He Conquered Everest, Then Went Hunting the Yeti — and a Hollywood Star Smuggled the Evidence in His Wife's Luggage

In a glass-fronted cabinet inside a Sherpa monastery above Namche Bazaar, a monk will show you, for a small donation, a leathery, hair-covered dome about the size of a rugby ball. The label says Yeti scalp. The man who first flew it abroad to find out what it really was had stood on the summit of Everest seven years earlier.

Khumjung is not a detour on the way to Everest Base Camp — it is the trail. At 3,790 metres, tucked beneath the sacred peak of Khumbila, it is the standard acclimatisation walk out of Namche Bazaar for trekkers heading toward Base Camp, Gokyo or the Three Passes. Our guides route clients through it deliberately: an extra night around Namche, spent gaining a little altitude on the walk to Khumjung and back, is one of the oldest tricks in Himalayan acclimatisation. Most visitors go for the view of Ama Dablam and the Hillary-founded school. Fewer know what is kept in a wooden box inside the village monastery.

Villagers had treated the scalp as a protective charm for generations, too precious to leave Khumjung. That changed in 1960, when Hillary organised the Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition — backed partly by the World Book Encyclopedia and joined by American naturalist and television host Marlin Perkins — with one goal alongside its high-altitude research: settle the Yeti question. Village elders lent the scalp on condition it be returned, and Hillary carried it first to Paris, then to Chicago's Field Museum for hair and tissue analysis.

The verdict: the scalp had been moulded from the hide of a serow, a Himalayan goat-antelope — not a primate. It really was old, the 200-to-300-year estimate held up, just not what generations of villagers and visiting Westerners had hoped. It still hangs in Khumjung today, an object of genuine cultural and religious significance regardless of the lab result.

The second relic, and the movie star who smuggled it

Khumjung was not the only Khumbu monastery guarding a piece of proof. Two trekking days south, in the equally historic village of Pangboche — home to the region's oldest gompa, founded in 1667, and a standard stop between Tengboche and Dingboche — monks kept a mummified, hand-shaped relic known as the Pangboche Hand. Its story is stranger still.

By 2011 the original Pangboche Hand itself was long gone. In 1991, shortly after a fragment surfaced on the American television show Unsolved Mysteries, the entire relic was stolen from the monastery and vanished into private hands. Only the smaller piece Stewart had carried out decades earlier survived, quietly held by a family that had inherited it, to be tested.

What this means for trekkers

The scalps and hands were never proof of anything except how badly the world wanted the Yeti to be real, Hillary included. What is real is the culture that produced them: monasteries standing since the 1600s, guarded by Sherpa families whose mountaineering history runs deeper than any cryptid headline. Source: NBC News, Infamous Yeti Finger Flunks DNA Test.

Cover photo: Tom Frost via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).