Shipton and Ward Yeti Footprints, Menlung Glacier, 1951

Autumn 1951. The British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition was nearing its end. Its leader, Eric Shipton, was taking a small party back towards Kathmandu through unexplored country between the Bhote Koshi river of Sola Khumbu and the Rongshar valley in Tibet. With him were the expedition doctor, Michael Ward, and Sen Tensing, a Sherpa from Khumbu with long experience of the Himalaya and the Karakoram.

8 November 1951. About 4 pm. The three men crossed the Menlung La and started down towards the Menlung Glacier, on the Nepal-Tibet watershed west of Everest. At about 16,000 to 17,000 feet, on the lower part of the glacier, they came across a whole series of footprints in the snow.

Shipton judged them less than a day old. Some had not yet been softened by the thaw. Ward said the clearest print was about the same length as his boot and nearly twice as broad. It had clear-cut edges and the imprint of a big toe, broader and shorter than the others. Shipton described a broad "thumb" to the side.

They followed the trail for more than a mile down the glacier. Wherever it crossed a narrow crevasse, about 6 inches wide, there seemed to be claw marks at the end of the toes. As if the creature had jumped and used its toes to grip the far side. Then the snow gave way to moraine-covered ice. The trail was gone.

Sen Tensing said the tracks were a yeti's. Yetis, he said, walk on two legs, stand about five feet high and are covered in brown hair. Pressed, he admitted he had never seen one himself.

Shipton photographed the best print twice. Once with an ice axe beside it. Once with Ward's boot. He also took long shots of the trail. Days later, W. H. Murray and Tom Bourdillon saw the tracks, already distorted by the sun. Bourdillon wrote to a friend that it was "no animal known to live in the Himalaya, & that it is big."

On 7 December 1951, The Times published the photographs. They became the best-known evidence ever offered for the Yeti. No cast was made. The party carried no plaster. In 1960 Wladimir Tschernezky of Queen Mary College, London, published a reconstruction of the foot in Nature, sculpted from an enlargement of the photograph.

Shipton maintained until his death that the tracks were genuine. Others were less sure. Peter Gillman argued in the Sunday Times Magazine that Shipton made the clear print as a joke that got out of hand. Edmund Hillary reportedly said in 1984: "Eric (Shipton) was a joker." Napier and Naish both noted that the close-up and the trail photographs look noticeably different.

Ward offered his own answer in 1997 and 1999. A local Tibetan with deformed feet, walking barefoot. Others blamed melting, or prints laid on top of one another. Jeff Meldrum saw an enlarged second toe consistent with macrodactyly. In 2017 Daniel C. Taylor proposed an Asiatic black bear, its hind paw landing on its front-paw print. He reproduced the effect with a tranquilized bear at the Kamla Nehru Zoological Garden.

The prints shaped the Yeti for a generation. Heuvelmans used the track in 1958 to describe Dinanthropoides nivalis. Nigel Kneale's BBC play The Creature and the Hammer film The Abominable Snowman drew on the discovery. In 2014 four original prints sold at Christie's for £5,500. The Royal Geographical Society still holds the photographs. What walked down the Menlung Glacier has never been settled.