The Yeti Society. Martin Sexton
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film. A cowboy, Bob Gimlin and an adventurer and self-confessed Bigfoot hunter, Roger Patterson, went looking for the beast of the woods and mountains, an unlikely search for what the local tribes call Oh Mah or Sasquatch, the boss of the mountains and then…they found him.
Except the him was a her. It was clearly a female, all hair and mammary glands. Its breasts, along with its heavily muscled thighs, moved with gravity and an hallucinatory clarity through the very few seconds of the shaken film amongst the flood damage of the Klamath River in Bluff Creek. The beast was not hidden, obscured by vegetation, a notorious blob Squatch. It was in plain sight, on a clear sun-drenched afternoon. One had one simple conclusion to draw—either it was a very large man in an ape-like suit or it was real. It was a binary choice. There was no in-between.
I lost count of how many times we screened that film, over and over again that night. We watched, largely silent, our only words being, occasionally…Shall we look at it again? One more time, yes? And so we did…Again and again. It looked strange. My eyes were at war with my brain and then vice versa as both would jump from opposing conclusions. The repeated screenings did not help matters, one set of eyeballs convinced one it was real and another viewing did not add clarity but left the same set rejecting the previous conviction. Eric was right, if it was a hoax it was a work of genius and if it was real…well…
Then Ruth walked in. We were so engrossed we did not hear her, even though the film is entirely silent. She switched the lights on and the first words I heard her say were, ‘You watching Eve again, Ross?’ I stood up to clumsily greet her but she ignored me and walked to the kitchen. She continued, ‘That's naked Eve. God sent her to show us we have to begin again. Judgement day is coming. Who's your friend? I have only got basics from the store, if you want eating.’
The next morning I set about finding out as much as I could on the background of the Bluff Creek film, of the strange hairy bipedal figure that had Ross and myself second guessing every time we watched it. His obsession had infected me. Unknowingly I found myself entering a world of clashing European empires and the mountains of the word. Nearly two decades before the Bluff Creek film, I found out that a world away, on the Nepalese side of the vast Himalaya, two highly respected English mountaineers had discovered inexplicable tracks. Eric Shipton along with a Dr Michael Ward were shocked on their descent down the Melung Chu, unroped but still on a dangerous uncharted climb close together, to find on a desolate glacier at an elevation of 16,000ft a long trackway in virgin snow. Despite the snow combined with hardened ice, deep depressions of large and bare, unadorned bipedal hominoid footprints were in a long run. As they were the first humans to chart this unexplored area, and at such an altitude to find anything, any animal was uncanny. They pondered could it be another climber? But surely only correctly equipped mountaineers with appropriate footwear, indeed any footwear would have made some sense. Truly baffled they took some photographs of what they found. Having no means to accurately measure the individual footprints, Shipton took what would become two iconic photographs that would stun and shock the world. One with Ward's boot for scale beside it and, the most iconic of all, one with Ward's ice axe beside it. What is more, two other equally respected mountaineers on the same expedition, including a scientist, Bourdillon, had followed them a day later over the Menlung La and come across the same trackway. Equally baffled, they followed it for over 3 miles before they had to turn back. When they returned to the high elevation base camp they met with the highly respected and experienced Sherpa Sen Tensing (who would later, along with Edmund Hillary, be the first to reach the summit of Everest). His local knowledge, having been raised and lived near and on the mountains, gave him no doubt. He confirmed they were footprints of a Yeti. The extraordinary photographs and the back story of how they came across them began in 1951 when Ward, a doctor with the Royal Army Medical Corps, came across some hidden photographs of the unexplored Nepalese south side of Everest taken by an RAF Mosquito X1X. The photographs revealed some key features critical to any ascent of the highest mountain in the world from the Nepalese side.
Two years earlier all foreigners were barred from entering Nepal and all Everest expeditions had to take place from the Tibet side. Along with these critical aerial photographs, he unearthed a rare and forgotten photogrammetric survey from the 1930s. Ward felt he had found the means for a successful ascent of Everest from Nepal. His attempts at getting such an ascent going with help from the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club proved difficult, not least because his plan meant a crossing of the treacherous Khumbu Icefalls and its maze of cliffs and shifting deadly crevasses. Ward managed to convince two New Zealanders, including Hillary, to join him along with Englishman Eric Shipton. When they finally arrived in Nepal and climbed the 18,000ft to the icefall, Ward described it as,
’…a glimpse into purgatory, the icefall had become an immense, unstable ruin, as though an earthquake had shaken the entire glacier.’
Nepal lies on a major fault-line between two tectonic plates. One has the continent of India resting upon it and pushes east and north at a rate of 2cm a year against the other, which carries Asia and Europe: it is the very process that created the vast Himalaya mountain range.
It was this expedition, and towards its end, as they were exploring the south-west of Everest in the Gauri Sankar at an elevation of 16,000ft on the glacier of the Mending basin, that Eric Shipton and Dr Ward found the tracks. Sherpa guide Sen Tensing had no doubt that what they first saw and photographed was a Yeti. At this altitude and in such a remote place on earth, the prints were fresh, they could only have been made that day or the night before, possibly very late the previous day. Shipton and Ward followed the tracks for a mile but the heavy loads they were carrying and the altitude and the pressing reminder as to what was their actual task, researching an ascent of Everest, caused them reluctantly to abandon the tracking. I found that many other respected mountaineers, both before and since Shiptons's photographs, had seen footprints at impossible elevations. As far back as 1925 the geologist N.A. Tombazi witnessed a naked, hairy man at a distance in Tibet, on the Himalaya, and went to investigate the area. He saw the clear bipedal prints left behind. Tombazi, the leader of the 1925 British Geological Expedition, was convinced he had witnessed a Yeti.
He saw it, spoke about it and then wrote about it. They all thought he was mistaken, but Reinhold Messner thought, ‘I know the high mountains and I can name every animal on the mountain, and in the valleys below and the great high plateaus.’ And just maybe Messner could. After all, Reinhold Messner had climbed Everest. He was a great mountaineer, maybe the greatest. Reinhold with his partner Peter Habeler had been the first to ascend to the very top of Everest without supplemental oxygen. Indeed, Messner had conquered all the highest mountains on earth, fourteen of them, and all over 26,000ft without supplemental oxygen and frequently on his own for the greater part of the final ascent. But this was what his detractors used against him. Mountain men are competitive and could not stand Reinhold's success or, worse, the attention it got him. So they said he was mistaken. All that climbing without supplemental oxygen had given him anoxia or brain damage and made him unreliable. Not only had a lack of oxygen damaged his cognitive functions, but bizarrely and conversely, he had compensated by sucking up all the oxygen of publicity for their achievements and if that was not enough, he wanted more of the spotlight for his ridiculous claims. The criticism was sharp and was designed to unnerve him. Reinhold was not just disliked for his success, for many years before he was equally and more devastatingly loathed for his perceived failures.
A personal tragedy took place on a mountain, one which directly hurt him and his family, so it was even stranger that the death of his younger brother led to him being despised in his grief for something that had a lesser impact on others.
If Reinhold thought he could finally leave his detractors behind him atop the highest mountains in the world, on isolated peaks away from civilisation, he was wrong. The death of his closest brother Gunther happened in 1970. Following and during a dangerous ascent, an even more hazardous descent took place down the Himalayan peak of the Naked Mountain or Nanga Parbat, as it sloped down deep snow, avalanche, sheer ice walls and unforgiving scree into the foothills of the beautiful valley of Gilgit Pakistan below. This death of his brother was to follow him every day, a shadow of spectral density that served to drive him, but one which his enemies fed on like hungry ghosts. Fourteen years after Reinhold lost his brother on the descent down the mountain, Werner Herzog (the German filmmaker) found out Messner was returning