06/04/2026
My Cousin Disappeared Outside Revelstoke in 1974 — My Aunt Found Her Living With Sasquatch Children
My cousin Karen vanished on the 8th of September 1974 on a logging spur off the Bigmouth Creek drainage, about forty kilometers north of Revelstoke, British Columbia. She was twenty-three, riding pillion on her boyfriend Donnie Petri’s 1971 Yamaha trail bike, when the chain snapped on a switchback.
The bike went one way; Karen went another. Donnie broke his collarbone and left wrist on a granite outcrop below the road. He crawled back to the spur and lay there in the rain for six hours before a forest service crew, working overtime, found him. Karen was gone. The search and rescue team scoured the drainage for eleven days with dogs and a Bell helicopter on loan from BC Hydro before the first heavy snow shut the operation down. They found only her hiking boot under a windfall about a kilometer west of the wreck. No sock, no second boot, no clothing, no trace. The file was closed in April of 1975 with a presumption of death by exposure. But my aunt Phyllis, Karen’s mother, never accepted that conclusion, not for a single day of the next thirty-one years .
I’m Hank Brooks. I am seventy-one, retired from a forty-three-year career with the Canadian Pacific Railway. I was twenty when Karen disappeared. After my own mother passed in 1988, Aunt Phyllis became the closest thing I had to a parent. I drove her to doctor appointments, shoveled her walk, sat on her porch in long summer evenings while she told me over and over that Karen was still alive somewhere in those mountains. I nodded and I listened, never once telling her what I actually believed—that her daughter had died on a wet hillside that September and had been moved by a cougar, a bear, or slid into one of the thousand crevices pocking the mountains. I was wrong. Aunt Phyllis was right. She had kept looking, patiently, quietly, like a woman who would not stop until the truth was found.
Karen Whitaker was born in Revelstoke in the summer of 1951. Her father, Walt Whitaker, a millwright at Big Eddie Mill, had died when she was thirteen, leaving Karen and Phyllis alone in a house where the gravity between them was absorbed by each other. Karen was small, five foot three, dark-haired, quiet but watchful. She knew the plants in the bush better than the Forest Service techs who came through every summer. After high school, she attended Selkirk College briefly, dropped out, and spent every weekend in the mountains—sometimes with Donnie, often alone.
The Selkirk Mountains rise steeply from the Columbia River Valley, granite walls climbing three thousand meters into clouds, with drainages so densely forested you could be invisible a hundred meters from a logging road. The interior cedar-hemlock forest is like an old-growth temperate rainforest, with red cedars the size of grain silos, devil’s club thick enough to tear your hands, and wildlife that made disappearing people tragically common .