Old Yellow Top and the Cobalt Lode Mine bus

Cobalt sits in the mining country of northern Ontario. Long before 1970, people there told of a hairy figure in the woods. September 1906. Men building a head frame for the Violet Mine in Coleman Township, east of Cobalt, reported a "large hairy man" in the trees, watching them. July 1923. Prospectors J. A. MacAuley and Lorne Wilson thought they had found a bear in a blueberry patch. Wilson threw a stone. It stood up, growled and fled.

In April 1947, a woman and her son near Gillies Lake saw a "dark hairy animal with a 'light' head" walking "almost like a man." That light mane gave the creature its name. Old Yellow Top.

The night of August 4, 1970. A bus carried 27 miners down the gravel road toward the Cobalt Lode Mine, headed for the graveyard shift. Aimee Latreille was at the wheel. He had heard the local stories. He had never believed them. Then a dark figure loomed from the roadside forest and lumbered into the glare of the high beams.

"At first I thought it was a big bear… But then it turned to face the headlights and I could see some light hair, almost down to its shoulders. It couldn't have been a bear." Latreille braked hard. The bus fishtailed near the edge of a rock cut. The creature finished crossing the road and disappeared into the trees.

Larry Cormack, one of the miners, saw it too. "It looked like a bear to me at first, but it didn't walk like one. It was kind of half stooped over." The driver was left with no doubt. "I have heard of this thing before but never believed it. Now I am sure."

The North Bay Nugget reported the encounter on August 5, 1970. No tracks, hair, photographs or film were reported. Later accounts describe a body of blackish gray hair under a head of yellowish white hair, and a figure that walked smoothly on two legs.

No official investigation is on record. René Dahinden preserved the Nugget clippings and later published them. John Green included the case in On the Track of Sasquatch in 1971. Coleman and Huyghe listed it in their Field Guide to Bigfoot, Yeti, and Other Mystery Primates in 1999, and Thomas Steenburg covered it in In Search of Giants in 2000.

The record has loose ends. The driver's name appears as Aimee Latreille in one account and Amos Latrielle in another. A government mining record says the Cobalt Lode Mine closed in 1959, so the bus may have been bound for a neighbouring operation reached by the same road.

The obvious answer is a bear. Both named witnesses thought of it first. Both rejected it, for the light mane and the upright, stooped walk. No source has offered another explanation. The bus sighting remains the last of four newspaper reports that make up the Old Yellow Top story. Some later accounts speak of a photograph taken on July 18, 1923, near Cobalt, called "the oldest known photograph of a living Bigfoot." No image or provenance has surfaced, and the 1923 accounts mention no camera.