"Abominable! Can you believe that? Do I look

abominable to you? Why can't they call me the

Adorable Snowman or...or the Agreeable Snowman, for crying out loud? I'm a

nice guy." – The Yeti [Monster’s Inc.]

Guarding the sleep of the mountains steep

The Yeti is the legendary guardian of the Himalayan Mountains. The search for the Yeti dates back as early as 326 BC and continues

today.

Home Home on the (Mountain) Range

The Himalaya mountain range is both remote and vast with a length of about 2,400 km and a

width of 200-400 km. The range includes Mount Everest, the highest peak on earth, standing at

29,028 feet high. The Yeti is said to roam between the treeline and permanent snow at

14,000 to 20,000 feet.

Alexander the Great & the hunt for the terrible horrible no good very bad…Yeti?

The search to find the Yeti can be traced back to the time of Alexander the Great, who in 326 BC set out to conquer the Indus Valley. Having heard stories of the Yeti he demanded to see one for himself, but local people told him they were unable to present one because the creatures could not survive at that low an altitude.

Come & Get Your Yeti!

• In the 1950s the Nepali government cashed in on the increasingly popular Yeti myth by issuing Yeti-hunting licenses priced at £400 per Yeti. To date no-one has succeeded in capturing a specimen dead, or alive (though people still pay for the chance).

• Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary in Bhutan is a national park officially dedicated to preserving the Yeti.

Yetis Save Lives!

This legendary creature has had an actual impact on conservation. Belief in an unproven animal has helped conserve the forest for real

animals, like Himalayan black bears, red pandas, leopards, and Himalayan tahr.

What’s in a name?

The name ‘Abominable

Snowman’ was coined in 1921 by journalist Henry Newman who

mis-translated the Tibetan label Metoh-Kangmi, “dirty men in

the snow.”

Here, there, everywhere!

Mystery primates are reported from every continent except Antarctica. They include the

Sasquatch of North America, the Yowie in Australia, the Yeren of China, the Hibagon in

Japan, the Orang Pendek in Sumatra, theAlmasty of Russia, the Ferles Mor in Scotland, and the

Mapinguari of Brazil.

Where it all began…

It is suggested that the Yeti myth originated in Tibet, and reached Nepal via the Sherpa, descendants of families who emigrated from the Khams region of

Tibet across the Himalayan range in the middle of the sixteenth century.

What walks that way?

Possible explanations for the unusually large footprints

found over the years include the effect of evaporation and

melting snow, the ‘overstepping’ phenomenon in which the longer tracks of an animal’s hind feet overlap and obscure the tracks of the

shorter forefeet, and even the prints left by nomadic

mountain men wearing roughly-woven snow sandals.

Scientist Says

The first scientist to investigate the Yeti was German Professor Ernst Schaefer. Allegedly, he was employed by the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler to search for the Yeti in 1938 in the hope that it would turn out to be the progenitor of the Aryan race. Schaefer reached the conclusion that the Yeti was in fact the Tibetan bear.

Artwork Copyright Nate Wragg 2012

According to Natives

Sherpa tradition holds that the Yeti

will only show itself to those who believe in it.

Hard to Say…

From a scientific point of view, the descriptions of the Yeti raise an interesting question: is there a real animal that lives in the Himalayas that people have exaggerated or imagined to be some kind of oversized hairy human?

So mixed up!

Could one or more of the large mammals that live in the high

mountain forest be the real Yeti? Or are people seeing

glimpses of real animals and mixing them together to

create a mythical one?

Trying to Understand

People who study the traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people are called folklorists. They study folklore to try and understand why certain legends persist and what significance they might play in daily life. One theory is that the myth of the Yeti serves to help protect the forests.

Going two by two

The Nepali people who live in the mountains, the Sherpas, believe in Buddhism, a very important religion in Nepal. Buddhism encourages people to live in balance with nature and discourages people from hunting animals for food or cutting down trees for fuel. They also establish “sacred lands,” large tracts of forest that are not to be disturbed. It is believed the Yeti favors these sacred areas. The people rarely enter dense forest alone or after dark. They believe it is safer to go by twos in case they meet this legendary creature.

Proof? Smoof…

Yet, even without proof, belief in the Yeti is very real. The lack of hard evidence despite decades of searches doesn't deter true believers; the fact that these mysterious creatures haven't been found is not taken as evidence that they don't exist, but instead how rare, reclusive, and elusive they are.

Artwork Copyright Nate Wragg 2012

Any body? Anybody?

A single body would prove that the Yeti exist, though no amount of evidence can prove they don't exist (you can’t prove a negative.) For that reason alone, these animals — real or not — will likely always be with us.

History of the Yeti…in under 1 ½ minutes

https://vimeo.com/97494705

Reinhold Messner: Climbing Legend, Yeti Hunter

• Age: 55• Home: South Tyrol,

Italy• Day Job: Member,

European Parliament• Number of Toes:

Three*

[*Other seven toes lost to frostbite while descending Nanga Parbat after an avalanche.

Living Legend

Reinhold Messner has made a life of redefining the possible.

The German-speaking Tyrolean Italian is probably the greatest mountaineer

alive. The American climber Jon Krakauer says: "Messner is to climbing what Michael

Jordan is to basketball."

Even without air!

In 1978 he bent the accepted boundaries of the human body, summiting Everest without

supplemental oxygen—arguably the greatest alpine feat of all time. He went on to bag all 14 of Earth's 8,000-meter (26,250-foot) peaks—another record. Now he's made a Messner of the yeti, yanking the improbable abominable

snowman into the realm of fact. Or has he?

Going it alone

In 1980, when attempts on Everest still relied on armies of Sherpas and equipment, Messner went up on his own. His

single-minded passion for climbing has survived the loss of one of his brothers, some controversy, and all but three of his toes.

And it is with that same single-minded determination that he believes he has solved the

yeti mystery.

Getting Bored

"These highest points were losing their

mystery," Messner lamented in 1986. By the end of that year he had all the mystery he could

handle: A close encounter with a yeti in the

Himalaya sparked a 12-year search.

Telling His Tale

In an interview in the National Geographic

magazine ADVENTURE Messner recalled that first meeting. Here he revealed the nature of the beast, why Hitler yearned for yetis, and

much more.

Going for a walk

It was 1986, and he had gone for a walk on his own and got a bit lost. A walk for Reinhold

Messner is not what most people mean by a walk. On this one he was trying to follow a route

taken by Sherpa people centuries ago in the flight from the lands of Dege to Lhasa. That's a

walk of about 1,200 miles.

Not alone after all

It was dusk; he was climbing a steep, densely vegetated slope. Suddenly something large and dark stepped out ahead of him. He watched it racing along in front, flitting in and out of the trees, upright like a man, but moving faster than any man could. Neither branches nor ditches slowed it down. At one point it stood motionless only 10 yards away, then disappeared.

Back again

He saw it again, later that night, running in

the moonlight. It looked more than seven feet tall and

immensely strong, but agile too. Covered in hair, with short legs and long, powerful arms, it made angry

hissing noises, and for a second he saw its

eyes and teeth before it ran off into the trees.

The Climbing Detective

After his encounter with the strange beast, Messner became obsessed. He spent a large part of the following 12 years chasing yetis

round the Himalayas - Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Mongolia, Kazakhstan - trying to get to the

bottom of a myth that has been around since Alexander the Great heard of them when he

went to conquer the Indus valley in 326BC. Now he thinks he has solved the mystery.

The Answer Is….

After 12 years of research and more than 20 trips to the Himalayas, scouring monasteries for relics and eventually seeing more "yetis" for himself in Lhasa and the Karakorum, Messner's conclusion is perhaps a little disappointing for the rest of us, but not for him (more on that in a bit.)

It’s a…bear?

[According to Messner]The yeti

does not exist. There is no human-like

abominable snowman living in

the mountains. The yeti is in fact a

Himalayan brown bear.

In His Own Words

Listen to audio clips of Ressner actually speaking of his experience as well as his interview here:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0005/q_n_a.html

Note: To listen to the audio clips, you'll needRealPlayer.

How do the legends and this bear match?

• “The legends all describe the yeti as two and a half meters [eight feet] high. If it’s big, they say it is black. If it’s very small, they say it’s reddish, because the small Tibetan bears are reddish.

• Everything matches perfectly. They all say, for example, when the yeti is whistling, run away because it’s becoming dangerous. It goes on two legs when it meets people, to show that he is big and strong and dangerous. It’s telling you, Go away or you are a dead man.”

Is it in fact “big and strong and dangerous”?

“It is able to kill a yak with one fist. No other animal can do this in the Himalaya—you know, a yak is big like a buffalo. I found a dead yak killed with one hand by a yeti—or a Tibetan bear.”

Why haven’t locals recognized the bear as the true yeti?

• It is a night animal, so they see only a huge shadow, a dangerous animal. And they know they have no chance in the night to compete, so they don’t go out. They see sometimes a dead yak, sometimes in the morning a goat is missing in their herd.

• In their stomachs, a few of them know this is a bear, but not all of them. They call it a bear with human abilities.

Are you [Reinhold Messner] disappointed?

• "Not for me. Because the brown bear is really a monster." What about for the people who live in the Himalayas and have lived with this legend for hundreds of years?

• The yeti is the sum of many, many, many tellings of a legend. The local people have a lot of fantasy creatures because they live without television and without Hollywood, so they have to create their own figures or myths. But most of these figures, like the yeti, are built on real, existing beings out of nature.

[continued]

• The local people tell each other the story. And from time to time somebody brings along a new part because they’ve been in touch, in the night, with one of these creatures. So the yeti is the sum of this fantasy figure and the zoological reality behind it—a Tibetan bear. The legend and this Tibetan bear match.

• "In the local areas they know all that - that this is an animal. But since only every 10 years someone is seeing a real example, so if they speak about it, all the children and normal people that never saw one, they are imagining they are talking about something that isn't a brown bear. We should see the yeti as the sum of the legend and the zoological reality."

The Yeti