Abbé Pierre Bordet's Yeti tracks at the Barun cols, Makalu region

Spring 1955. A French expedition was at work on Makalu, in Nepal, and one of its two geologists was the Abbé Pierre Bordet of the CNRS, a veteran of the 1954 expedition. On 7 May he left Camp I, at 5,300 m, with his Darjeeling Sherpa Ang Bao and a caravan of porters. On the 10th they went down the Barun to the start of the path over the Barun cols, but a porter had a bad attack of malaria, so they stopped at a hut halfway up. There they met a postman from Jogbani, 250 km to the south, who said he was afraid of the Yeti.

11 May 1955. They resumed the climb. Snow began about 150 m below the first col, at the upper edge of the rhododendron forest. Three cols lie here, between 4,100 and 4,200 m.

Then the trail. It cut across the col, from east to west, and it looked fresh. Each print had four toes, the inner one the largest, about 20 cm long, with no claw marks. Sunk 10 to 15 cm into the snow, at a stride of around fifty centimetres. Bordet set his 19 cm knife beside one print for scale and took a few photos.

"C'est le Yéti," Ang Bao told him. He urged Bordet to leave.

Bordet followed the tracks eastward, across a fairly steep slope. The animal had slipped several times. At a rock wall about 1.50 m high, it had jumped straight over and carried on. To Bordet, it walked on two legs and had no tail. Nearby lay an older trail beside a lake, and a third left by a large four-legged animal, probably a bharal.

Nearly 3,000 prints. More than a kilometre. Then clouds rising from the west filled the cirque, and visibility fell to a few metres. He turned back. When he returned, the porters had lit a fire. Bordet took it to be meant to keep the animal away.

The story reached the front page of the Dauphiné Libéré on 5 June 1955. There, Grenoble geologist Michel Latreille told it as a joint find at 4,100 m in the Barun valley, at the foot of Makalu. The prints were about the size of a human foot, followed for nearly a kilometre until the snow gave way to rock. Bordet's own paper tells it differently. In it, Latreille appears only as a colleague preparing to head home.

On 1 December 1955, Bordet presented his findings to the Réunion des naturalistes du Muséum, chaired by Prof. A. Guillaumin. The paper appeared in the Bulletin du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle. Professors Berlioz and Arambourg knew of no animal that left such prints or walked strictly on two legs. Bordet compared the tracks with Shipton's 1951 photograph and found the same general shape. He concluded an unknown animal, perhaps a bear or an ape. "Mais nier purement et simplement son existence ne serait ni logique, ni scientifique."

Bordet left a bear open himself, while noting that Sherpas know bear tracks well and still called these a Yeti's. Edmund Hillary's 1960 expedition put Yeti prints down to ordinary animal prints enlarged as the sun melted the snow. Later, in the same Barun valley, Daniel C. Taylor traced fresh Yeti-like prints to a tree bear, the Asiatic black bear. He never applied that to the 1955 trail.

Ivan T. Sanderson cited the paper in his 1961 book on the abominable snowman, and W.C. Osman Hill summarised the episode in Oryx. The animal itself was never seen. Only its trail across a col, and a geologist's photographs.