Highway Worker Breaks 27-Year Silence on BC Bigfoot Encounter

Just came across a video that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. A former BC highway maintenance worker named Wayne Driscoll sat down and told a story he's been sitting on for 27 years, and it's one of the most grounded, detailed first-hand accounts I've come across in a long time. The video comes from the Bigfoot Sightings Canada YouTube channel, and it features Wayne telling his story directly to camera. No theatrics, no dramatic music, no reenactments. Just a 64-year-old retired crew lead with two replaced knees and a bum shoulder, recounting what he and three coworkers found on the shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway near Revelstoke, British Columbia, on the morning of February 19, 1998. The short version: at 4:47 AM, a plow driver named Roy Melnyk called dispatch about "something on the highway" a few kilometers east of the Illecillewaet campground turnoff. Roy refused to approach it. Roy refused to leave. The dispatcher said she'd worked with him for eleven years and had never heard him sound shaken about anything. Wayne and two others went out in the sander truck. What they found, according to Wayne, was not something they could honestly write down in an incident report. So they didn't. The official Ministry report described "an injured transient, male, unknown identity, suffering from severe hypothermia, transported to Queen Victoria Hospital in Revelstoke." That report has been sitting in a filing cabinet in the Revelstoke depot for nearly three decades. What makes this account stand out isn't just the encounter itself. It's the credibility of the witness. Wayne worked winter highway maintenance for the BC Ministry of Transportation out of the Revelstoke depot for 22 years. He was crew lead for the last nine. He grew up in Revelstoke. His father worked the mill. His grandfather worked the rail yards. Three generations of his family lived alongside the infrastructure that crossed those mountains. He knows the Selkirks and the Monashees the way a sailor knows water. He's worked whiteouts on Rogers Pass where you're navigating by delineator posts because the road itself is invisible. He's cleared avalanche debris three meters deep across both lanes at one in the morning. This is not someone unfamiliar with the wilderness, and it's not someone prone to dramatic interpretation. The winter of 1997-98 was no ordinary winter, either. Environment Canada recorded the snowpack in the Selkirk range at roughly 300% of normal. Rogers Pass, sitting at about 1,320 meters elevation and surrounded by peaks over 3,000 meters, had already received more snowfall by February than most years see in total. The highway between Revelstoke and the Alberta border — 148 kilometers of mountain road following the Illecillewaet River through some of the most dramatic terrain on the continent — was running on a maintenance schedule that had crews out 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Wayne also touches on something that doesn't get talked about enough in these conversations: the Parks Canada avalanche control program at Rogers Pass. Since 1961, they've been using a 105mm howitzer positioned at Tupper Creek, plus helicopter-deployed explosives, to bring down slides in controlled conditions. It's the most extensive avalanche management operation anywhere on the planet, with more than 130 identified avalanche paths in the pass area. The controlled blasts are targeted, but the shock waves travel through the snowpack, the rock, and the timber in directions the targeting can't fully predict. For a resident of those mountains without maps or protocols or radio contact, the experience of those blasts during a 300% snowpack winter would be something entirely different than sitting in a warm truck waiting for the all-clear. The video cuts off mid-sentence (looks like Wayne was just getting into that part of the story), but there's already enough here to make this one worth your time. The way he describes the institutional machinery of the Ministry — how a report describing a severely hypothermic unidentified individual requiring assistance would simply be filed and moved on in the middle of a record snowpack winter — feels painfully accurate to anyone who's dealt with bureaucracy. And the line that got me: "I am sixty-four years old with two replaced knees and a left shoulder that hasn't worked right since a loading accident in two thousand and eleven, and I am aware that the window for telling it closes on its own schedule, without asking." His wife passed two years ago. His youngest daughter has been after him for a decade to write it down. So he did. Go watch the full thing. It's the kind of account that reminds you why these stories matter — not because they're dramatic, but because they're told by people who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling them.