Rene Dahinden Discusses Sasquatch Hunt in Vintage BC Radio Interview

Digging through YouTube can be a real goldmine sometimes, and stumbling across this vintage clip from the Real Eyes Tv channel was an absolute treat. It's an old radio interview that originally aired on CJIB in Vernon, British Columbia, featuring a young Swiss mountaineer named Renee de Hinden who became obsessed with tracking down the legendary Sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest. What makes this piece so fascinating is the time period it captures. Back in the 1950s, when de Hinden first arrived in Canada from Switzerland, the conversation around these hairy giants was already deeply rooted in Indigenous tradition and frontier folklore. The interview, conducted by journalist Naira Groves, dives into why de Hinden believed so strongly in the existence of the Sasquatch and what drove him to risk everything to find them. According to de Hinden, the Sasquatch were described by the Indigenous peoples as beings standing 7 to 8 feet tall, broad-shouldered, with white faces, flat noses, and long hair covering their entire bodies. Their arms reportedly reached below their knees, they walked hunched over, and left footprints measuring up to 22 inches long. Those are some seriously massive tracks, the kind that would stop anyone dead in their tracks on a quiet trail. The interview also walks through some of the earliest documented encounters. There's the 1846 account from a Hudson Bay Company inspector near Harrison Lake who wrote about being met with a bombardment of rocks thrown by a group of Sasquatch. Then there's the chilling story from the Harrison Hot Springs Hotel in the early 1940s, where a guest spotted a hairy giant standing between the trees before it vanished when others came to investigate. One of the most compelling stories shared is the Chapman family incident at Ruby Creek around 1945. Mrs. Chapman was home alone with her young son and baby when her child came running in, terrified, describing a "big cow" that had stepped over the fence. Looking out the window, Mrs. Chapman saw a massive hairy figure approaching the house. She grabbed her kids and ran down toward the Fraser River and the CNR railroad tracks, hiding until her husband returned that evening. The Sasquatch had entered their woodshed, tasted the barrel of salted fish, disliked it, and tossed the whole barrel outside before moving on. The family packed up and left shortly after. Stories like these really highlight how unsettling these encounters must have been for families living in remote areas. De Hinden also references Mr. Burns, a well-known authority on the Sasquatch and a former Indian school teacher and government agent who spent 16 years at the Chehalis Indian Reserve. Burns wrote about the Sasquatch in Maclean's magazine back in 1929 and noted that the Indigenous families would keep their children home from school whenever the Sasquatch were known to be in the area, fearing their kids would be taken. When asked how a tribe could remain undetected for so long in British Columbia's rugged terrain, de Hinden made a lot of sense. The interior wilderness offered everything they would need to survive, including brown bears, black bears, grizzlies, mountain goats, deer, birds, roots, and berries. He suspected they lived in caves and stored food during the summer to get through the harsh winters. His first expedition took him and his team flying into Harrison Hot Springs, then by boat up Harrison Lake toward Mount Breakenridge, which rises to 7,825 feet, and further west into unnamed mountain ranges. Even in the middle of summer, snow was present down to 3,500 feet. Two months of searching turned up nothing, but de Hinden remained convinced they were out there. He talked about needing better equipment, including movie cameras with telephoto lenses and powerful telescopes, to properly document any future encounters. His plans included searching south of the Hope-Princeton Highway in the spring and heading north of the Fraser River toward Garibaldi Park in the summer, where the weather would be more forgiving. When asked how long it might take to get real results, de Hinden simply said it could take a week, a month, a year, or even longer, but he was sure they would succeed. His wife, also interviewed briefly, expressed confidence in his mission, noting that the Sasquatch were likely just deeply afraid of people and that with enough time and support, he would find them. The interview wraps up with a thought-provoking question that still resonates today. How much of these stories are legend, and how much is fact? If the Sasquatch do exist, what are they? A wild tribe, or descendants of stone age people? A successful discovery could rank among the major scientific finds of the 20th century. This kind of historical footage is gold for anyone interested in the long history of Sasquatch research. The fact that de Hinden was treated seriously on broadcast radio, and that journalists were genuinely curious about his findings, shows just how deeply embedded this subject has been in Pacific Northwest culture for generations. Definitely worth checking out the full clip over on the Real Eyes Tv channel for anyone who wants to hear the original broadcast.