4 Drivers Filmed a Sasquatch Carrying Kills on the Same Alaska Road in 2024. All 4 Stopped Talking

4 Drivers Filmed a Sasquatch Carrying Kills on the Same Alaska Road in 2024. All 4 Stopped Talking

There is a road in interior Alaska called the Denali Highway. It is not the road most people mean when they say they are going to Denali. It runs east to west for 135 miles between Paxton and Cantwell, and for nearly all of that distance it is gravel. There is no fuel between the ends in the off-season. There is almost no cell service. In the middle it climbs above the tree line into open tundra and stays there a long time. On a clear day the Alaska Range stands so close to the north that it does not look real. The road is closed by snow from mid-October to mid-May. For seven months of the year it does not exist as a place you can drive.

Between the middle of June and the middle of September in 2024, four people driving that road reported the same thing. None of them had spoken to the others. Two of them did not know the others existed. The word each of them used in the Bureau of Land Management visitor contact log was the same word.

Here is how it ended for them, so you are not waiting for it. Naen Prosser left Alaska in the spring of 2025 and moved to Washington State where her sister lives. Rich Sandoval let his guide registration lapse that same year after thirty-one seasons and did not renew it. Dale Ketering never went back for his truck. It sat at mile 122 until a road contractor towed it in October because it was going to be buried under snow. Ketering paid the fee over the phone and told the contractor to keep anything in it he wanted. Within a year he had left the state as well. Only Melody Olsen stayed. She still lives at the same address in Glennallen. When people have gone to that address to ask her about what she saw that September, she does not open the door.

What survives of all four of them is paper. The BLM field office in Glennallen keeps a visitor contact log for each season. The 2024 log has four entries that use that same word. There is also a single written statement taken by an Alaska State Trooper at the Cantwell post in the early morning of the ninth of September, signed by Dale Ketering, four pages long in a shaking hand.

The accounts themselves, in the order they happened, in the words of the people who lived them.

Naen Prosser, 52, schoolteacher from Cantwell, morning of Sunday the sixteenth of June.

I want to say before anything else that I am not a person who believes in things. I taught fourth grade for twenty-six years. I have a mortgage and a bad knee and I do my own taxes. I am telling you this because when I tell you what I saw, I need you to understand the kind of person it happened to.

That Sunday I was driving west to meet my sister at the Maclaren River, which is a thing we did most summers when she came up. She would come up from Glennallen onto the highway at the Paxton end, and I would drive down from Cantwell, and we would meet in the middle at the lodge by the river and have lunch and turn around and go home. It is a long way to go for lunch. That is the point of it.

I had a thermos of coffee in the cup holder and I was worried about my front passenger tire, which had been low all week. I remember thinking I should have had it looked at before I got onto gravel. That is the sort of thing that was on my mind. A tire.

The road was empty that morning. It usually is. I passed one truck in the first forty miles going the other way, a man with a boat trailer who lifted two fingers off the wheel the way you do. After that, nothing. Just the road and the gravel noise and the mountains coming up on my right as I climbed out of the trees.

There was one thing before the bridge that I did not think about until later. Maybe ten miles back from it there was a place where the ravens were up—a lot of them, more than you usually see, circling over something off the north side of the road out on the tundra a quarter mile or so. I remember thinking a caribou had died out there and the ravens had found it, because that is what ravens over the tundra means. I did not slow down for it. It was only afterward, thinking back, that I wondered what had killed a caribou out in the open like that in June, and what had opened it up enough for the ravens to be at it, and whether the thing at the bridge and the ravens back down the road had anything to do with each other. I will never know. But I saw the ravens first, before I saw anything, and I have wished since that I had understood them as a warning.

I came up onto the tundra and the visibility out there is enormous. You can see for miles in every direction because there is nothing to block it. No trees, just low country rolling away and the big peaks behind it. I could see the Maclaren River Bridge from a long way off, the way the road drops down toward it, and I remember being glad because it meant I was close and my sister was probably already there.

There was something standing on the far side of the bridge. I thought it was a person at first because it was standing upright. Then I thought it was a bear because of the size and the color. Then I got closer and it was neither of those things.

It was standing off the shoulder on the north side, on the gravel where it goes to grass, facing the road, facing me. It was holding something against its chest with both arms the way you would hold a large dog you were carrying. What it was holding was a Dall sheep, a white one. I could see the horns and I could see the legs hanging down, and I could see that the head was hanging too at the wrong angle, so I knew the sheep was dead.

I did not stop. I want to be clear about that. There is a story people expect where the person stops and stares, and I did not stop. My foot did the opposite of stopping. I went across that bridge faster than I have ever driven on gravel in my life. As I went past it I was maybe thirty feet from it, and I looked because you cannot not look, and I saw it clearly for about one second.

It was taller than my car. Standing there flat on the ground it was taller than my car, and my car is not a small car. It was covered in hair that was dark, a rust color going to almost black, and wet—matted down wet on the shoulders and the chest. The sheep it was holding was wet too where it was pressed against it. The face was not an animal face the way I expected. It was wide and flat, and there was a heavy ridge over the eyes, and a broad flat nose, and the eyes caught the light and threw it back the way a dog’s eyes do at night, except it was morning. It had watched the car go past. It turned its head to watch, and I saw it do that in my mirror, and then I was over the bridge and around the bend and it was gone.

Here is the part I have never been able to make sense of. As I came at it, it stepped back. It took a step back off the road, backward, to let me through. It moved out of my way. Whatever it was, it understood that the road was mine and it was polite about it. And I have thought about that more than I have thought about anything else, because a bear does not do that. A bear does not stand aside for a car and hold the door for you.

My sister was at the lodge. I sat down across from her and she asked what was wrong and I told her I had seen a grizzly with a sheep by the bridge and she said that made sense, that grizzlies take sheep, and I said yes, that it was a big grizzly, and we had our lunch. I called it a grizzly for four months. I called it a grizzly to my sister and to the ranger I finally told in October and to myself in my own head lying in bed. It was easier. It let me keep driving that road.

Except that I did not keep driving that road, not alone, not the rest of that summer. And if you had asked me why, I would not have been able to tell you. I never looked in my mirror again on the Denali. Not once. I would rather have hit a moose than see what was behind me.

Rich Sandoval, 58, registered hunting guide out of Paxton, thirty-one seasons, afternoon of Wednesday the twenty-eighth of August.

I have guided in this state for thirty-one years. I have seen every large animal Alaska has, most of them at a distance you would not want to be at, and I have packed out more meat than I could weigh. I am telling you my résumé because I want you to weigh what I say against it. I am not a man who scares off a track in the mud. I know what is out there, and I have made my living in it.

The twenty-eighth of August I was hauling a client’s caribou back toward Paxton. We had a drop camp up off the highway and the hunt had gone clean. One bull. I had quartered him in the field the way I always do and bagged the four quarters in game bags and loaded them in the bed of my truck under a tarp. The client had flown out already. It was just me on the road in the late afternoon, coming down off the tundra with the light going long and gold the way it does up there in August.

I was maybe four miles west of the Maclaren Bridge coming down the grade toward Paxton when I felt the load shift. You get to know your truck. I could feel by the way it took a corner that a strap had worked loose and the quarters were sliding, and I did not want caribou sliding around loose back there for another sixty miles. So I pulled into a gravel pull-out to restrap it. Ordinary thing. I have done it a thousand times.

I got out on the driver’s side and went to the tie-down and started working the strap with my back to the bed and my head down and my hands busy. I was not paying attention to anything. There was nothing to pay attention to. It was an empty road in the daylight and I was fixing a strap.

I felt the truck rise.

I need you to understand what that means. I did not hear anything. I felt the whole truck lift on its springs the way it does when you take a heavy man out of the passenger seat. That little rise and settle. The suspension came up. Weight had come off the bed of my truck. A lot of weight, all at once. And I had my hands on the strap on the other side, and I felt it in my hands through the metal of the truck.

I came around the back of the truck. Two of the four quarters were gone. The tarp was folded back off them—folded, not thrown, not torn, laid back the way you fold a blanket off a bed. And two of the four game bags were simply not there anymore. And out past the pull-out, out on the tundra, going away from me uphill and already a hundred yards off, was the thing that had them.

It was walking on two legs and it had a bagged quarter under each arm and it was not hurrying. That is what I keep coming back to. It had just lifted better than a hundred pounds of caribou off the back of my truck without me hearing a sound from ten feet behind me, and it was walking away across open country like a man carrying two bags of groceries in from the car. Unhurried. It never looked back.

I stood there and watched it go for a long time, longer than made any sense, until it went over a rise and was gone. And the reason I watched that long was that it never once turned around to see what I was going to do about it. It did not care what I was going to do. I was not a factor.

I did not report the theft. I want to be honest about that because it matters. I reported the caribou as spoiled meat, which is a thing that happens, and I ate the cost, because I have a guide registration and I know exactly what happens to a man in my business who starts telling that story. You are done. Nobody books the guide who saw the thing. So I told the client the weather had turned the meat and I told the ranger nothing and I kept my mouth shut for a long time.

Three weeks later I was back through there and I found one of the game bags. It was a half mile off the road on the tundra, and I only found it because I was glassing for sheep and it caught my eye, white against the brown. It was empty. It was turned inside out the way you turn a sock, and it was folded. Folded in a square and set down. I did not touch it.

I have thought a great deal since then about what I leave on that road. Thirty-one seasons. Every fall I am up there with meat, gut piles at every kill site, coolers in the truck, bones and hide, and the smell of it carrying for miles in country where the wind never stops moving. I have been feeding that road for thirty-one years, and I never once thought of it as feeding anything. And now I cannot stop thinking of it that way.

I moved my drop camps for the rest of that season, every one of them, off the pattern I had used for a decade. And I told my clients it was about the wind. It was not about the wind.

I will tell one more thing and then I am done, because it is the thing that made me let the registration go. Late in September I had a camp up off the road with two clients and I had done what I said—I had moved it off my old spots, put it somewhere I had never camped before, thinking I was being clever. The second night one of the clients woke me because he said something was walking the edge of camp. I got up and I stood out past the tents with my rifle and my headlamp and I put the light out into the dark at the edge of things, and there was nothing to see, but I could hear it. Out past the light, moving slow, a big weight settling and lifting, circling the camp at the distance where the light gives out. It went around us most of the night. It never came in. It stayed exactly at the line where I could not see it. And it walked that line around and around, and every so often it would stop for a long time, and I would stand there with the light and the rifle and know it was standing too, out there facing in, and then it would start again.

I did not sleep. In the morning there were tracks all the way around the camp in a ring at that same distance—an even ring around the three of us. And no track came closer than that ring, and no track led away from it that I could find. I broke that camp at first light and I took my clients out and I drove home. And about a month later I let my registration lapse, because I could not any longer stand in front of a client and promise him the country was safe when I no longer believed one word of it.

Dale Ketering, 37, welder from Delta Junction, night of Sunday the eighth of September.

I was coming back from a moose camp on the eighth, late—later than I should have been, because I am always later than I should be—and I took the Denali instead of going around because the Denali saves you the better part of two hours if you do not mind the gravel in the dark. And I do not mind the gravel in the dark. Or I did not. I had done that drive at night a dozen times. It is just a road. You put your brights on and you watch for animals and you drive.

The first tire went at mile 118. It was a clean flat, probably a sharp rock, the kind of thing that happens on gravel. I have a spare and a jack and I know how to use them. So I got out and I changed it in the dark on my knees on the gravel with a headlamp, and it took me the better part of forty minutes because the lug nuts were on tight and the jack kept wanting to sink into the shoulder. But I got it done. I put the spare on and I loaded the flat in the bed and I got back in and I drove, and I was annoyed and cold and thinking about a hot shower. That was the whole of my problem in the world.

The second tire went four miles later at mile 122. I know the mile because there is a marker right there and I sat and looked at it for a long time afterward. I want to explain what that means, because if you have not been in it you will not understand why I did what I did. I had one spare and it was already on the truck. I had no second spare. So now I had a flat I could not fix on a truck I could not move at mile 122 in the dark with no cell service on a road that in September at night might see one vehicle before dawn or might see none at all. It was cold. It was going to get colder. I had a jacket and a headlamp and no water and no food because I had eaten it all at camp. Cantwell sits at the end of that road and I was thirteen miles short of it. I knew that road and I knew it was thirteen miles because I had just watched the markers go by.

Thirteen miles is a long walk, but it is a walk. Four hours maybe in the dark on bad footing. And the alternative was to sit in a cold truck and hope somebody came. And nobody was coming. If I stayed I was betting my night on a stranger. If I walked I was betting on my own legs. Anybody would have walked. You would have walked.

So I put on my jacket and I checked my headlamp and I started up the road toward Cantwell on foot.

The first three miles were nothing. I want that on the record. The first three miles I was bored more than anything. It is loud walking on gravel. Your own feet are the loudest thing for miles. And the cold got into me and I walked faster to stay warm and I watched the black shapes of the mountains against the sky where there were no stars because it had clouded over. I counted mile markers. I thought about the tires and what they were going to cost me. Ordinary miserable thoughts. A man walking home in the cold.

Somewhere in the fourth mile I noticed there was gravel sound behind me that was not mine. You know your own footsteps. You have listened to them your whole life. And there was a second set back behind me off my rhythm. And when I stopped to listen, it stopped too. I told myself it was an echo off the hills, which is a stupid thing to tell yourself because gravel does not echo. But I told myself that and I kept walking and it kept walking, matched to me, staying back.

I did the thing you are not supposed to do. I turned off my headlamp. I turned it off so that whatever was back there could not see me by it. And I stood in the dark and I listened, and the footsteps kept coming without my light. It did not need my light. It came on toward me in the pitch dark at a walking pace, closing. And I understood then that it could see me fine and had been able to see me the whole time, and that the light had only ever been for me.

That was the first moment the fear became a real thing in my body and not just in my head. I turned the lamp back on low and I walked faster.

And then it was not behind me.

I do not know how to explain the next part except to say it plainly. I had been listening to the thing behind me for a mile, and I came around a long bend and there were two of them on the road ahead of me—on the road, standing on the road between me and Cantwell, at the edge of my headlamp’s reach. And they were not the one that had been behind me, because I could still hear that one behind me. So there were at least three: two ahead on the road and one on the road behind. And I was in the middle of that on foot with a headlamp and a jacket.

I went off the road. I went right, downhill, east off the shoulder and down into the country, because I could not go forward and I could not go back. And the only thing I had—the only card in my hand—was that on the road I was a thing they could see coming from a long way off, and off the road in the timber maybe I was not. I know that near the Cantwell end the highway comes down off the tundra and there is black spruce in the low ground along the Jack River, and I made for that, downhill, because a man in the trees is harder to keep in sight than a man on a road. That was the whole of my reasoning. Get where they cannot watch me walk.

The spruce down there is thick and it is wet. There were patches of old snow in the shadows that had not gone all summer, and there was deadfall you could not see until you were on it. And I went through it with the headlamp on its lowest setting, hooded with my hand, moving as quiet as a man can move who is going downhill over deadfall in the dark. My boots were wet to the knee inside a hundred yards. I did not care. I was listening.

I found something dead. It was in a little opening in the spruce and I nearly walked into it, and I got my hand over the light before it lit up the whole thing, but I saw enough. Something large opened up, dark and wet, and the ground around it dark and wet, and it was steaming. In the cold I could see it steaming, which meant it was warm, which meant it was recent. I did not stop to learn what it was. I turned and went the other way, and I did not run because you cannot run in that timber in the dark, but I went as fast as a man can go.

There was a place a little after that where I had to stop. The spruce came together so tight I could not see a way through it in the dark, and I stood with my back against a trunk and my light off and made myself breathe slow and pick a line. And while I stood there, close—closer than anything had been all night—one of them walked past me. I did not see it. I heard it: three or four steps, a heavy careful weight coming down through the deadfall, off to my right and near enough that I could have reached the sound. And then the smell came, which I have not told many people about because it is the part that makes them look at you differently. It was a wet animal smell, rank, like a dog that has rolled in something. But under it there was another smell that was almost sweet and almost rot, and I have never smelled it before or since, and I hope I never do again. It went past me in the dark, whatever it was, and it did not know I was there, or it did not care that I was there. And when the steps had gone on I let out the breath I had been holding and I moved, because standing still was worse than moving.

They were pacing me in the trees. That is the thing I have the hardest time saying, because it is a thing that no one wants to be true. I could hear them keeping level with me off to my right back toward the road and off to my left down toward the river. And they were not quiet. That is what undid me. They were not trying to be quiet. They were big enough and there were enough of them that they did not have to be. And they came through that spruce on either side of me at my speed, matching me, herding me. And every so often I would hear one of them go over deadfall, and it was a heavy sound, a sound a big thing makes. And I kept my light down and I kept walking and I did not look at them because I did not want to see how close they were.

I saw one of them once. There was a gap in the spruce, a place where the trees open for maybe forty feet, and one of them crossed it off to my left and below me, and my light was low and pointed at the ground, but there was enough spill to catch it for a second, a second and a half, no more. It was moving across the gap on two legs, and it was carrying something. I saw it from the waist down and I saw the load in its arms and I did not see the face. And I have thanked God for that every day since—that the light was low and I did not see the face. It was tall. The legs were wrong, too long in the thigh, and the way they folded was wrong. And it was carrying something the size of a person against its chest. And it went across that gap in three strides and was gone into the black on the far side. And I stood absolutely still and did not breathe.

And then the timber started to thin. I could feel it before I could see it—the trees getting smaller and farther apart. And then there was open sky ahead of me low down. And I came up out of the spruce onto the shoulder of the highway again, closer to Cantwell than I had any right to be, because I had been going downhill and forward the whole time and had made better distance than it felt like.

I came out onto the gravel and I turned and looked back at the tree line, and they were there at the edge of the trees. I could not see them, but I knew where they were—three shapes darker than the dark behind them, standing at the line where the spruce ended. And they did not come out. They stopped at the trees. They watched me stand on that road, and they did not take one step out of the timber onto the open ground. And I have thought about that as much as I have thought about anything—that the road was the one place they would not follow me, the open place where a thing can be seen.

I walked the last four miles on the center line of that highway with my headlamp switched off in the pitch dark, straight up the middle of the road, and nothing happened. Nothing at all. And that was worse than all of it—those four miles of nothing—because I knew they were back there in the trees along the road keeping pace and choosing not to come out. The not coming out was a decision. And a thing that makes a decision is a thing that is thinking. And I did not want to be walking home in the dark from something that was thinking.

There is a thing that happens to your mind on a walk like that. It stops being afraid because it cannot stay afraid for four hours, and it goes somewhere flat and calm and terrible, and it starts to make bargains. I found myself thinking that if they had wanted me they would have taken me in the timber easily anytime, and that the fact that I was still walking meant they had decided not to. And then I thought about what it means that whether I lived or not that night had been a decision that something else got to make out there in the dark about me, and that I had had no say in it at all. And that is the thought I have never been able to put back down.

I saw the lights of Cantwell come up finally, low on the road ahead, the yard lights and the one lit window. And I did not feel relief the way you would think. I felt like a man walking out of one country into another. And I kept looking back over my shoulder at the black line of the trees behind me, expecting the tree line to still be keeping pace. And it was not. The trees had fallen back and let the road open out. And only then, with the lights close, did I understand I had been let go.

I got to the Cantwell junction sometime after four in the morning. There was a trooper. I do not remember how I got him, whether I flagged a truck or walked to the post. I have lost that piece of it. But there was a trooper and he sat me down and I could not stop talking, and he wrote it down—four pages—and at the end of it he asked me to read it and sign it, and I did. I signed my name to all of it. I have never taken back one word of it, and I have never said it out loud again to him or to anyone from that morning to this.

Melody Olsen’s report is the shortest of the four. She came into the field office on the nineteenth of September, eleven days after Ketering’s walk, to report something she said had happened to her three nights before. Her entry in the contact log is dated that day. She called the Cantwell post twice that week and gave no name either time. It was only when she came in person that her name was written down at all. And beside it in the log are four words describing what she reported. Those four words are the reason she has never opened her door to anyone who came asking. They are not written here, because she has never permitted them to be, and it is not my place to be the first.

The Denali Highway reopened in May of 2025 on schedule once the snow was off it. The traffic counts that summer were ordinary. People drove it to fish and to hunt and to see the mountains the way they always have, and most of them saw nothing but the road and the tundra and the Alaska Range standing up to the north, too close and too clear to look real.

Four people saw something else on that road in one summer. Only three of them have told you what.

Real or fake, you decide.