The Yeti: Climbing Expeditions, Footprints, and Himalayan Folklore

This article documents widely-reported accounts and historical records of unexplained phenomena. It does not assert supernatural causation.

In the autumn of 1951, mountaineer Eric Shipton crouched at roughly 19,000 feet on the Menlung Glacier, on the Nepal-Tibet border, and photographed a line of large, deeply impressed footprints in the snow. Beside one of them, he placed his ice axe for scale. The image — crisp, unambiguous, and taken by a credentialed alpinist on a serious Everest reconnaissance — would circulate in newspapers worldwide within weeks and anchor decades of debate about what, exactly, was moving through the high Himalayas when no one was watching.

What Was Reported

The entity referred to in the West as the “Yeti” — a term likely derived from the Tibetan yeh-teh, roughly meaning “that thing” or “rocky place bear” — has roots in Himalayan oral tradition that predate Western exploration by centuries. Sherpa and Tibetan communities maintained distinct categories for what outsiders would later collapse into a single label. The mi-go, sometimes rendered “wild man,” was described as a bipedal, hair-covered creature of roughly human stature, associated with high-altitude terrain and considered by some Sherpa accounts to be a dangerous but real presence in the mountains. The larger dzu-teh — “cattle lifter” — was separately described as a bigger, more bear-like animal known to raid livestock at lower elevations. Whether these traditions described distinct animals, the same animal, or something closer to a spiritual or symbolic entity varies by community and account.

Western documentation of the phenomenon begins, by most scholarly accounts, with Brian Houghton Hodgson. In 1832, Hodgson — then British Resident in Nepal and a prolific naturalist — reported that his porters had encountered a bipedal, tail-less creature covered in long dark hair at high elevation. Hodgson himself attributed the encounter to an orangutan or unknown primate, though he did not witness it directly. The report was published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and is generally cited as the earliest Western documentation of what later became the Yeti phenomenon.

Over the following century, a steady accumulation of reports emerged from British and European mountaineering expeditions. In 1899, Laurence Waddell described large, mysterious footprints encountered at altitude in his book Among the Himalayas. In 1925, N.A. Tombazi, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, reported observing a bipedal figure at roughly 15,000 feet near the Zemu Glacier in Sikkim. He described it as moving upright, dark against the snow, and visible for about a minute before disappearing. When his party reached the location, they found footprints in the snow, which Tombazi described as about six inches long and resembling a human print but broader.

The Shipton photographs of 1951 changed the scale of public interest entirely. Shipton and his fellow climber Michael Ward encountered the tracks on the Menlung Glacier during a reconnaissance expedition for a future Everest attempt. The prints measured approximately thirteen inches long and were arranged in a trail. The photographic evidence was examined by zoologists and anthropologists at the time, with no consensus reached on what animal could have produced them.

The Witnesses

Eric Shipton was not a credulous observer. By 1951 he had completed multiple Himalayan expeditions and was regarded as one of the most experienced high-altitude mountaineers of his era. His co-discoverer, Michael Ward, was a physician and seasoned alpinist who would later serve as a medical officer on the 1953 Everest summit expedition. Their account was precise and their photographic documentation methodical. Neither man made dramatic public claims about the creature’s identity; Shipton expressed genuine uncertainty about the tracks’ origin and resisted pressure from the press to speculate beyond what the evidence showed.

Sherpa witnesses occupy a different evidentiary category — not lesser, but differently situated. Tenzing Norgay, who summited Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953, stated in his memoir Tiger of the Snows that he believed in the Yeti’s existence and that his father had seen one. Ang Tharkay, another highly respected Sherpa sirdar, reported a Yeti sighting during the 1951 Everest reconnaissance, prior to Shipton’s discovery of the tracks. These accounts come from men whose professional lives required accurate assessment of mountain conditions and whose familiarity with known Himalayan wildlife — snow leopard, Himalayan black bear, Tibetan brown bear — was deep and practical.

Reports of Yeti sightings and track discoveries have continued intermittently from the 1950s to the present. In 2019, the Indian Army’s official Twitter account posted photographs of large footprints found near the Makalu Base Camp, describing them as possible Yeti tracks. The prints measured 32 by 15 inches, which is substantially larger than any known bear species’ track and also larger than most classic Yeti report dimensions. The Army post attracted widespread mockery alongside genuine scientific interest, illustrating the persistent cultural friction that surrounds the subject.

What Investigators Found

Edmund Hillary, fresh from his 1953 Everest summit, returned to the Himalayas in 1960 specifically to investigate the Yeti question. The expedition, partly funded by World Book Encyclopedia, was serious in intent and scope. Hillary’s team examined a number of supposed Yeti relics, most notably a scalp kept at Khumjung Monastery in the Khumbu region of Nepal. The scalp — conical, reddish-brown, and hair-covered — had been venerated by the Sherpa community for generations as a genuine Yeti artifact.

Hillary obtained permission to take the scalp to the West for scientific examination. The artifact was analyzed at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the British Museum of Natural History in London, and by zoologists in Paris. The consensus conclusion, reported in 1960, was that the scalp had been fashioned from the skin of a serow — a Himalayan goat-antelope (Capricornis sumatraensis) — stretched over a mold. Hillary presented these findings publicly and stated his conclusion that the Yeti, as a large unknown primate, did not exist. The expedition report was published and widely cited as effectively closing the case from a mainstream scientific standpoint.

The most rigorous modern investigation came in 2017, when Charlotte Lindqvist, a molecular biologist at the University at Buffalo, published a mitochondrial DNA analysis of nine samples previously attributed to Yeti encounters. The samples — hair, bone, tooth, skin, and fecal matter — came from museum collections and private holdings across Bhutan, Tibet, India, and Mongolia, collected over several decades. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that eight of the nine samples traced genetically to Himalayan brown bears (Ursus arctos isabellinus) or Tibetan brown bears. The ninth was identified as a Himalayan black bear (Ursus thibetanus).

Lindqvist’s study also produced a significant subsidiary finding: it identified a previously undocumented genetic subpopulation of Himalayan brown bear that is genetically distinct from other brown bear populations globally. This has implications for bear conservation, and it raises the possibility that encounters with this reclusive, high-altitude-ranging population may have generated Yeti reports over generations without the animal being well-known to Western science. The study did not claim to definitively close the Yeti question — Lindqvist herself noted that absence of DNA evidence in a sample set does not disprove the existence of an unidentified animal — but it substantially redirected the evidentiary landscape.

An earlier 2014 genetic analysis by Bryan Sykes of Oxford University had also tested alleged Yeti samples, famously reporting that two hair samples from Ladakh and Bhutan matched a genetic sequence from a Pleistocene-era polar bear jawbone — a finding interpreted by Sykes as potentially indicating a novel bear hybrid or relict population. Subsequent re-analysis of Sykes’s data, including by Lindqvist’s team, concluded that the match was more likely to a Himalayan brown bear than to an ancient polar bear, attributing the anomaly to the incomplete nature of the reference sequences Sykes had used.

Possible Explanations

The brown bear explanation is coherent and well-supported by the DNA evidence. Himalayan and Tibetan brown bears are known to stand bipedally, particularly when investigating scents or threats. Their hind foot tracks, when conditions cause the print to melt and refreeze, can expand significantly and lose claw impressions, producing a broad, human-like shape at dimensions well above a normal human foot. At altitude, in poor light or psychological conditions of cold and exertion, such tracks could plausibly be read as belonging to something unprecedented. The dzu-teh of Sherpa tradition — larger, livestock-raiding, quadrupedal or semi-bipedal — maps onto brown bear behavior with reasonable fidelity.

The mi-go accounts — describing a smaller, bipedal, more human-seeming creature — fit less neatly. Langur monkeys and Himalayan black bears have been proposed as explanations for some visual sightings, particularly at lower elevations. Misidentification under difficult observation conditions, cultural transmission of expected sightings, and occasional outright fabrication have all been cited by investigators including Hillary and Lindqvist.

A minority of researchers, including primatologist John Napier in his 1972 book Bigfoot, have argued that the most detailed and consistent visual reports — particularly those from experienced Sherpa witnesses — are not easily dismissed as bear misidentification. Napier concluded that the available evidence was insufficient to confirm or deny the existence of an unknown primate, a position of deliberate agnosticism that some researchers still maintain.

It is also worth noting that the Himalayan range contains large areas of terrain that remain minimally surveyed, particularly at the elevations where Yeti encounters are most commonly reported. New large mammals have been identified in South and Southeast Asia within the past three decades — the saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) was unknown to science until 1992. The Himalayas are not fully explored biological territory.

Why It Still Matters

The Yeti case is among the most thoroughly investigated cryptid reports in the world, precisely because the Himalayas attracted serious, documented scientific expeditions from the 1950s onward. The result is an unusually legible evidentiary record: we can trace which samples were tested, by whom, with what methods, and with what conclusions. That record now strongly supports the bear hypothesis for the physical evidence. What it does not fully account for is why eyewitness reports from trained observers — Tombazi, Ang Tharkay, and others — describe something that, in their account, was demonstrably not a bear.

Lindqvist’s 2017 work also served a practical purpose: the identification of a genetically distinct Himalayan brown bear population has real implications for conservation planning in a region where habitat is under pressure. Whatever else the Yeti phenomenon represents, it has driven scientific inquiry into one of the world’s most remote ecosystems in ways that produced concrete biological findings.

Sherpa and Tibetan traditions never required a single resolution to the question. The mi-go and dzu-teh were known quantities within those frameworks — hazardous, real in some sense, and not requiring Western validation. The ongoing divergence between the DNA evidence and the continuing stream of eyewitness reports represents, in that context, something perhaps familiar to mountain communities: a place where what science can measure and what people encounter don’t always produce the same answer.

The footprints on the Menlung Glacier have never been definitively attributed to a specific animal. Shipton’s photographs remain in circulation. The Khumjung scalp is back in the monastery where Hillary found it. New reports from the high Himalayas surface periodically, examined, filed, and left open. The case, as a case, is not closed — it has simply become more precisely defined, which is not quite the same thing.

Related case files

• Bigfoot: A Field Guide to North America’s Most Famous Cryptid
• The Patterson-Gimlin Film: Frame 352 and the 1967 Bigfoot Footage Debate
• The Loch Ness Monster: Inside the Scottish Highlands’ Greatest Mystery
• Champ: The Lake Champlain Monster America Almost Believes In
• The Beast of Bray Road: Wisconsin’s Werewolf Reports