Don Whillans' Yeti Sighting and Footprint Photographs, Annapurna Sanctuary (1970)

Spring 1970. Chris Bonington was leading a British expedition to the South Face of Annapurna, which had never been climbed. His deputy was Don Whillans. Whillans went ahead of the main party. His job was to find a site for base camp in the Annapurna Sanctuary.

He camped near what is now Machapuchare Base Camp. In the dark, he heard odd cries. His Sherpa, named in one account as Pemba Tharkey, looked past him and spoke matter-of-factly. "Yeti coming."

Whillans was able to see only a shadow disappearing behind a ridge.

The next day Whillans and Mike Thompson went out to scout the area. Around the same spot they found a set of tracks in the snow. They looked like human footprints. Whillans photographed them. Thompson had a simpler answer. "It's a bear." Whillans disagreed.

The following night the moon was bright enough to read by. Whillans' tent faced the slope and ridge where the figure had been the night before.

Through binoculars, for about 20 minutes, he watched a powerful, ape-like animal. It seemed to be searching for food not far from his camp. It looked more like an ape than a bear, he said. From the shadowed part of the hillside it came out into the moonlight, "bounding very quickly across the snow, heading for the shelter of the cliffs."

In the morning the Sherpas ignored the tracks and acted as if they did not exist. Whillans believed they saw the creature as a sacred animal, best left alone. On 27 March 1970 he met Bonington and told him that he and his Sherpas had seen a Yeti and photographed its footprints.

The retellings do not agree. In the words quoted from Whillans himself, the animal was "bounding along on all fours", which would fit a bear. Later summaries call it bipedal. Odette Tchernine, writing in the journal Oryx, described "a dark hair-covered bipedal creature scraping the snow on the slope beyond his hut", though other accounts put him in a tent. A children's magazine later added claw marks around the camp, which no earlier account mentions. And the whole sighting took place at night, by moonlight, through binoculars, at a distance no source records.

Tchernine still took the evidence seriously. She put Whillans' footprint photographs beside Eric Shipton's 1951 Menlung photograph as "the most serious challenges to the myth theory". No official body ever investigated.

Whillans still had a climb ahead of him. On 27 May 1970 he and Dougal Haston made the first ascent of the South Face. Weeks after the expedition came home, the ITN documentary Death on Annapurna ended with John Edwards interviewing him about the sighting. In 1980 he appeared in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, in the episode "The Missing Apeman". Alongside Reinhold Messner's encounter of 1986, it remains one of the best known Yeti sightings by a Western mountaineer.