the icefall has also seen the deaths of dozens of Sherpas and somewhat fewer Westerners. (I myself narrowly escaped disaster in the icefall on two occasions: once by avalanche and once by a collapse of ice seracs.) In the following year Eric Shipton, the second half of the Tilman–Shipton exploring partnership, lead the impressively titled Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition of 1951 to the same valley. Included in the party was Edmund Hillary, who was going to get to the summit two years later. They managed to climb the 2,000-foot icefall despite deep snow and saw a clear route to the top. Shipton saw that the mountain was climbable, given enough resources.
Some might have staged a shot at the summit from there (and changed history), but Shipton always seemed more interested in exploration than peak-bagging. He turned away from Everest, and in so doing probably gave ammunition to those who so humiliatingly sacked him from the leadership of the successful British expedition of 1953. This was unfair, as his expedition was far too late in the season to go high; it was 28 October and the winter cold had set in. (I was on the summit on 6 October and was lucky to get away with just frost-bitten fingers.) The reconnaissance expedition split into three parties, with Edmund Hillary exploring other possibilities behind the Shipton party. Then Shipton, Michael Ward and Shipton’s long-term Sherpa companion Sen Tensing found something else entirely:
It was on one of the glaciers of the Menlung basin, at a height of about 19,000 feet, that, late one afternoon, we came across those curious footprints in the snow, the report of which has caused a certain amount of public interest in Britain. We did not follow them further than was convenient, a mile or so, for we were carrying heavy loads at the time, and besides we had reached a particularly interesting stage in the exploration of the basin. I have in the past found many sets of these curious footprints and have tried to follow them, but have always lost them on the moraine or rocks at the side of the glacier. These particular ones seemed to be very fresh, probably not more than 24 hours old. When Murray and Bourdillon followed us a few days later the tracks had been almost obliterated by melting. Sen Tensing, who had no doubt whatever that the creatures (for there had been at least two) that had made the tracks were ‘Yetis’, or wild men, told me that two years before, he and a number of other Sherpas had seen one of them at a distance of about 25 yards at Thyangboche. He described it as half man and half beast, standing about five feet six inches, with a tall pointed head, its body covered with reddish brown hair, but with a hairless face … He left no doubt as to his sincerity.3
And then, writing in The Times:
The tracks were mostly distorted by melting into oval impressions, slightly longer and a good deal broader than those made by our mountain boots. But here and there, where the snow covering the ice was thin, we came upon a well-preserved impression of the creature’s foot. It showed three ‘toes’ and a broad ‘thumb’ to the side. What was particularly interesting was that where the tracks crossed a crevasse one could see quite clearly where the creature had jumped and used its toes to secure purchase on the snow on the other side. We followed the tracks for more than a mile down the glacier before we got on to moraine-covered ice.4
This little detail of the dug-in toes reminded me of the way I felt when I saw the way my yeti’s toes had dug into the snow.
Shipton’s ice axe and the footprint: true and false?
The photographs caused a sensation. Shipton’s extraordinary footprint led all who saw it to conclude that the creature that made it was an enormous snow-dwelling ape. On his return flight, Shipton was told by an air hostess at Karachi that journalists were waiting for him when they landed at London. He was mobbed at the airport on arrival and photographs of the footprint with an ice axe for scale, the footprint with a boot and another one featuring a trail of footprints made up the whole front page of The Times.
Scientists took the photographs seriously. John Napier was a British primatologist and paleoanthropologist who was widely considered as the leading authority on primate taxonomy. He was also the author of the first authoritative study of our subject: Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality.5 He explains in his book that it was Shipton’s photograph which really kicked off his own interest in the yeti. He thought that the previous eyewitness stories were merely travellers’ tales. ‘But with the publication of Shipton’s picture – sharp, undistorted and precisely exposed – the legend of the yeti took a giant step forward and entered the public domain.’
Scientific publications took it seriously, too. In the New Scientist, an editorial gasped: ‘The discovery would have profound scientific importance, as well as being a certain winner at the Zoo.’6 The Zoo?! Well, yes. Not to mention TV chat shows and a royal presentation. And, just by the way, overturning most theories of human evolution.
Shipton’s story was later corroborated by his companion Dr Michael Ward, who wrote: ‘This was no hoax and the events occurred exactly and precisely as described in Shipton’s book on the Everest reconnaissance and by myself in this article. There must, therefore, be some rational explanation.’
Dr Ward was one of the uncelebrated men behind the success of 1953. During his national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he had come across a roll of 35mm film shot by an RAF Mosquito fighter-bomber during an ‘accidental’ flight over Everest.7 He saw at once that there was a climbable route from the Western Cwm. He helped to persuade the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society to approve the Everest reconnaissance of 1951, and joined the successful British expedition of 1953 as doctor. James Morris gave us a thumbnail sketch of Ward at the top of the icefall: ‘He was a slender, lithesome man, and it always gave me great pleasure, even in those disagreeable circumstances, to watch him in action. His balance was so sure, and his movements so subtle, that when he turned his grinning and swarthy face upon you it was as if someone had drawn in a moustache upon a masterpiece by Praxiteles.’
Meanwhile, John Napier was making an exhaustive study of the yeti/Bigfoot phenomenon for his 1973 book on the subject, concentrating on the Shipton photograph, in particular. Napier was well qualified to pronounce on primate footprints, as before his career as a primatologist and paleoanthropologist he had worked as an orthopaedic surgeon and later became an expert on human and primate hands and feet. He was the founder of the Primate Society of Great Britain (they must have had great tea parties), and helped to name Homo habilis (‘handy man’) in the 1960s. Later, he became the Director of the Primate Biology Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where he examined the footage of an actual walking Bigfoot (the Patterson film, see Chapter Eight), and he also investigated the frozen Bigfoot specimen, the Minnesota Iceman.
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