THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I WAS IN A MEADOW of Primula denticulata—small, purple-mauve flowers widespread at that altitude. While milk was heating on the stove for my cereal, the sound of French-made helicopter blades suddenly approached me. An hour later, I sat at my desk reading the weekend cable traffic from Washington. A new book had come with the diplomatic pouch. That evening in 1970 at my Kathmandu home I started reading. Eric Shipton had again joined the Yeti discussion, adding unreleased details of his 1951 discovery with Michael Ward:
At 4 o’clock we were astonished to see a line of tracks converging on the direction of our advance, and evidently coming from or going toward the col at the head of the glacier.… When we reached the tracks we saw that they were fresh, certainly not more than a few hours old. …
Sen Tensing was the only one of us who had no doubts as to the origins of the mysterious tracks. With complete confidence he pronounced that they had been made by Yeti (‘Abominable Snowmen’). He told us that two years before he had seen one of these creatures at a distance of twenty-five yards. He described it as being the height of an average man, tail-less, with a tall, pointed head and covered with reddish-brown hair except on its face which was bare.…
We followed these down the glacier. Gradually, as we descended the depth of the snow diminished, until there was barely an inch covering the glacier ice. Hitherto the individual footprints had been rather shapeless, but here we found many specimens so sharply defined that they could hardly have been clearer had they been made in wax. We could tell, both by comparing one print against another and by their clean-cut outline, that there had been no distortion by melting; and this again provided ample evidence that they had been very recently made.…
We found several places where the creatures had leapt over small crevasses and where we could see clearly that they had dug in their toes into the snow to prevent their feet from slipping back.…
Night was falling when we reached a moraine at the side of the glacier, where we camped. It was a clear, still night, and when we had settled in our sleeping bags the silence was broken only by the occasional creaking caused by the movement of the glacier. I could not altogether suppress an eerie feeling at the thought that somewhere in that moonlit silence the strange creatures that had preceded us down the glacier were lurking. I was not surprised to find that Sen Tensing, lying beside me, was pondering similar thoughts.
‘You know, Sahib,’ he said, ‘the Yeti will be very frightened tonight.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, no one has ever been here before; we will certainly have scared them.’9
Putting the book aside, I stepped outside. It was late evening as I walked the Kathmandu streets with homes and stores shut. The only open place I passed was a temple with lights that illuminated the idols and lamps inside—the Yeti is an idol, I realized, a spirit that gets incarnated into a material being. It has transcended its once supposed home in Buddhist lands. I walked the streets of Kathmandu, the city where the Yeti now lived with greater vitality than anywhere else, even the high Himalayan snows. It lived on T-shirts. It had become a brand of soap. And, of course, it was both a beer and a whisky. It was interesting that an animal of the most remote mountains found its life most vibrant now in a city—in this city it had become an idol that makes money.
5.3 Lamps at a Kathmandu Altar
Source: Author
In Shipton’s new report, the facts are the same between his first book and this written in 1969. But across years when so many Yeti expeditions have taken to the search because of his discovery, Shipton has now discovered more, symbols like paraphernalia in the stores. Most interesting is that while the questers for the Yeti never knew what it looked like, and all they had was footprints, among marketers there is no disagreement as to its physical appearance. What is equally interesting is the total absence of any reproduction of its footprints in the markets.
But for us who still search, there is that iconic track to be explained. And around it grows the hope, transmogrified in this new book in the imagination of men lying in their sleeping bags on glaciers who remember their earlier discoveries: our wild ancestors left that form imprinted in the snow. As I walked through the streets of Kathmandu, I overlaid Shipton’s new scene on to the day in the high snows—filled out by Sen Tensing’s vivid tale told in the dark. His non-scientific mind giving the footprints animation, filling fears with form. With the context thusly painted, the Yeti has gained a physical description which, in many ways more vividly described the animal than any packaging in the bazaar—a description of words not presented as facts, yet holding validity because the speaker is a local authority.
Shipton himself remains tight to the facts. But what he gives now, beyond the earlier one photograph and a mountaineer’s route quest, is folklore brilliant in sober English reporting, a bit understated yet vividly rich in its attribution from local culture.
IN 1971, CRONIN AND MCNEELY’S EXPEDITION HEADED TO THE BARUN. That year I returned to America. Seeking funding for their work, McNeely and Cronin were open about their intent to look for Yetis, though their stated mission was an ecological description of eastern Nepal.
But with the whole of Nepal as a possible research area, they went where Slick’s second expedition had made its most suggestive finds, the Arun and Barun valley system. For two years, working out of a base in the heart of the prime Yeti country, they hoped that while learning about the habitat, the Yeti would find them. In January 1973, the Associated Press reported that their expedition had found tracks high on a ridge in the snow. Plaster casts were made. From three column inches in the Baltimore Sun (no more in the New York Times), I inferred that the tracks fit the Tombazi pattern.
Grandpa now lived with my parents, having left the Indian jungles after sixty years, because my father had joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins to found the Department of International Health. When I passed through Baltimore while on my way to my home now in the West Virginia mountains, Grandpa and I talked. One day, shyly as though afraid he might shock me, he asked, ‘Danny, have you ever wondered about the Yeti? There are things in the jungle we do not understand. Cronin and McNeely may have something.’ Grandpa and I talked into the night about how their strategy might be improved.
‘They’re doing the basic part right,’ Grandpa said. ‘They’re sitting in the best place they know, letting the Yeti come to them. You know, it takes just one animal to prove that the Yeti exists.’
‘I wonder what the whole trail looked like,’ I replied. ‘What did they really find? Someday, Grandpa, I shall go and look.’ On 13 December 1973, Grandpa died. Neither he nor I had yet seen the plaster casts or the photographs. I held on to the idea—researchers kept reporting individual prints; might there be some answer in the trail?
Then in 1979, forty-two years after his first Yeti discovery, Lord Hunt, who led the 1952 British expedition that first climbed Everest, found astounding tracks nearly 2 inches longer than Shipton’s while on an excursion in the Himalaya. Returning to London, he proclaimed to a world that had more or less lost interest that the real question was not whether Yetis existed, but how long they would continue to evade attempts for their discovery.
The same year John Whyte presented a report on BBC with photographs of tracks, smaller than Lord Hunt’s. These fit Tombazi’s measurements, roughly 8-by-4 inches, with four toes and a thumb-like inside digit. Was Slick right? Were there two Yetis? Or did Whyte’s prints belong to a juvenile? Whyte added the dimension of sound. From a cliff above, while photographing the tracks, expedition members heard a piercing scream that lasted about ten seconds, a scream their sherpas identified as the Yeti’s.
Shown on television, Whyte’s tracks and Lord Hunt’s assertion rekindled the British interest in the Yeti, and after almost ten years of nothing suddenly discoveries ensued. In 1980, a Polish Everest expedition found tracks—the large, now fourteen-inch variety. Then in 1986, near my home valleys of the Indian Himalaya, the British traveller
Anthony B. Wooldridge came upon a Yeti standing in a gully. He watched it for forty-five minutes and took photographs. Wooldridge obligingly sent me copies. At last we knew what the Yeti looked like after eighty-seven years of searching since Wadell’s sighting. Laboratories and the most conservative zoologists double-checked his photography. Nothing suggested a hoax. Here is his report from the 1986 volume of the Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology.
At the point where a set of tracks led off across the slope behind and beyond a spindly shrub … was a large, erect shape perhaps up to 2 meters tall. … It was difficult to restrain my excitement as I came to the realization that the only animal I could think of which remotely resembled this one before me was the yeti. … It was standing with its legs apart, apparently looking down the slope, with its right shoulder turned toward me. The head was large and squarish, and the whole body appeared to be covered with dark hair, although the upper arm was a slightly lighter color. … I took a number of photographs.10
When Wooldridge made his discovery, I wrote to him, and he sent me a complete report, one aspect of which particularly puzzled me: his animal stood still in the open for forty-five minutes—and all reports suggest Yetis are extremely shy. Wooldridge thought his animal was dazed by a fall, but a dazed mammal, I knew, will lower its head below its heart to improve circulation. Might, I wondered, an animal that is behaving totally out of character in reality not be an animal at all?
There was, of course, the other explanation. Wooldridge could have been hypoxic from exertion and altitude; possibly also mildly hypothermic as he reports he’d been running in wet snow. So with nothing but a Yeti-looking shape to suggest its reality, I guessed what he had been photographing was a rock or a tree stump. I wrote to Wooldridge saying so, and he wrote back and then later published the same, following a return visit to the site, concurring that he’d mistaken a rock for a living creature.
six
Footprints Melting into Rivers
6.1 Where the River Runs Pure Amid the Wild—Po Tsangpo River above Namche Barwa Gorge
Source: Author
Without exception, all Yeti evidence to suggest an authentic animal—notwithstanding the fun stone footprint found on entering the deep jungle of the Barun Valley and other ciphers like it through the Everest region—is found in the snow. And when those snows melt, that evidence disappears.
Himalayan snows that tower almost beyond reach seem to be secure. Their glaciers endure for centuries, seemingly set apart halfway to outer space. It would seem likely that footprints in these would be preserved. But in reality, the footprints start disappearing the instant they are made, sublimating into the air because air pressure at altitudes where glaciers endure is half that of sea level and because of the doubly intense high-altitude sun.
The river that gathers the waters of every glacier of eastern Nepal, and hence all evidence of the Yeti’s reality, is the Sun Kosi. From snows on Everest and her sisters, Makalu, Lhotse, Cho Oyu, Shishapagma, and thirty others over 20,000 feet, glacial trickles gather into streams, then tumble in the tumult of the Sun Kosi. In October 1970, four of us went to ride these waters.
Our descent was the first, succeeding where others had died. A year before, Sir Edmund Hillary tried to ascend this river in a jetboat. (The first passage, he thought, would be safer upstream, allowing him the option of turning around.) There is a singular calling in doing what has not been done before; primal vibrancy comes to life with Nature met red in tooth and claw. The beguiling seduction of attempting ‘a first’ is amplified by the immediacy of living felt in every moment as to whether you’ll even return home.
It is the attempt to try something that challenges a person, for the unknown of the event is linked with the unknown capacity of oneself. As Hillary shared with me years after he and Tenzing did their great climb, it is not a conquest but an inquest into possibilities. Footprints on places that did not have them before open a trail into the self, and in going through and coming out, life opens, questing inward.
Our expedition that opened the Sun Kosi River (also the first successful descent of any major Himalayan river) initiated what is now, four decades later, a new Himalayan sport: river running. Where previously adventure in the Himalaya had been about going up, now available is the challenge of going down, allowing thousands now to ride the Himalaya, just as hundreds every year climb Everest since Tenzing and Hillary opened the great summit. So to discover the currents of that which is uncontrolled, we thrust ourselves into the Sun Kosi’s waters.
IN MOUNTAINS LESS STEEP THAN THE HIMALAYA, along riverbanks are where peoples’ paths often first extend, the riverine grass gets padded down, a dirt track carved, and in time maybe a road penetrates. Flowing then through the valleys is the commerce of domesticating the mountain.
But in the world’s highest mountains, smoothed river grades do not offer that opportunity. In the Himalaya escarpments climb out of a river at its every turn. Rivers are barriers to travelling. Lands where banks would typically be found are cliffs. Trails people might etch to use the river’s grade obliterate with the next flood, as in these vertical valleys gathering waters tumbling, water levels surging, water forces amplifying, rising rock becomes reshaped.
The trembling rock alongside these rivers that comes from this intense cascade rises from the deep origins of this land. Our planet, seemingly rock hard, so presses against itself that the rock inside it bubbles. In pulling together, the inner rock of the Earth itself moves in rivers, and that molten movement one hundred million years ago parted the protocontinent Gondwana. This was in the age of algae, when proto life also began oozing out of the waters on to the earth. Gondwana’s fragments migrated, making new places—Africa, Antarctica, Australia, the Americas—but one piece, the Indian Subcontinent, slid northeast through the Tethys Sea towards union with the other great protocontinent, Eurasia. If the Himalaya today tremble such that they quake with the mountains still rising, contemplate the quaking then as earthen plates moved, being driven by boiling stone in the heart of the planet below, through the waters of the Tethys Sea at a shake-the-world speed four times faster than that at which human fingernails grow.
So the Indian fragment collided with Eurasia—and the Himalaya started rising on what were then flat Tethyan shores; the planet giving birth out of herself, lifting up an 1,800-mile swath of rising rock, oceanic floor rising into the sky. This, which is the highest wreckage our planet has produced, continues even today. The Gondwanan fragment continues to burrow, now 10 miles down into the still boiling magma, and the rivers of rock inside continue to elevate the Tibetan Plateau (the size of western Europe), lifting it already 4 miles above the sea and slicing into the Earth yawning chasms on the other side of this lift such as the world’s deepest lake, Baikal.
At the 1,800-mile separated ends of this planetary collision are embracing lines of water—the rivers Indus and Brahmaputra encircling this supercontinental creation. Both start as trickles from snow on the sacred mountain Kailash in Tibet. The Indus flows north and then turns west to loop the northwest end of the Himalaya. From the same mountain the Brahmaputra flows east and then south, looping the other. And near the base of this mountain another river also rises, the Ganges, slicing the Himalaya to drain the mountain range’s southern flank.
As the Ganges collects the southern rivers, into it gushes the Sun Kosi. Their waters continue across the Indian plains, nourishing the fertility of India until the remarkable happens. The rivers Ganges (which is female) and Brahmaputra (which is male) have a union again—waters that started in separate directions on the same mountain, one east and the other south, unite in their ending. Jointly they travel their last miles, and then enter the Indian Ocean, the old Tethys Sea. Waters from one mountain encircle the greatest fence on earth, and then flow back together.
With the circle of these waters is another circle, not across the Earth but, like the mountains they encompass, circling to the sky. As riverine waters flow
down, vapourized moisture ascends, lifted from the sea to the sky where the water turns to snow. (‘Himalaya’ in Sanskrit means ‘abode of snows’.) Pulled back down by the earth, snow compresses to glaciers, and the hard ice slides down as the rocks underneath move up. On these moving glaciers, some mystery of animate life makes footprints. When the moving snows with their prints arrive at the end of their journey, they melt, and the footprints of mystery join the flow.
Out of the glaciers of Shisha Pagma, the earth’s fourteenth highest summit, comes the Sun Kosi (Golden River). Crossing from China into Nepal, other rivers join: Tamba Kosi (Copper River), Bhote Kosi (Tibetan River), Dudh Kosi (Milky River), the Arun, and the Tamur. Where these rivers begin are the slopes of the world’s sixth, fifth, fourth, third, and first highest summits. Powered by their joined waters, their force breaks through the final Himalayan barrier, the Chotra Gorge of the Mahabharat Lekh, the last great upswelled rib of mountains.
6.2 The Lingum Shrine at the Snowfield Where the Arun/Barun Rivers Begin
Source: Author
FOUR OF US WENT TO THE RIVER: Terry, Cherie, Carl, and I. We thought we had two advantages. First, I had flown over the river in a helicopter, so I knew there was no great waterfall. After Sir Edmund had a member of his team killed, questions had grown among us who lived in Kathmandu regarding whether the river was runnable. Second, we had a special boat. Earlier rafts navigated using paddles. But the boat we acquired had oars, a steering oar on the stern and a pair in the centre to propel and turn—then with the two inside having paddles, our crew could spin that raft. And there was a third special feature that gave boldness—we were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 11