Sir Edmund Hillary is perhaps the last of New Zealand’s traditional white heroes who hasn’t yet been cancelled, un-personed or “de-colonised” — but give it time. No doubt the gimlet-eyed inquisitors of the left will dig up some un-woke sin the great man once committed.
But yeti-hunting is unlikely to be his downfall.
Sir Edmund and the Yeti: it sounds like one of those weird Kindle erotica that women consume by the megabyte. The erotic story of a beekeeper boned by the Bigfoot! (If you’re blissfully unaware of Bigfoot porn… I strongly advise you not to look it up.)
But yeti-hunting was serious business in the mid-20th century. With nearly all of the globe doggedly mapped and explored, there was less and less space left for “here be monsters”. But that did nothing to quell the public’s appetite. And at the same time, opening up previously unknown exotic lands made the Western world more aware of a wealth of local monster folklore — much of which sounded at least plausible enough to be true.
And if you were going to go a-hunting for creatures in the Himalayan wilds, who better than the New Zealander famous the world over for conquering the Himalayas?
When British mountainer, journalist and National Geographic photographer Desmond Doig went in search of the yeti, it was hardly the crazy folly that it seems to us today.
“The yeti wasn’t considered mythical in the early ’60s,” explains Graham Hoyland, mountaineer and author of Yeti: An Abominable History […]
That Edmund Hillary might set off in search of the abominable snowman, then, was not the wild, conspiracy-theory-baiting story it would appear to be today. That he and Doig might actually encounter a wild yeti was considered a very real possibility.
So, on the morning of September 10, 1960, Hillary led an expedition into the Rolwaling Valley, a hotbed of yeti sightings.
Among those traveling on the dual-purpose expedition were Peter Mulgrew and Wally Romanes, who had accompanied Hillary on his 1955-58 expedition to Antarctica; American space physiologist Dr Tom Nevison and glaciologist Barry Bishop, both well suited to measuring the effects of long-term altitude exposure; and Marlin Perkins, director of the Lincoln Park Zoo, and Dr Larry Swan a self-described “Himalayanist,” whose expertise seemed ideal for a yeti hunt. In other words, this was a serious, well-funded and professional expedition, one backed by World Book Encyclopedia.
Besides yeti-hunting, the expedition would also study the effects of long-term exposure to high altitudes on human fitness. This was serious, scientific stuff.
According to Sherpa legend, the yeti is a genus of high-altitude-dwelling, ape-like creatures with three distinct species: the dzu-teh is a six-to-eight-foot bearlike creature covered in either blond, red, black, or gray hair. Despite being largely vegetarian, dzu-tehs have been known to deploy its long claws in the hunting of cattle. The mih-teh is a two-legged creature the size of a small man and is covered in black or red hair with a long mane hanging over its eyes. Finally, Doig writes, the thelma is said to be a “sad-faced, dwarf-sized beast found in dense forests below 10,000 feet.”
Sadly, for those of us yearning for a lingering glance of the fabulous in the modern world, the search came to naught. The most the team found was a set of footprints in the snow. Doig was convinced they were the real deal, but Hillary was rightly sceptical.
Hillary dismissed the prints as having been made by snow leopards or wolves and claimed, “I would like a lot more convincing proof.” Doig, Swan, Perkins, and a few others set to work documenting the tracks with sketch books and measuring tapes, taking photographs, and attempting to make plaster of Paris casts, but it soon became clear that the prints were not made by a mysterious creature, but by the hot sun, which distended the tracks of much smaller, perfectly ordinary animals.
Hillary’s overall attitude was open-minded scepticism. Although he declared that, “I have never believed in the existence of the snowman,” at the start of the expedition, he at least allowed that he might be wrong. He pointed to supposed “yet relics”, such as a scalp held at local monasteries as possible evidence.
But even those failed the test of scientific scrutiny.
Eventually, the scientists agreed the scalp was likely a fake, possibly constructed from the skin of a serow, a goat-like creature found in the Himalayas. “Pleasant though we felt it would be to believe in the existence of the Yeti,” Hillary wrote in High in the Thin Cold Air, “when faced with the universal collapse of the main evidence in support of this creature the members of my expedition … could not in all conscience view it as more than a fascinating fairy tale.”
Atlas Obscura
Still, hope for the reality of the yeti dies as hard as belief in the continued existence of the thylacine. Even despite the disappointments of his expedition, Doig continued to insist that “there certainly is something in the high Himalayas to spark the descriptions of a shaggy red monster walking usually on two feet”.