Peering down over the rim, the lake is below. It must be almost 1,000 feet. Small trees surround its shore, a meadow too. Mist rises from its surface. Off to the right, where a gentle slope leads to Tibet’s Gama Valley, smoke rises. Smoke, not mist. Against the cliff whose rim I now stand on, and along the sides of the cliff approaching this meadow, appears to be a cavity cut into the rock face, cut probably by a glacier that once moved on the meadow whose remains are the lake. Into these overhangs stones seem to have been stacked to make walls, appearing to have rooms behind them. Smoke seeps from three.
I watch through my binoculars. Will I see someone leave the shelters? Time passes, an hour then another. As I watch, from behind me the cloud has risen up the Barun, engulfed Saldima, and now rolls over the rim on which I lie. There seem to be people below. Do they discover a complementary consciousness of the yin of humanity with the yang of nature? Are these shelters their permanent home? Perhaps they may be smugglers who use this as a way station? Or, even more simply, they may be yak herders who graze that apron of grass. They also may be spiritual seekers coming closer to the great beyond. Whatever their purpose, let this community pursue its reclusive quest. By the cairns I have left, back to a world that has yet not found grace, where wildness is feared, into that confusion I shall guide my quest.
Afterword
A.1 Sign and Route Map for the Yeti Trail to Lead Visitors into the Barun Valley
Source: Author
MAY 2010. I RETURNED TO SALDIMA MEADOWS. Accompanying me were my two sons both now men. Jesse Oak was returning to jungles where in life-opening ways he first entered the wild. Luke Cairn came to the mountains he had been travelling in, by then for years, doing his own research. We had returned because my Yeti quest continues.
Two Yetis exist. Each has a different identity. The maker of the footprints is a bear; that identity is certain. Beyond the footprint maker, though, is a second Yeti, one asking existential questions about Homo sapiens’ relationship with the wild, and those questions each person needs to answer individually. To help with that, in the Yeti a symbol is given with which to discover one’s own footprints—this is far from an abominable search.
The footprint-making Yeti’s spoor I have tracked across mountains, seen its nests in the high trees, and watched it feed. Tranquilizing it, I replicated the footprints in plaster to match the earlier mysteries found by others in the snow. As hunger calls (or urge to reproduce) from one side of a mountain this bear, Ursus thibetanus, goes over the mountain. Its prints then emboss in glaciers. That explanation, simple as it is, fits all the facts.
Yet the enigma continues, for the Yeti has a second identity that is more than a bear. This is a mascot that walks the world only loosely tied to the Himalaya. What is extraordinary about this reality is that it lives not in the snows but in human desire. This is not a physical animal. People believe in this Yeti as an embodiment of the human connection to the wild. As an icon represents faith and as an idol symbolizes an idea, so is this second Yeti both an icon and an idol.
What is extraordinary about the Yeti that exists as a bear is that from that enigma whose trail cannot be followed, where the footprints themselves melt the next day, from this resulted real national parks. Moreover, these parks brought a new way to manage the wild by people caring for the wild. The parks that were started by this Yeti are: the Makalu–Barun National Park in Nepal and Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve in China. The model started there was adapted across the Himalaya in Nepal, China, India, Bhutan, Myanmar, and other places. What resulted across the Himalayan span was protection for the bear and other species.
But beyond, these homes have become havens for the human desire to connect with a primordial wild, the second Yeti. These collected strings of national parks have become an expansive diverse place where people can live in some balance with the wild.
When established in the 1980s, our two partnership-based parks were the first people-based nature preserves in Asia, opening the idea of community-engaged partners that had before been only talked about such in the world park conference in 1982 in Bali. The wild’s preservation by engaging people in its management became real. This gives hope. For against that hope the wild as we once planet-wide knew it disappears. The mystery still to be solved is whether the species that always hungers for more will turn now planet-wide to collectively manage what it has taken. Will we grow a shared commons for generations yet to come? 1
In 2010, I made that first trip back to Saldima, and then four months later I made a second trip. They both were prompted because I had lost my father a few months before, and so I went into nature asking existential questions. Walking in these mountains, in which Dad had been born almost a century earlier, I first took my sons along, then went alone, probing through protected valleys in his memory. These pilgrimages opened connection. Families are animations of the individual, extensions and gatherings from where we have come and giving membership to where our kind continues.
Travelled on my two pilgrimages were trails intimate with towering trees, with feet splashing through pools at the base of waterfalls bringing melted snows from Himalayan summits. In those life journeys my footfalls treaded paths few people know, edged around the shoulders of earth’s first, fourth, and fifth highest mountains—where above the planet penetrates space, the one place earth goes further towards beyond our knowing.
Regrowing natural luxury gives hope for the world—for creating the national parks has established baselines of successful action to regrow nature. Against that baseline, comparing from those, we can show animal and plant numbers now more than when the action began. We need not head towards a planetary loss. We have evidence that people’s behaviours changed in this region, evidence that the species that typically damages can do the right thing.
Humans can adopt modalities of living to make the wild wilder. To reinforce this lesson, I turn again to Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild: ‘A place is wild when its order is created according to its own principles of organization—when it is self-willed land’.2 This type of wild is not one that is managed (the US Government’s Wilderness Act, for example) where control is by policies, licenses, and not admitting mistakes. Nor is this the wild promoted when the focus is on biodiversity priorities (many conservation groups or biologists, for example). This type of wild is more, a wild that rises from priorities inside people. That wild is a process not an end.
The new mystery coming from the Yeti is a ‘whether’. Are we allowing human footprints to trend towards where ‘order is created according to its own principles’? This means letting bears come into our cities (of course, taking them out when they harm us). It also means letting people organize their lives (rather than organizing it for them). The new mystery will be created by working through this question: Do we seek balance or do we seek control in our lives?
It is impossible to control the experience of living. The forces of life are too large, our wisdom too small. People everywhere are increasingly worried by changes underway in the united socio-econo-info-biosphere that our planet has become. Some in reaction gravitate to doctrinal fundamentals, hoping in ardent belief questions shall go away. But others are absorbing; we are part of a large complex always adapting system. The wild is not only a feature of the past … it can become a fact of Homo sapiens’ future (people who are wise).
Learning to live in the idea of the wild is, like this, a path. The opening way as we go towards the unknown is to embrace the wild and walk among it. With adjusted behaviours, we grow wildness again. This is our foundational calling as we enter the age of human-making of climate, disease, civil strife, and economic surprises. The opportunity is about growing a new earth. More flowers were not the meadow’s earlier condition, but in the world of our making it is evolution’s potential.
On my second pilgrimage through Everest, Makalu, and Lhotse’s valleys, alone, living with the contents in my pack, I saw no other human. My life was filled with forces that played mu
sic from nature as does wind when careening through alpine gorges, for valleys are colossal flutes that can grow sonorous—and from great mountains thunder avalanches that resonate in valley chambers below. Majestic—what other word describes such an event—so close to magic for that is how it feels. Against such a backdrop rose trees 200 feet high and 6 feet in diameter. While behind those, Everest and her sisters towered 15,000 times higher. Answers that came were more than Latin names and ecological niches. Underway here are people making the planet wilder now.
This rocky chunk flying through space, a hardness totally devoid of life two billion years ago, somehow grew great life, and one species among that life became planet reshaping. Religions give differing answers to this. But in a new reshaping, on our flying chunk’s highest place and on one of its more fragile ecosystems it was possible for life to become wilder than when, a third of a century before, the abominable search began. The wild was not pocketed off from people as in the old mode. Living with the wild was brought into domesticated lives. Despite India and China growing with their billions—and counter-intuitively because of a wild human now shown not to exist—a life repository grows wilder because of increasing numbers of people coming into more active engagement.
What is important to realize is that the wildness has always been with us, relentlessly. So, let us invite it in, learn to live with it, and enter into a dialogue with the ground of all being that which gives life. Icon and idol—that is the discovery the Yeti led me to.
BUT HOW TO EXPLAIN THE FOOTPRINTS THAT LAUNCHED THE SEARCH? A half century of continued findings confirms the bear explanation.3 After my first book explaining the tree bear being the Yeti, the explanation was repeated around the world. A range of discussants concur that a bear makes these footprints. The mountaineer Reinhold Messner came to this conclusion. So did Disney World, of all places, and the consensus grows.4 The bear explanation, as noted before, is not original to me; it was first advanced by Smythe in 1937 then reaffirmed by Charles Evans in 1955.5 While agreement coalesces on the bear, until my explanation no point-by-point elucidation explained the specific Shipton print that launched Yeti interest worldwide.
Ursus thibetanus, the Asiatic black bear, made that elongated 1951 footprint. When its front paw came down, making those dramatic toes in the snow, it did not press so firmly into the crust to show the bear’s nails on the front paw. Then the hind paw fell onto the back half of the print, elongating to the twelve-inch length and from the hind paw nail marks are evident—and with this feature the story gets more interesting.
The four-inch shorter 1972 prints of Cronin and McNeely, Tombazi three decades earlier, and our discovery that day on the ridge were all made where the hind paw came down with less of an overprint.6 We have then a ‘smaller Yeti’. A fact overlooked by others that proves the Yeti to be a product of misidentification is that no credible Yeti prints have ever been photographed of a Yeti going downhill. That going uphill is needed to make Yeti footprints is evidence that the mountain makes the Yeti, not the animal. Steep hills make big Yetis, and almost flat slopes make small Yetis.
The hominoid-like thumbs evident on some footprints are created by young bears who have dropped inner digits pressed down on the paw (yearlings and twolings have agile tendons and joints) because they spend much of their time in the trees (becoming therefore rukh balu, tree bears) seeking food. And these dropped inner digits can look remarkably like a thumb when imprinted in snow.
But let us look specifically at that iconic 1951 Shipton and Ward image, showing how Ursus thibetanus is the maker of this mystery that started it all:
Nail marks of the hind paw are revealed in the center of the overlay print. With most observers’ attentions on toe pads at the top of the print the determinative feature of the print’s maker are two nail marks in its center (one on the right side and the other on the left).
The mind-captivating human-like toes on the top that do not reveal nails are created because the front of the bear is less heavy, causing weight not to push the front paw as deeply into the snow as the rear. (Cronin and McNeely’s snow was soft, and so the nail marks did not show.)
The three tipped-to-one-side toes at the top of the print align almost identically with the digits of an Ursus thibetanus front paw while the ‘thumb’ on the left fits with a tree bear’s splayed inner digit. (Bears typically walk bow-legged.)
And, on that Shipton print, when the rear paw came down partway down the print, the nail marks are in the center of the print, an unexpected place for nails if the print was made by one foot but not if it is a second foot. That the rear paws penetrated more deeply is because the rear of the bear is heavier than the front.
Because Shipton mentions ‘for there were several’, also suggests bear. For it is likely these prints are from one or two cubs accompanying the mother—evidence shown earlier in the photograph of Michael Ward standing beside their mysterious Yeti trail.
The explanation of known animal for mysterious Yeti may also include the snow leopard’s eerie yowl which from time to time reverberates off high Himalayan walls, an animal very rare in Sherpa country in the middle of the last century where the Yeti legend grew. But with recent conservation, its numbers increase so the snow leopard is now known to have a range of vocalizations.
I had come to this Yeti/bear conclusion after sixty years of research (1956–2016). The explanation fits all the facts. Then something remarkable happened as this book was going to the press. I had contacted the Royal Geographical Society for permission for Oxford University Press to publish the iconic Shipton print I had carefully studied for so many years. The society came back asking, ‘Which Shipton Yeti photograph do you want?’ They sent two images. In my sixty years I had never seen their second one. See A.2.
A.2 The New, Never-Before-Published 1950 Shipton Yeti Photograph
Source: Royal Geographical Society
Photographed is the same print as the familiar one shown in Chapter Four (see 4.2). But this new print, taken a bit further away, has three new details. First, are two nail marks on at the top of the lower partial footprint; nail marks exactly of the expected dimension between the second and third digits for Ursus arctos thibetanus. Second, between the familiar print and now the partial print seen below are three scratch marks; I suggest these marks were made by the bear’s front foot just before it put that foot down. They are possibly rear foot prints, but what is certain is that they are bear nail marks. A third point is of interest; the icy crust was indeed very thin, explaining why the bear’s feet did not sink in, because at the top of this new print the rock beneath is evident.
So again I argue, the Yeti is a bear. This new print provides added proof. Nonetheless, across now three decades since first making the identification, in letters I receive, questions after lectures, and call-ins during radio shows, the Yeti’s bear identity is not what people focus on. The Yeti lives in the larger ideology. It is a mascot suit, and inside this suit is a human hunger. A second Yeti exists: the hope that there might be a connection today to eons gone by.
Indeed, that desire is as accurate an answer as that for the first Yeti. Wildness is disappearing. It does not matter that the Yeti is a bear that clambers out of jungles and crosses high passes. To people who hunger for the wild, what matters is to have alive a mystery from the frontier of the planet—reminding us that, in the Anthropocene, wildness is still possible. What helps in this new age of human making is a hope that guides our way as we apprehend the frighteningly changed wild that is coming.
AS A HAVEN FOR THE WILD, PEOPLE-BASED ACTION IS THE HOPE. To preserve the potential for the wild in people’s lives, evidence accumulates that conservation is more effective, less costly, and more sustainable when done in partnership with people. In Asia, the approach was initiated by Makalu–Barun National Park, then the Qomolangma (Mount Everest) National Nature Preserve.
Despite a civil war in Nepal that burnt park buildings and drove out park wardens, today forests and wildlif
e are more abundant than when we ‘discovered’ the pristine Barun. And in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, a land which public opinion holds erroneously to be undergoing devastation, wildness also grows. In both areas, what has been successful is protection that advances through actions by communities in partnership with the government and science.
In Nepal, communities did not take advantage of the war to invade the Barun. They did not just control themselves (which they did); they also prevented exploitation by others. The 20 acres of jungle where the Barun and Arun Rivers meet is proof. Decades earlier, Tirtha identified these acres as a key subtropical habitat, where warm, moist air is pulled up the Arun Valley by the low-pressure zone off Everest and her sisters to nurture this niche in the middle of the Himalaya. When our expeditions came, the people were turning this jungle into fields (it was here Lendoop’s daughter slipped into the river). But the people stopped clearing that jungle. Today those acres remade by human actions are fitting the authentic original Sanskrit meaning of jungle: fields returned to the wild.
Shyakshila gives an example of how a Nepal village many would view as so poor that to advance it needs ‘assistance’ was able to do ‘the right thing’. Getting them to advance did not come from buying their actions or from a leader telling them what to do. While employing a people may get those individuals to comply with legal ordinances, and power may turn people to protection as long as power is exerted, what Shyakshila showed is how the people learned—and from that adopted a partnership with nature. Learning is what changes behaviours sustainably and at scale.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 33