Frenchman's Bay - Early 1960s
 
Ken Kristian


An incident in the early 1960s that got me deeply interested in the subject of Sasquatch went something like this: A logging company owner by the name of Joe Manuck had a smaller show at a place on Pitt Lake called Frenchman's Bay (now known as Christian Cove on the maps). He went up the mountain about one mile or so to get at some big timber in a very steep and rugged canyon. In the process of setting up a temporary camp for his crew and cook, Manuck towed a wood frame and plywood cook/bunk house on 3-ft-round skid logs up the valley with a D-8 Cat. After Manuck logged the show and got most of the good wood out, he left the old cook/bunk house up there for family and friends to use as a hunting cabin.

One weekend during the fall of about 1962, my friends Fred Gerak, Ron Gerak and Vince Manuck Jr. headed up to the area for some blacktail deer hunting. They reached the place late on a Friday afternoon and proceeded to give the old cabin a quick sweep to get rid of the mouse droppings, chop enough firewood to last a couple of days, cook some dinner and then hit the sack early for some much needed rest. Sometime during the middle of the night they were all rudely awakened by a massive crash of something hitting the outside of the cabin hard enough to dislodge the stove pipes and fill the entire cabin with black soot and choking smoke. At first light in the morning they inspected the cabin fully expecting to find a giant boulder, claw marks from a big bear or some other such sign on the outside walls but found nothing.

I went up the following weekend on a hunting trip and had a good look around the cabin for myself. I found no broken branches on any of the small alders that had sprung up beside the cabin or anything else to indicate something with a rational explanation responsible for crashing into the cabin. Over the years I often pondered the thought of what could have possibly hit the cabin's walls "so high up" above the skid logs (on the bunk side where everyone was sleeping and probably snoring a bit) with the force required to knock the stove and its pipes completely out of commission. Not a one of us could figure this out until a later date when the stories of Sasquatch began to quietly circulate amongst the area's loggers.

©  Ken Kristian
West Coast Sasquatch Research
http://www.westcoast-sasquatch.com

 

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