Terrace, BC. That account is the only reason any of this can be told. The details in his written testimony are what make this story stand out. He describes the young one as roughly three and a half feet tall, covered in long matted cream-white hair except on the face and palms, where weathered gray-brown skin showed through. A wide, flat, human-sort of face with no muzzle, a broad flat nose, and a heavy bony ridge already forming over the eyes. But it was the eyes that undid him. They caught the light and threw it back the way an animal's eyes do at night, yet they watched him with a person's awareness. An old man's face on a child's body, he wrote. Every line of a hard life already in it. On the fifth of October, he took the first photograph. The gap had closed to about forty meters on its own terms. When he raised the camera, the young one froze mid-step, pulled both hands up under its chin the way a child does when trying to be small, and stared straight into the lens. On the second frame, his hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped the camera. He walked the rest of that road backward because he couldn't bring himself to turn his back on it, and it walked backward with him, matching his pace step for step. Then he stumbled over a rock he couldn't see behind him and went down hard on one knee. The young one stopped instantly, took one step toward him, then checked itself, caught between coming to him and staying back, the way a dog will start toward a fallen person and then stop because it has learned it is not allowed. Hartline put his hand out, palm toward it, the universal stay gesture. The young one settled back onto both feet and waited. It understood him without a word. Hartline carried a borrowed rifle every day for those eleven days and never once chambered a round. He has spent thirty years trying to understand why, and the closest he can get is that some part of him knew early on that it wouldn't have helped, and some other part of him didn't want it to. The Babina Mountains and the broader interior of BC have long been considered prime habitat by researchers, with vast stretches of old-growth forest, abandoned logging roads, and minimal human presence. The Terrace and Smithers areas in particular have produced a steady stream of reports over the decades, and serious researchers in the region have collected hundreds of accounts from loggers, trappers, and contractors who work alone in exactly this kind of terrain. What makes Hartline's account unusual is the duration of the contact, the proximity, the photographs, and the written record he eventually produced. The video on Bigfoot's Trail walks through Hartline's account in his own words, as close to the original as possible, and includes discussion of the photographs and the circumstances under which they finally surfaced. It's worth watching in full because the way Hartline describes the final night, with the family arriving at the tree line, carries a weight that a summary can't fully capture. Stories like this one remind me why I keep coming back to this subject. The woods remember things we forget, and sometimes, if you're quiet enough and alone enough, they let you see.