A fresh wave of Bigfoot reports out of Ohio has people squinting at treelines again – and if you spend any time hiking west of Calgary, that habit might not be entirely unreasonable. Sasquatch sightings in Alberta go back further than most people realise, and some of them are considerably harder to wave away than a blurry photograph.
Alberta's Sasquatch Record Is Longer Than You'd Expect
The earliest documented account dates to 1811, when explorer David Thompson reportedly came across enormous human-like footprints near what is now Jasper National Park. It was, to be fair, a period when the Canadian wilderness was full of things that hadn't been formally catalogued yet – but footprints are footprints.
More than a century and a half later, in 1977, the RCMP found themselves in the unusual position of investigating a set of tracks near Manyberries. The prints measured nearly 18 inches long, showed five distinct toes, and appeared in fresh snow outside a train station.
The Mounties looked into it. No explanation was ever confirmed. The file presumably sits in a drawer somewhere, next to some other paperwork nobody particularly wants to revisit.
The Nordegg Sightings and the Problem With Dismissing a Crowd
In between those two events, something was apparently happening near Nordegg. In 1969, multiple residents reported encounters with a seven-foot-tall, hair-covered figure in the surrounding area.
This wasn't a single witness on a long hike with low blood sugar – the sightings were frequent enough, and from enough different people, that they've held their place in Rocky Mountain folklore for more than fifty years. That's a long time for a story to stick around if there's genuinely nothing to it.
The Ghost Lake Report and the Problem With Bears
Reports have also emerged closer to the Bow Valley corridor. A resident near Ghost Lake in Rocky View County once described watching a large, dark figure moving upright along a treeline before it disappeared into the forest. The witness's first instinct was bear – reasonable enough, given the area – until the figure kept walking on two legs without slowing down.
Wildlife experts are reliably sensible about all of this. Most sightings, they'll tell you, come down to bears, unusual shadows, or the specific kind of misidentification that happens when someone is already a little nervous on a trail. That's almost certainly true the vast majority of the time.
What's Actually Out There (Probably)
The recent Ohio incident – four separate reports over a single weekend near Mantua, with witnesses describing a nine-foot creature that apparently smelled strongly of cat urine – was enough to get Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, on record saying that multiple sightings clustering in the same location within days is genuinely unusual.
Even by Sasquatch standards.
Whether or not you find any of this convincing, the wilderness surrounding the Canadian Rockies is vast, genuinely remote in places, and home to wildlife that can still surprise experienced hikers. Kananaskis, Waiparous, Ghost Lake – these are not places where you always know exactly what's moving through the trees.
The next time something large shifts in the undergrowth on a quiet trail, it's almost certainly an elk. And if it isn't, well – at least you'll have a story that's considerably more interesting than another photo of Lake Louise.