Season 07 Episode 08: Walking on Snow (Pt.1 of 2)

one explained. The girl relaxed back into the short alpine grass and stared up at the sky. It was early summer in this high valley of the Himalayas, surrounded by towering, snow capped mountain peaks, topped with a deep blue sky made all the darker by the thin air. The sparse grasses were dotted with wild flowers, and a herd of yaks, cows,

sheep and goats grazed contentedly nearby. Chettun Tamang, the daughter of a Sherpa family from the village of lang Tang in Nepal, had been sent to tend the family's herd in the high pastures over the summer, a task she'd performed alone every year since she was around eight years old. It was a remote spot because her father always insisted on taking their animals well beyond the usual grazing areas used by other families in the village in order to

find the best grass. She was staying in the family yak Kirka, a simple dwelling of stone walls which the family re roofed every spring with strips of bamboo specially woven together for the purpose. Born in this very spot, the girl was almost completely at ease alone with the animals, surrounded by the immense mountain peaks of the Himalayas. She was afraid of only one thing, falling asleep. Her parents had told her time and time again that snow leopards

stalked the surrounding slopes. If she saw one, Chetton would have to make plenty of noise. The leopards mostly avoided people and were easy to frighten away, but if she fell asleep, a leopard could slink close to the herd and quickly make off with one of the animals, and the family couldn't afford to lose even a single baby, yak or goat, But there was something else that Cheten

was wary of too. Growing up in her home village of Langtang, Chetton had been told many stories by her grandmother about the strange creatures that were also said to stalk the surrounding mountains and pastures. They were said to be huge, around ten to twelve feet tall, and covered in long brown hair so dense that it was sometimes hard to see their eyes. These creatures were extremely strong and powerfully built, and walked on two legs, apparently not

very intelligent nor speaking any discernible language. Nevertheless, they seemed to understand what humans were saying and sometimes liked to hang around the sherpa copying what they were doing. You knew if one or more were in the area because they communicated by a kind of muling whistling call. And these creatures could also be very dangerous, sometimes allegedly killing

and eating villages, especially small children. The last one that was thought to have lived in the area was said to have been killed when Chetton's father was a small boy. They called it Yete, otherwise known as YETI you're listening to unexplained and I'm Richard mclan smith. For centuries, the Himalayan people of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, and China have recognized the existence of the yeti, an anglicized version of the word yete, which translates roughly to that thing or

man like animal. According to the descriptions, there are several types of yeti based on size and location. The smallest, sometimes called the little yeti or te ema, live in forested mountain valleys below the snow line, no more than around four feet tall, with reddish gray hair and pointed, sloping heads. They are said to feed on small mammals. Then there are the classic yete, described as about the height of a young boy or up to around five

feet tall. They too are said to have conical heads and are stocky and ape like, with short, coarse, reddish brown hair, wide mouths, with large teeth, and very long arms. Supposedly living and mostly dense Himalayan rhododendron forests at elevations above fourteen thousand, five hundred feet, they are most famous for supposedly leaving their tracks in the snow when crossing the mountains from valley to valley. Next, there is the

big yeti, or zoute. Descriptions of this creature resemble most closely a large bear, reported to live between thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand feet above sea level. They are said to walk mainly on fore legs, but sometimes bipeedally, and are known for their attacks on yaks, which they are said to kill by ferociously grabbing the horns and twisting

their necks. And then the rather than ni almo. Living at elevations above thirteen thousand feet, they are said to be between ten and fifteen feet tall, with enormous conical heads, rumored to feed on yaks, mountain sheep, and sometimes on humans. It was these terrifying creatures that teenage Yak herder Chetton had learned about from her grandmother. According to her, the yeties or nilmo that used to inhabit the mountains above

lang Tang had a bizarre habit. They seem to like to watch then try to copy what they saw humans doing. Over the years, the Sherpa people had apparently used this curious habit to gradually kill them off. In one story, several families collected strands of wool from their herds and rolled them into large, uneven gray balls that looked like boulders. Then they went to the opposite banks of a fast flowing mountain river and started throwing the fake boulders at

each other, pretending to fight. A group of yeties who were said to have observed this, started to do the same thing, but with real boulders in the process. They hit and injured their group so badly that they fell into the torrent and were swept away. By the early nineteen fifties, when Chettun's father was around five years old, her grandmother said that there was only one remaining yeti

known to be in the area. It seemed to have a particularly aggressive disposition and was rumored by local villagers to have snag and eaten several young children in the high yak pastures above lang Tang. This yeti had supposedly been seen periodically by a couple who were staying in their yak kirka with their newborn baby. The simple stone walled shelter where they lived over the summer months, tending

their animals at no door, just an open entrance. The only way to secure that entrance was to place tree branches across it, not as specially secure against an enormously strong creature. Having not seen the Yeti for a few weeks, the husband decided to walk down to the village, about an eight hour trek away, to fetch much needed supplies for his family and his herd. He left his wife

alone with their baby to tend to the yaks. On such trips he would typically stay away for a night and come back the next day, But after three days the man had not returned. Despite her concerns, his wife had no choice but to stay with the animals rather than go looking for him. The following morning, she was busy milking a jack when she heard the baby crying from inside the cooka. Quickly finishing up, she went to

tend to it. Went to her horror, she supposedly found the Yeti who'd been plaguing her family now standing inside the stone dwelling. Not only that, but it was cradling her baby in its arms. Thinking fast, the terrified woman was then said to have taken some water that had been heating over the fire and began washing her hair

with it, just as she'd hoped. The Yeti then apparently made gestures which indicated it too would like her to wash its hair, and so the woman did, but instead of using the pan of warm water, she took a can of kerosene instead and poured it over the Yeti's head. Then she moved herself closer to the fire and dropped her head down toward the flames, motioning for the Yeti to do the same, as Chettun's grandmother explained. When the Yeti did as the woman suggested, its head and fur

lit up instantly in flames. The Yeti ran, grunting and snarling from the stone shelter and headed straight towards the nearby river, but died before it could reach the water. The woman grabbed a large sharp knife and watched from a distance until she was sure that the Yeti was dead.

On reaching its partly charred corpse, she is then said to have sliced the creature open right down its massive belly, Its stomach ripped open, partially digested remains of human body parts and fragments of clothing spilled out onto the ground around it. Among them, the woman recognized the remains of her husband. The first known Yeti report from the Himalayas

made by a European was in eighteen thirty two. Trekker Brian Hodgson was walking through northern Nepal assisted by local guides, when they all spotted what he said was a large creature covered in long, dark hair, with no tail and walking on two legs. Hodgson took it to be in a Rangatan, even though that species would have been several thousand miles from its natural Smartran jungle home. His local guides, however, took the creature to be something else. Entirely frightened, they

refused to shoot at it and fled. Hodgson even published a report of the sighting in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Benngre. It would be another sixty years before the next European sighting of an apparent yetty appeared in print. In eighteen ninety nine, British adventurer Lawrence Waddle, who'd spent around fifteen years exploring the region, published its travel book Among the Himalayas. In it, he recounted coming

across enormous footprints in the snow. Though his local guides insisted it was some kind of wild man, Waddle believed the prints were in fact left by a Himalayan brown bear. Reports of Himalayan wild men reached Europe with increasing frequency as more and more foreigners traveled to the region. Colonel Charles Howard Berry, an Anglo Irish explorer and botanist, set off to climb the lak Pa Pass early one morning

in September nineteen twenty one. During the trek, he and his party encountered a set of strange footprints, which Howard Berry decided had been made by a loping wolf before becoming distorted by the melting snow, but the expedition porters immediately identified them as those of what they called a meta kang me or man bear snow creature. On the group's return to Britain, some of the expedition team were interviewed by journalist Henry Newman. Newman mistranslated meta kangm as

abominable snowman. The name would quickly become etched in the mind. In nineteen twenty five, Greek explorer Nicolaus Tombarsi was camping close to the Zemu Gap, a twenty five thousand foot peak located on a ridge just east to the summit of Kangchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world. One morning, his porters called him from its tent to come and

see something. Tombarsi duly joined them, where after initially being blinded by the intense glare of bright sunlight reflecting off the snow, he saw a bizarre figure around three hundred yards away, human like in shape and walking upright, silhouetted against the blinding snow. Tomarsi could not make out what color it was, but could discern that whatever it was wasn't wearing any clothes. Every so often, the creature was said to stoop and uproot a road dendron bush, before

it wandered eventually from view into some thick scrub. Tom Barzi apparently went over to where the creature had been and saw footprints that he described as similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long. Marks of five toes and an instep were clear. He concluded that the prints were undoubtedly those of a biped, but like the explorers before him, he was skeptical that

this was a yetty. He decided instead that he'd seen a wandering hermit or holy man, although he did confess that the lack of clothes and bare feet did seem odd at such a high altitude. Just over a decade later, another British explorer John Hunt was in eastern Nepal. Hunt would later be awarded a knighthood for leading the nineteen fifty three expedition in which Tensing Norgay and Sir Edmund

Hillary successfully summited Mount Everest. But on this earlier trip, he was climbing on the northern face of the Zemu Gap, the same area of the Himalayas that Nicolaus Tombarsi had been. At a height of nineteen thousand feet, he came upon two lines of what looked like human footprints. At first, Hunt thought that some one had simply walked over the area before him, but had later emerged that there was no one else on that part at the mountain at

the time. The following year, in nineteen thirty eight, the German paramilitary organization the s S briefly went looking for the Yeti while on the hunt for evidence of a new and strange idea. Back in eighteen ninety four, Austrian engineer Hans Herbeger was staring up at the moon when he had a sudden epiphany. What if the reason the moon shines so brightly in the sky was because it was made of ice? What if ice, in fact was

fundamental to the existence of the universe. Herbeger was an expert in his field, but had no training in cosmology or physics. It didn't stop him obsessing over his new idea, however. Then one night he had a dream. It was a vision, he said, of a pendulum swinging back and forth until it broke. He believed it was a sign that he was onto something. Herbeger's idea became known as world ice theory. It asserted, essentially that ice was the basic component of

all cosmic processes. It eventually gained a significant amount of support, with many in Adolf Hitler's circle, especially enthused by its potential to one seat more widely held ideas about the nature of the universe, which they regarded as inherently Jewish ideas. And so it was in nineteen thirty eight that German zoologist Professor Ernst Schaeffer was sent on a top secret mission to Tibet by Joseph Goebels, in part to find evidence of her Bigger's theory. Sadly for them, since the

idea was utter nonsense, they found nothing. Schaeffer did, however, become intrigued by the YETI myth while trekking through the icy mountainous terrain, much like Lawrence Waddle. It was also his conclusion that the creature was most likely just a bear. In the autumn of nineteen fifty one, English mountaineer Eric Shipton led an expedition to survey possible routes to the

summit of Mount Everest from Nepal. The findings from that trip paved the way for the first successful recorded ascent in nineteen fifty three, but the fifty one expedition was

to become famous for something else entirely. One afternoon Tenzing, Norgay, Eric Shipton and Michael Ward, who was a surgeon as well as a mountaineer, were descending from a high pass when at around sixteen thousand feet they came across something astounding on the lower part of a glacier, a series of footprints in a two to four inch covering of snow. The print seemed to have descended from another pass that reared up about three thousand feet above them, and were

in two groups. One set were fairly indistinct and led out onto the surrounding snow fields. The others were much more detailed. Stunned Eric Shipton told Ward to place his ice axe alongside them for scale. Then he took out his camera and snapped four photographs. A short time later, one of these photographs, a now iconic image, appeared in newspapers all around the world. It showed a strangely wide, single distinct footprint with wards twelve inch long ice ACKs

next to it for scale. The footprint was nearly two times wider than a typical human foot, and was about twelve to thirteen inches long. Going by the sh shape of it, the big toe appeared to be broader and shorter than the other, rather in distinct toes, of which there seemed to be four or five. They were sunk into the snow much deeper than the footprints made by the booted mountaineers, implying a much heavier creature, and did

not seem to be human. And even if they were, how or why had someone or something walked through the snow in freezing temperatures without any foot protection. The startled group, keeping a keen lookout for whatever had created them, followed the tracks down the glacier for almost a mile. Two days later, the group were joined by two others who also witnessed the tracks, which by that time had been deformed by the effects of the sun and the wind.

Later wrote that despite evidence of obvious weathering, by the time he saw the footprints, they were still surprising and inexplicable. As he said later, what it is I don't know, but I am quite clear that it is no animal known to live in the Himalaya, and that it is big. When Eric Shipton's mesmerizing photograph was published, it fueled excited speculation in news reports around the world that the Yeti

really did exist. The following year, nineteen fifty two, famed mountaineer Edmund Hillary is deep in his ongoing preparations for making the first ascent of Mount Everest, about nineteen thousand feet up. While climbing a steep pitch on a high Himalayan pass with two Sherpa climbing partners, one of them, Pember, suddenly stops and picks something off the Hillary looks on as a greatly animated Pember shows it to his compatriot, ang Pember, who seems similarly impressed. Hillary asks the pair

what they are so excited about. Pember holds it out for Hillary to see. It is a tuft of long black hairs, thick and coarse. They look more like bristles than anything else. It's yetty hair, he says, with the look of such conviction that, as Hillary later reported, he couldn't help but be impressed by it. A year later, on the twenty ninth of May nineteen fifty three, news came from the Himalayas that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

had reached the summit of Everest. When the ensuing media frenzy began to subside, one British newspaper, The Daily Mail, was keen to have another big story form on the Himalayas. While supposedly credible footprint evidence of the mysterious Yeti had been found and photographed by reputable mountaineers, there was no concrete proof of the creature itself, so The Daily Mail decided to fund an expedition to find and capture the Yeti.

The paper was no stranger to funding quests for mystery creatures. It employed the actor and big game hunter Marmaduke weather Or to go and find the Lockness Monster, as covered in season seven, episode three of unexplained, a venture that was to end in failure and ridicule. Undaunted, the Daily Mail spent the equivalent of a million pounds in today's money to assemble and dispatch an expedition to go to the Himalayas. The mission team included mountaineers, ornithologists, zoologists and

three hundred seventy porters. They were given tranquilizer guns, a cage and instructions to catch the yetti and ship it back to London alive if possible. The quest would take fifteen weeks. Anthropologist and naturalist Charles Stonor was a member of The Daily Mail's Yeti expedition. Arriving ahead of the main team, he was part of a group tasked with

finding a suitable location for the expedition's base camp. Having settled for a few nights in the village of Pangboche, thirteen thousand feet up in the Sulukumbu district of Nepal, the team set about gathering testimonies from the local community. Before long, Stoner was approached by a local herdsman named

Mingma As. The man went on to explain to him four years before, he was watching over his yaks in the high pastures above the village when he thought he heard another herdsman in the rocks above him, shouting as if calling out for a lost yak. Despite Mingma shouting back that there were no stray creatures near by, the strange, disembodied cries continued. Moments later, Mingma looked up in horror to see a large, hairy creature quickly moving down the

mountain side toward him on two legs. Mingma scrambled back to his yakkirka and barricaded the door as best he could with heavy breaths. He eventually summoned the courage to peer out through a chink in the wall, and there, standing right in front of him was a yeti. Mingma described the creature as being squat and thick set, and about the size of a small man. It was also covered with mostly short, reddish and black hair that was long around the feet and had a high pointed forehead

with a crest of hair on top. Mingma held his breath as the yetty apparently lumbered around in front of the hut. It had long, muscled arms, with hands that appeared larger and much stronger than a human's, and a distinct, large flat nose. Then suddenly it turned and stared right at the terrified Mingma. It snarled at him, revealing big sharp teeth. Battling his frightened wits, Mingma looked about the hut for anything he could use as a weapon. He grabbed some wood and held it over the small fire

burning in the middle of the room. Then he flung the flaming missile while at the yeti, with as much force as he could manage. Thankfully, he said, the frightened creature ran off and did not return and enrapped. Charles Stoner found Mingma's story quite believable. The man had received

no reward for telling it. Indeed, he seemed quite surprised that his listener was so interested, and when Stone asked him to repeat the story for the benefit of other expedition team members, Mingma did so without any variation in even the smallest of details. Stoner later showed Mingma a watercolor painting depicting an apelike hairy creature striding through a snowfield. Mingma took one look and instantly rejected it. It was far too monkey like, he said. The creature he saw

was much closer to a human in appearance. This alleged incident was said to have occurred on the high yak pastures above the village of Pangboche, in one of the upper parts of the Dude Coosey Valley. It was in that area that the Daily Mail's expedition made their base camp, on a small flat stretch of pasture sandwiched between a swirling mountain torrent and a thick, high altitude forest of pine birch and rhododendron. A. Stoner's advanced party made the

camp ready for the main group. They were soon approached by another man who told them that he and his wife had encountered a YETI just the previous autumn. Stoner sat and wrapped as his sherper assistant translated the man's words for him, and as he told him about the creature that had apparently jumped out at him while he was collecting herbs. Stoner gave out to the vast snowpeaked mountains that surrounded them on all sides and dared to dream.

The stage was set for the arrival of the main expedition. You've been listening to Unexplained Season seven, episode eight, Walking on Snow, Part one, the second and final part, will be released next week on Friday, October twenty seventh. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard McClain smith. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast,

including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can per from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own

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