From Harrison to Comox: British Columbia’s 2026 Sasquatch Season

British Columbia has a special claim on the creature most North Americans call Bigfoot: the word “Sasquatch” comes from the province. It is an anglicized form of sásq’ets, a word in Halq’eméylem, the language of the Sts’ailes people of the Harrison River valley. In 2026 the province’s Sasquatch calendar ran from a First Nations celebration in June to a conference on Vancouver Island at the end of October.

Sasquatch Days in Sts’ailes territory

On June 13–14, Harrison Hot Springs hosted the 14th annual Sasquatch Days, co-presented by the Village of Harrison Hot Springs and the Sts’ailes nation, according to Tourism Harrison. The weekend opened with a procession and ceremony and featured war-canoe races on Harrison Lake, medicine walks, vendors and a closing prayer. The festival traces its roots to May 1938, when, according to Tourism Harrison, upward of 2,000 First Nations people from both sides of the border gathered on the lakeshore for the first Sasquatch Days.

As the Agassiz Harrison Observer explained in its June 5 preview, the word sásq’ets means “hairy man,” and in Sts’ailes tradition the being is a shape-shifting, spiritual guardian of the nation’s territory – one that can pass between the physical and spirit worlds, shows itself only by its own choice, and can never be caught. In other words, it is not an undiscovered ape. That is a living cultural teaching, and it deserves to be understood on its own terms rather than as evidence in a zoological debate.

A Bigfoot town hall in Victoria

In September, the Sasquatch scene came by sea. Hundreds of passengers on the Alaska Bigfoot Cruise, a Seattle–Juneau round trip, were due to come ashore in Victoria for a Bigfoot town hall on Thursday, September 17, at the Sngequ House Conference Centre on the University of Victoria grounds, the Agassiz Harrison Observer reported in a September 15 preview. Organizer Martin Pippin, who has staged Bigfoot events since 2023 with Nikki Beaty, owner of the event company Gather Up, billed a $50 evening with researchers Matt Pruitt and Adam Davies and original Expedition Bigfoot cast member Ryan Golembeske, followed by an open floor for local residents’ stories.

Pippin summed up the appeal: “The world is a more interesting place when you think there might be a Bigfoot out there in it,” he told the paper.

Squatch Watch comes to the Comox Valley

Next on the calendar is Squatch Watch Vancouver Island, October 30 to November 1 at the Florence Filberg Centre in Courtenay. Presented by Kiki’s Communications in partnership with the Queneesh Indigenous Community Society, which receives part of the proceeds, it promises talks from Tom Sewid, Francis Horne Sr., broadcaster Dave Scott of Spaced Out Radio and Terrance N. James, biographer of the late B.C. wildlife biologist and Sasquatch proponent John Bindernagel. A weekend pass costs $50, and there is an alcohol-free Halloween dance.

Citizen science on Vancouver Island

Some of the province’s most methodical searchers are three Greater Victoria men profiled by Saanich News in March. The Vancouver Island Sasquatch Society, founded in 2018 by Alex Solunac, Dave Hill and Stephen Gray (Hill and Gray both bring Canadian Forest Service experience) uses trail cameras, night-vision gear, track casts and environmental DNA (eDNA) that Hill samples from rivers and streams. Hill, nicknamed “No Fun Dave” for his counterarguments, often offers ordinary explanations: clicking sounds that come from click beetles, oversized prints left by bears, odd tree damage caused by dwarf mistletoe, and calls made by owls. Solunac told the paper that some of their hair and eDNA samples are “not human, synthetic, or any other known North American animal,” but the group concedes that without a body to compare them against, such results cannot be verified, and they are often written off as contamination.

The province’s newest BFRO entry shows how slippery the evidence can be. In report #79929, submitted in March, a man camping at Fraser Lake west of Prince George in May 2025 described a string of “ahhh-WHOOP” calls in the night – and openly asked whether his own expectations had shaped what he heard.

No Sasquatch has ever been documented by science in B.C. or anywhere else, and many calls, tracks and glimpses have ordinary explanations. But in the province that gave the creature its name, the tradition, the festivals and the hunt all remain very much alive.