In 1951, an Everest Climber Photographed a Giant Footprint in the Snow. Nobody Has Fully Explained It Since.

On 8 November 1951, on a glacier in the Menlung Basin near the Nepal-Tibet border, three men crossing a high pass looked down and saw a line of footprints in the fresh snow that none of them could explain. One was Eric Shipton, already one of the most respected Himalayan climbers alive. Another was Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, two years before he and Edmund Hillary became the first climbers confirmed to summit Everest. What they photographed that afternoon became, and remains, the single most famous piece of evidence ever produced for the Yeti.

The print itself, as Shipton and his climbing partner Michael Ward described it, had a broad, short impression that looked like a big toe, with four or five fainter toe marks beside it — not quite human, not quite anything either man could immediately place. They followed the track line for close to a mile before it disappeared onto harder ground. Shipton took four photographs. Two used his ice axe for scale, one showed Ward's own booted foot pressed beside a print for comparison, and together they are the images almost every Yeti story since has reused for 75 years.

What this means for trekkers

Hillary was never convinced by the Shipton photo. On his own 1960 Himalayan expedition, funded partly to investigate Yeti reports seriously, he examined alleged Yeti scalps kept in monasteries around the Khumbu — including one at Khumjung, still shown to trekkers on the Gokyo Ri trek route today — and concluded they were fashioned from serow antelope hide. He thought Shipton's print was a distorted animal track, most likely a fox or wild dog, its edges melted and enlarged by a day of sun. It took another 57 years for genetics to test that theory properly.

In 2017, biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and a team at the University at Buffalo ran DNA sequencing on nine samples collected across the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau over decades and sold, displayed or claimed as Yeti evidence — hair, bone, tooth, skin and droppings. Eight came back as Asian bears: one Asian black bear, one Himalayan brown bear, six Tibetan brown bears. The ninth was a dog. None were an unknown primate, and none matched anything outside the existing bear family tree.

That result didn't end the legend, and it hasn't stopped trekking groups from swapping Yeti stories over dal bhat at 4,000 metres. What it did was connect two true things that had sat separately for decades: a real photograph taken by a credible Everest-era climber, and a real animal that leaves a footprint strange enough, at the right angle in the right light, to start a legend that has outlived everyone who first saw it.

Source: University at Buffalo — DNA study ties 'Yeti' samples to Asian bears (2017).

Cover photo: Jenish Bajracharya via Pexels (Pexels License).