High Adventure With Abominable Yeti

Abominable Yeti

The fantasy land of Nepal produces high mountains, herpas and, according to some people, Abominable Snowmen, lecause of these things it was the area chosen by the World look Encyclopaedia Scientific Expedition to the Himalayas, id by Sir Edmund Hillary, in 1960-61. Sir Ed and Desmond )oig now recount how, where and why, in a new book of alpine dventuring, High in the Thin Cold Air.

E hunt for Yeti, or Snowmen, was the part of the expedition most captured public attention this aspect is dealt with by ;, the expedition’s Press officer, uring the expedition’s time in al it was sold a piece of Yeti saw Yeti scalps; had innumer- Yeti footprints pointed out tie high snow country by Sher and had Yeti described as like ; or bears; or goats; or apes; l combination of all of them, it all to no avail. The con on inevitably reached was that > is no such animal, ae Yeti fur, the explorers had 1 reason to believe, came from iimalayan Blue Bear from ern Tibet; the footprints were ably made by a small quad d which managed to get its back steps close to those of its front sun and melting snow provided rest of the illusion.

Old, But a Fake ie Yeti scalps were not dis d of so easily, but it was done. f were taken by five of the party, iding Hillary, Doig and Khunjo mbi, one of the Sherpas, half ss the world to the United ;s, Paris and London and in the r pronounced a fake—probably or 300 years old, but still a uring their visit to London, mbi called on the Queen (who away at Sandringham) and left , and this had a sequel which I describes like this: n January, 1961, Queen Eliza , together with the Duke of iburgh, made a State visit to al. . . The Queen expressed a •e to meet Khunjo Chumbi and k him personally for the gifts he left her in London. Mrs. mbi was invited, too. . . What ; of us knew when we sent in dions to Khunjo and Mrs. mbi to hurry down to Kath du [from Khumjung] was that

the 45-year-old Mrs. Chumbi was nine months pregnant.

“Without hesitation the couple set out on the 180-mile walk, along with some of our expedition Sherpas.

Four days out of Kathmandu, while the men stopped to eat their morn ing meal, Mrs. Chumbi sat calmly by the roadside and produced her fourth son.

“ ‘I did not want to miss you,’ she told the Queen when they met in Kathmandu at a British Embassy reception. ‘So I wasted no time about having the child and decided to keep up with the men when they walked on after their food.’

“The infant was named Philip Tobgay Chumbi in honour of the Duke.”

Chumbi, on this occasion, had brought down more Yeti evidence to show the Queen —allegedly a Sno w m a n’s arm. “The shaggy, henna-coloured limb that the Queen and the Duke examined,” says Doig,

“was, without doubt, the hind leg of a blue bear.”

Doig’s section of the book deals with the Yeti legend in all its aspects, but apart from this and its amusing account of travels abroad with Chumbi and the Yeti scalp, it gives an interesting background account of the Sherpas and their history.

Yeti research was, of course, only a minor assignment of the 1960-61 Expedition. Its major task was to carry out physiological research into high altitude acclimatisation and at tempt to climb 27,790 ft. Mt.

Makalu, without oxygen.

In the second part of the book, Hillary relates how they went about this by building a prefabricated lab oratory (the Silver Hut), at 19,000 feet, where medical men, scientists and climbers spent the winter.

This phase of the expedition was dogged by illness and bad luck, but the scientific work was eventually completed although the last few hundred feet of the mountain beat them in the end.

Few people write better about this sort of thing than Hillary. He does not make climbing five-mile high mountains seem easy; he merely makes it sound sensible. For people who spend their entire life at sea level, never climbing anything higher than the steps into a bus, that’s really something.

(High In The Thin Cold Air.

Published by Hodder & Stoughton. 37/3.)