Footprints of Yeti
The imagination of an artist
The Himalayan Yeti mystry or legend???
The Himalaya Mountains, the highest range on Earth, have been referred to as the “roof of the world.” If that is so, there is a mystery called the Yeti in our attic. In Tibetan the word means “magical creature” and truly it is a seemingly supernatural enigma in the shape of a hairy, biped creature that resembles a giant ape.
The Himalayas lie on the border between India, Nepal, and Tibet (now part of China). They are remote and forbidding. Large stretches around these rough valleys and peaks are uninhabited. The tallest mountain in the world, Everest, 29,028 feet high, lies half in Nepal, half in China. It is from Nepal, though, that most attempts to climb Everest, and the surrounding mountains, are made.
In Katmandu, the capitol of Nepal, a visitor finds himself immersed in the Yeti legend. He is a commercial money maker for the tourist industry (there’s even a Hotel named the “Yak and the Yeti”) as well as legend, religion and fantasy to some of the Neplaese people.
The first reliable report of the Yeti appeared in 1925 when a Greek photographer, N. A. Tombazi, working as a member of a British geological expedition in the Himalayas, was shown a creature moving in the distance across some lower slopes. The creature was almost a thousand feet away in a narea with an altitude of around 15,000 feet.
“Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes,” said Tombazi, “It showed up dark against the snow and, as far as I could make out wore no clothes.”
The creature disappeared before Tombazi could take a photograph and was not seen again. The group was descending, though, and the photographer went out of his way to see the ground were he had spotted the creature. Tombazi found footprints in the snow.
They were similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide at the broadest part of the foot. The marks of five distinct toes and the instep were perfectly clear, but the trace of the heel was indistinct…”
There were 15 prints to be found. Each was one and one half to two feet apart. Then Tombazi lost the trail in thick brush. When the locals were asked to name the beast he’d seen they told him it was a “Kanchenjunga demon.” Tombazi didn’t think he’d seen a demon, but he couldn’t figure out what the creature was either. Perhaps he’d seen a wandering Buddhist or Hindu ascetic or hermit. As the years went by though and other Yeti stories surfaced, Tombazi began to wonder if he’d seen one too.
Yeti reports usually come in the form of tracks found, pelts offered, shapes seen at a distance, or rarely, actual face-to-face encounters with the creatures. Face to face encounters never come with researchers looking for the Yeti, but with locals who stumble into the creature during their daily lives.
Some of the best tracks ever seen were found and photographed by British mountaineers Eric Shipton and Micheal Ward in 1951. They found them on the southwestern slopes of the Menlung Glacier, which lies between Tibet and Nepal, at an altitude of 20,000 feet. Each print was thirteen inches wide and some eighteen inches long. The tracks seemed fresh and Shipton and Ward followed the trail for a mile before it disappeared in hard ice.
Some scientists that viewed the photographs could not identify the tracks as from any known creature. Others, though, felt it was probably the trail of a languar monkey or red bear. They noted the tracks in snow, melted by the sun, can change shape and grow larger. Even so, the bear/monkey theory seems unlikely as both of these animals normally move on all four feet. The tracks were clearly that of a biped.So was it Hoax or Truth …hope time unfolds it.
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