Bigfoot Yeti and the Last Neanderthal Page 4

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  The Footprint that Shook the World

  It is doubtful that any footprint has had such an electrifying effect on the public appetite for romance and adventure as the one photographed in 1951 by Eric Shipton. Shipton was the foremost climber of his day and one of the handful of men who had devoted their lives to the conquest of Mount Everest. Before the Second World War, successive expeditions had pushed higher and higher up the flanks of the tallest mountain in the world trying to find a route that would take them to the summit, and safely down afterwards. Shipton himself had been on most of these Himalayan ventures. Nepal was closed to climbers before the war, so all attempts were made from the north, from Tibet. The aftermath of the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1950 put a stop to further expeditions from that direction.

  Fortunately, the Nepalese government began to issue climbing permits for Everest so attention shifted to the relatively unexplored southern routes. It was Eric Shipton who led the 1951 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition that forced a route through the formidable barrier of the Khumbu icefall, in Shipton's own words ‘a wild tumble of contorted ice’ which blocked the route from base camp to the Lhotse face, the South Col and from there to the summit. He realised the extreme danger of climbing the icefall, not just from the collapsing seracs, but from the constant risk of ice-avalanches falling from the hanging glaciers clinging to the slopes on either side. This danger remains, and such an avalanche killed sixteen Sherpas in April 2014. Nevertheless, Shipton's demonstration that the Khumbu icefall could be crossed settled the favoured route for the expedition that was to put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Everest two years later.

  After they had mapped the Khumbu icefall, the members of the expedition, having achieved their principal objective, split up into two separate parties. Shipton, along with Michael Ward and Sen Tenzing, set off to explore the Menlung La, a 20,000 foot high pass to the north. On the afternoon of 8 November 1951, the party was descending a gently sloping glacier on the other side of the pass. At around 4 p.m. they suddenly came across a series of tracks in the snow. Some of the footprints were only vague impressions but the rest were sharply outlined individual prints in the thin layer of snow that covered the ice. Shipton took four photographs altogether, two of the indistinct impressions and two of the much sharper footprints. To give a sense of scale, he included in one the ice axe of his companion Michael Ward and in the other, his climbing boot. The prints were about the same length as Ward's size 8½ boots, that is around 12 or 13 inches long, but twice as broad. The edges were sharply defined in the crystalline snow with a broad big toe separated from the other toes, of which there were three or four. It was hard to tell. Sen Tenzing immediately identified them as yeti tracks.

  The three climbers followed the tracks down the glacier and wherever they crossed one of the many narrow crevasses in the surface of the ice, the toes appeared to be dug in to gain purchase on the far side. Eventually the tracks disappeared on the grass-covered glacial moraine. Two days later the group was joined by other climbers who had travelled down the same glacier, but by then the tracks were gone, eroded by the wind and the sun.

  It was the publication of Shipton's ice-axe photograph in the London Times on 7 December 1951, the day after his written account in the same paper, that set the world buzzing with excitement and the anticipation of mysterious creatures roaming free in the land of snow and ice, a land which many had heard of but few had experienced for themselves. Strange and unexplained footprints had been seen before in the Himalayas but somehow this image, alongside the ice axe that not only provided scale but also an immediate link to a world of adventure, captured the mystery and the romance of the yeti in a single frame. This photograph joined that select group of iconic images – the Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, Neil Armstrong's photograph of Buzz Aldrin stepping onto the surface of the moon and Marilyn Monroe's white dress billowing in the breeze from a subway grate in The Seven Year Itch – that seemed to capture everything in a single moment. Shipton's shot of the yeti print gripped the public imagination of a generation and ushered in two decades of frantic activity, all aimed at finding the creature that made it – alive or dead.

  The first of the big yeti expeditions was sponsored by the London newspaper, the Daily Mail. The man with the imagination, and the connections, to secure the funding and get the expedition off the ground was the journalist Ralph William Burdick Izzard. He had been sent by the Mail to cover the ascent of Everest in 1953, but had been kept well away from the action by the people from the Times who had bought the exclusive media rights to the expedition. However, during his otherwise frustrating trip, he did have a brief conversation with John Hunt, the leader of the Everest expedition. Hunt, who had been chosen as the expedition's leader ahead of Eric Shipton, had been to the region many times before and had himself seen yeti tracks. In 1937 he was crossing the 19,000 foot Zemu Gap that lies between Everest and Kanchenjunga to the east when he saw a double set of prints, side by side, stretching ahead of him. At first he interpreted these as tracks left by two members of a German expedition that was in the area. However, he later discovered that the German climbers had been elsewhere and was left with the intriguing possibility that these were indeed yeti tracks. Hunt conveyed to Izzard his belief that the yeti was a real animal, and that it could be found.

  As soon as he returned to London, Izzard set about planning his own expedition for the following year. Its aim was not to climb Everest, nobody was interested in doing that after 1953, but to find the creature that had made the prints. If man's ambition to get to the top of the world had been achieved in 1953, that other legacy of Himalayan adventures, the yeti, was a glittering prize yet to be claimed.

  Izzard was one of the sizeable band of dashing yet urbane heroes who were said to have been models for Ian Fleming's character James Bond – in Izzard's case, he was allegedly a source of inspiration for Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale. After the war he spent over thirty years on the staff of the Mail, with postings all over the world. Even so, it was a hard task to convince the paper's proprietor, Lord Rothermere, to put up the money for the scale of expedition Izzard had estimated the task required. But he succeeded, and by early January 1954 the expedition had arrived in Calcutta en route for Nepal. Rather like Hunt's the year before, this was a huge operation organised along military lines and employing, at its height, an army of three hundred porters. Military tactics also governed the expedition's strategy. It would divide into three separate parties to form a complicated pincer movement, driving any yetis into an ambush. Sadly, despite spending fifteen weeks in the Himalayas, they returned to London with nothing more than some vague sightings and even vaguer footprints. History does not record Lord Rothermere's reaction but the satirical magazine Punch greeted their return with these pithy lines:

  NOTHING DEFINITE YETI

  There are fascinating footprints in the snows of Kathmandu

  On a slightly less than super-human scale:

  There are numerous conjectures on the owners of the shoe

  And the money it has cost the Daily Mail.

  The failure of the Izzard expedition to photograph or, better still, to capture a yeti did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of other wealthy romantics, principal among whom was the Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick. Indeed, the Daily Mail's failure, or rather lack of success, meant the great prize was still there to be claimed.

  Thomas Baker Slick Jr was brought up in a family of entrepreneurs with business interests ranging from beef to railroads to oil, all over the Midwest. In 1912, his father Tom Slick Sr discovered oil in Payne County, Oklahoma, which earned him his soubriquet: ‘King of the Wildcatters’. He capitalised on this and other discoveries in the developing Cushing oilfield by building the railroads connecting the wells. In 1920, Tom Sr and his partners created a new town in Creek County, Oklahoma as their centre of operations. Soon the Slick Townsite Company, the Slick Gas Company and the Slick National Bank opened their doors for business in, you've guessed it, the town of Slick. At its peak over five thousand people called Slick home and the town's prosperity boomed. But like so many other boom towns, when the wells dried up the people left. Slick, Oklahoma is now abandoned with little remaining but crumbling buildings, weed-choked schoolrooms and broken window panes.

  With a family background like this, it isn't surprising that Tom Jr thought on a grand scale. His father, Tom Sr, died in 1930 at forty-six years of age, when Tom Jr was just fourteen. He had made a fortune from his businesses but never lived to enjoy the benefits, something his son was determined not to repeat. The day after his father died, Tom Jr was sent east from his home in Oklahoma City to attend the exclusive Phillips Exeter College in New Hampshire. At school young Tom had shown an interest in science, especially biology, which continued when he reached New Hampshire. Contemporaries remarked that he also devoted himself with gusto to the more practical applications of human biology, namely dating girls.

  In 1934, his graduation from college coincided with the announcement of an ambitious expedition to Tibet to capture the legendary giant panda. Although dead specimens had reached the West, until 1936 only nine Westerners had seen a giant panda alive. The 1936 reconnaissance expedition was led by Bill Harkness, one of the Standard Oil dynasty that had sponsored Tom Slick Jr through college. Harkness died in Shanghai on the reconnaissance trip, but his widow Ruth, a New York fashion designer, decided to lead the main expedition herself. In 1936, she and the naturalist Gerald Russell encountered and then captured a giant panda cub in Sichuan province, Western China. Su Lin, as the young animal was named, arrived back in the United States and created an immediate sensation. For several months, she lived in Ruth Harkness's New York apartment but was eventually sold to Brookfield Zoo, Chicago. Sadly Su Lin died of pneumonia two years later. His (or as it turned out during the autopsy, her) stuffed body is now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. If only all expeditions to find legendary creatures had such a happy ending – at least for the explorers.

  Slick progressed smoothly from college to Yale. During his time there he heard about the sightings of the Loch Ness Monster and, in 1937, shipped his car and his friends to Scotland for a visit. They stayed for a while near Urquhart Bay, where most sightings are made, but saw nothing. Ironically, in the same month that Slick and his group were on the north shore, the Rev William Graham saw a two-humped grey creature cruising along the opposite shore at Foyers.

  Tom Jr did well at Yale, graduating in biology in 1938. He lived back in Oklahoma City for a while before moving to San Antonio, Texas in 1939. It was here that he began to use his wealth to create a succession of scientific research institutes to conduct experiments in agriculture, engineering, medicine and the natural sciences. Unlike the eponymous town, one of the institutes founded by Tom Slick in 1947 has prospered and is now among the largest independent non-profit applied research and development organisations in the United States, posting an income of $570 million in 2011.

  While Tom Slick was building research institutes in Texas, and overseeing the family businesses, one of the most important events in the whole history of the quest for legendary creatures occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. An obscure Belgian biologist called Bernard Heuvelmans published a book in his native French. Sur la Piste des Bêtes Ignorées did not create much of a sensation when it was published in 1955, but when Richard Garnett's English language translation appeared in 1958 as On the Track of Unknown Animals it immediately became a classic. Over fifty years later it is still in print and has sold over two million copies. Heuvelmans himself was a complex character, one I got to know very well when I spent many days in his archive in Lausanne. But that is for a later chapter. There is no doubting the influence that On the Track had on everyone with even the slightest interest in ‘animals unknown to science’. And this included Tom Slick.

  By the time he made up his mind to send his own expedition in search of the yeti, Slick had already visited India on several occasions and had talked to local people about the half-human, half-ape creatures that roamed the high forests and snowfields of Nepal and Tibet. His interests were not confined to travel, but had in part a business motivation. He had developed an interest in skyscraper construction using pre-cast concrete and thought, bizarrely, that if he could discover the secret of the Hindu practice of levitation, he might be able to adapt it to raising the concrete slabs into place on building sites. Between these researches, he began in earnest to make the practical arrangements for the first of his yeti expeditions, which is when he heard about Peter Byrne. Peter, the last survivor of the big yeti hunts, now lives on the Pacific coast of Oregon in the northwest United States. He has lost none of his enthusiasm for finding anomalous primates as I discovered when I visited him at his home during my own excursions in the region.

  Originally from Ireland, Byrne had left the Royal Air Force after World War II and become a tea planter near Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas, within sight, on a clear day, of the third highest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga. It was during this phase of his life, on a trip to Sikkim in 1948, that Peter Byrne had seen his first yeti print close to the Zemu Glacier, the site of John Hunt's discovery of the twin set of tracks in 1937. As for many before and since, this was a transforming experience and he determined, like others who undergo a similar encounter, to do what he could to find one of these creatures. He quit tea-planting and started a career as a professional big-game hunter, helping clients to track and shoot mainly tiger, leopard and rhinoceros in the forests of Nepal. This was in the days when these animals were common and views on hunting were very different from what they are today. Peter still leads expeditions to Nepal, although these days his hunting parties are armed only with cameras.

  As for so many would be yeti-hunters, a major problem was securing the funding to mount a credible expedition. Byrne's move to Australia in 1954, where he worked as a journalist, gave him the opportunity to begin raising funds among the business community in Sydney. Unlike the large-scale Daily Mail expedition of 1954, Byrne's idea was to send a small team of two or three travelling lightly through yeti country. Even so, Byrne was not finding it easy to raise enough money for even this modest expedition. He did however have sufficient funds to return to Sikkim to look for additional evidence to convince his prospective backers that their money would not be wasted. It was during this foray, in 1956, that Byrne first heard about Tom Slick from none other than Tenzing Norgay, Hillary's companion on the summit of Everest. Tenzing had heard of Slick's plans to send an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the yeti and gave Byrne his address in Texas. Byrne wrote at once and received a rapid and encouraging reply.

  There followed months of complicated negotiations with the Nepalese government but eventually the expedition arrived in Nepal in March 1957. It was a slimmed-down operation comprising Tom Slick, Peter Byrne and the superintendent of the Delhi Zoo, N.D. Bachkheti, with a support team of seven Sherpas, and forty porters to carry the kit. The region they chose to explore was the country surrounding the Aran Valley in northeastern Nepal. Their reasons were that they had been informed by the head of the Geographical Survey of Nepal, one Col Rana, that yetis were comparatively plentiful in the region and that they were much bigger than those found further west.

  The Arun is the largest of the trans-Himalayan rivers, rising in Tibet and cutting through the main Himalayan chain between the peaks of Makalu and Kanchenjunga. The lower levels of the Arun basin are heavily populated but the steep-sided valleys leading to the high peaks are virtually unexplored, even today. They are thickly wooded with dense growth of rhododendron between chir pines, fir trees and native hardwoods. The tree line is at about fifteen thousand feet and gives way to a barren alpine landscape that, when the expedition arrived, was partly covered in snow. It was here that Tom Slick saw his first yeti prints, thirteen inches long and with the clear impression of five toes. He photographed and cast these in plaster of Paris. On the same day, but at a different location, Peter Byrne found a good set of fresh prints that he was able to follow for several miles through forest, including thick stands of bamboo that the creature, whatever it was, had ploughed straight through. Imagine his excitement in thinking that he might be on the brink of coming face-to-face with a yeti. Sadly it became clear to the pursuing Byrne that the creature was moving much faster than he was and that he was not going to catch up with it. He returned to camp exhilarated but also frustrated. Others in Byrne's party who had been ordered to follow the tracks in the reverse direction in the hope of finding the creature's lair found only droppings and a single black hair snagged on a thorn bush.

  On the way out from the mountains, Slick did an interesting experiment in the villages they passed through along the route. Descriptions of native encounters with the yeti are often tinged by the suspicion that they are confusing ordinary animals with the mythical yeti. Top of the list are bears and, in the Himalayas at least, langurs – large monkeys that are certainly capable of walking on two legs for considerable distances. In Kampalung, for example, he found fifteen villagers who, in the past, claimed to have had a clear view of the yeti in good light. He showed these witnesses a series of twenty photographs or drawings of animals often thought to have been confused with the mythical creature. He asked each witness in turn to pick out the image that most closely resembled the animal they had seen. In every case, the first choice was a photograph of a gorilla, unknown in the Himalayas and only found in Africa. Second choice was an artist's drawing of a prehistoric human and third was an orangutan standing up. No one chose the images of bear or langur, which were immediately recognised for what they were.