Mountains and Monsters

The 1950s and early ‘60s were of a rare time. It was the golden age of Himalayan climbing. And it was also filled with immense scientific curiosity for the unknown. Shipton, Hillary, and Norgay’s findings in the early ‘50s would set the course, only helping to spur the imaginations and intentions of many climbers and adventurers to hunt out the Yeti. After all, the Yeti was rumored to live above tree line, making high-altitude climbers the most viable stewards in the search.

As Everest writer Broughton Coburn wrote of this era’s climbers:

“These were uncommon men… hybrid scientist-adventurers. They did not set out merely to explore, but also to further academic knowledge and the frontiers of the human spirit.”

Ralph Izzard and Tom Stobart’s Himalayan expedition in 1954 would be wholly representative of man’s curiosity for both mountains and monsters. The two would scale eight peaks over 5,000 meters in just four months. But climbing was not the primary agenda; “Its first aim was to find what truth there was in the stories of the ‘Yeti’…” Their expedition would add to the early hypothesis of the Yeti as a rare, high-altitude dwelling ape or bear, exhibiting human-like traits. Izzard wrote:

“We did at least prove to our complete satisfaction that there is absolutely no theoretical case against the existence of a beast new to science in these mountains.”

Nothing about the expedition could be considered a farce either. Izzard would write a year later in his book The Abominable Snowman Adventure that the expedition “…was probably one of the best equipped and supplied expeditions ever sent to the Himalaya.”

As the era continued, more expeditions would take place in the same vain as Izzard and Stobart’s, and the discovery of the Yeti would seemingly become as important as the conquest of the world’s highest peaks. Over 20 Yeti expeditions took place between 1950s and 1980s.

The expeditions sponsored by Tom Slick in 1958 and 1959, which were led by climbers Norman Dyhrenfurth and Peter Byrne, were some of the most well-known American expeditions engaged in the Yeti hunt. During the first (which visited eastern Nepal, close to the Tibetan border), Norman Dyhrenfurth aptly portrayed the experience in an American Alpine Journal article—noting how expedition members “holed-up” in large caves at an elevation around 20,000 feet for many weeks, sometimes traveling to nearby valleys or high passes, all with the sole intention of making Yeti observations. Over that time Dyhrenfurth, Byrne, and company found clumps of “reddish-brown hair” in the caves, discovered countless Yeti tracks, and on one occasion actually:

“…saw in a stream around midnight, a small Yeti, no more than 4 feet 6 inches in height, possibly a young one. The Yeti apparently had come for his nightly meal of frogs, and when a flashlight was aimed at his face he started toward the men. Next morning [they] checked and found small Yeti tracks.”

In 1961, Edmund Hillary returned to the Himalaya as part of massive multi-month expedition, which sought out scientific discoveries—the Yeti first among them—in addition to unclimbed peaks. However, the preliminary report in the American Alpine Journal was more elusory and skeptical than Dyhrenfurth’s, stating:

“Briefly, we do not believe there is a snowman. Numerous sets of ‘snowman’ tracks were photographed only a few miles from Shipton’s famous discovery in the Menlung valley. In each case we could follow the man-like prints to a place where they were protected from the sun. Here the prints retained their original round shape, which resembled the paw marks of a small animal such as a fox. For years the evidence of the celebrated Thyangboche ‘Yeti scalp’ has been a strong argument in favor of the existence of a snowman. This has been shown by scientists in this country and in Europe to be not a scalp at all but a bit of goat fur which had been stretched into a pointed shape while still fresh. Likewise the ‘Yeti fur’ brought back by Hillary proved to be the skin of a Tibetan blue bear.”