79-Year-Old Surveyor Shares 1957 Bigfoot Encounter From BC Interior

There's something about a witness who can give you exact measurements and bearings that makes a story land differently. That's exactly what makes this recent upload from the Beyond The Treeline channel worth sitting down for. The video features Xavier du Puis, a 79-year-old retired road surveyor from British Columbia, speaking into a recorder at his kitchen table in Clearwater. He begins by explaining that his wife Odette passed away eight weeks prior, and that she made him promise to finally share what he's been carrying for 53 years. Their daughter Simone is meant to receive the recording. What follows is one of the more methodical and quietly compelling firsthand encounters I've come across in a while. Xavier was 26 in October 1957, working as a junior surveyor for a provincial roads camp near McKenzie Pass in the BC interior. His wife Odette was eight months pregnant and had come along for the season. The camp had 12 men and three families, with a foreman named Felix Cauet and a cook named Paulette Archambault. On the evening of October 21st, Xavier went up the survey line after supper to check three stakes he was worried had shifted during blasting. He had a hand lantern, a compass, and his notebook. He told Paulette he'd be back for the last coffee of the night. He never made it back on time. The cloud came in lower than predicted, visibility on the granite shelf above the tree line dropped to about 15 feet, and the orange flagging on the return trail disappeared in the mist. He drifted west of the survey line, realized it within 20 minutes, took a compass bearing, and started working his way back east along the face of the shelf. When the lantern died, he sat down against the rock and waited for his eyes to adjust. That's when the mist started making a sound. Not wind, he clarifies, but something with internal structure, almost like a tonal phrase that repeated twice and shifted by a half step. Then the temperature changed. Not a general warming, but a directional warmth from his left, accompanied by a smell he describes as bark and deep soil and something older he never found a word for. He felt the breathing before he saw anything. Slow, low, lower than a resting man's. Each exhale carried that sound again. When his eyes adjusted, he could make out the outline against the gray of the mist. Standing on two legs. Shoulders at least four feet wide. Standing height somewhere between eight and nine feet, which he later confirmed against the nine-foot granite face at his back that he had already measured during survey work. Long arms, large head set low on the shoulders. A shape that was clearly not human, and yet carried no threat in it. What struck me about Xavier's telling is how he keeps returning to the precision of his own awareness. He wasn't delirious. He wasn't panicking. He was a man solving a technical problem in the dark, and he wants his daughter to understand that. He describes himself as still and attentive, the way a surveyor learns to be still and attentive, and notes that a still man is harder to disturb than a moving one. The encounter, as he tells it, was not a thing of fear. He uses the phrase "a thing of such unusual grace" and compares carrying the memory to holding a live bird in cupped hands. The being was not alarmed. It had known he was there before he knew it was there. Xavier eventually made it back down to camp. Norbert Veincourt, the equipment operator, found him at the edge of the lower survey line at 4:30 in the morning with a lantern. Norbert took in the state of his clothes and face, said "Then let us go down," and never asked what happened. Paulette, the cook, listened to the whole story without interrupting and said only, "I have heard of such things," then made him sit down and eat. The video is worth watching in full. Xavier's voice has that particular steadiness of a man who has lived with something for over half a century and is finally setting it down on the record. The BC interior has long been considered prime territory for ongoing encounters, and McKenzie Pass sits in a stretch of country between Kamloops and the Rockies that has produced consistent reports across decades. The detail about the tonal sound in the mist, the directional warmth, and the smell of bark and soil all line up with patterns that show up again and again in credible witness accounts from the region. Beyond The Treeline has been putting out longer-form testimony pieces like this, and this one stands out for the care with which Xavier lays out his own state of mind, his equipment, his bearings, and the measurements he had on hand. It's the kind of account that researchers can actually work with, and the kind that reminds you why the quiet witnesses often matter more than the loud ones.