The Barun Valley Footprints

The Barun Valley runs about 46 km along the foot of Makalu, east of Everest, in Nepal's Sankhuwasabha District. Daniel C. Taylor called it the "densest jungle in the Himalaya." He did not choose it by chance. "I was advised to go there by the King of Nepal," he recalled. The King's words, as Taylor remembered them: "If you want to go to the wildest place, where the Yeti might be, it is the Barun."

The region already had a story. In December 1972, Cronin and Emery found tracks by their tent in the upper Arun, tracks "not referable to any known animal."

1983. Taylor went in with the naturalist Robert L. Fleming Jr., along with friends and family. It was winter. Snow lay on the ground.

Then the footprints. They looked hominoid, with what appeared to be a hallux and a bipedal gait. And they were fresh. "I'd seen footprints before but these were fresh and I had no doubt I had found the Yeti," Taylor said.

In snow, the trail could be followed. So they followed it. "They led not onto rocks, but up trees." Up in the branches were "huge nests where the animal slept," made of bamboo broken at uniform heights, with stiff black hairs inside. The party photographed the prints, but no one ever saw the animal.

A local hunter had a suggestion. Villagers knew two bears: the rukh bhalu, or "tree bear," small and reclusive at about 150 pounds (68 kg), and the bhui bhalu, the "ground bear," aggressive and up to 400 pounds (180 kg). "Yes, we have bears living in trees; they are smaller," they told Taylor.

Taylor and Fleming were joined by the bear researcher John Craighead and the Nepali botanist Tirtha Shrestha for three years of research on the "tree bear" possibility. The nest hairs were identified as bear. Skulls were compared with collections at the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum. The answer was a single species, the Asiatic black bear. It simply "spends much time in trees to avoid attack by larger male bears on the ground."

Why would a bear leave a human-looking track? A bear's hind paw can land on the print of its front paw, leaving "a human-looking, bipedal-like snowprint." And a bear that climbs "forces an inner digit down so it can make an opposable grip." Taylor later made overprinted snow tracks and plaster casts with a tranquillised bear in a Kathmandu zoo. In his 2017 book, Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery, he applied the same reading to the 1951 Shipton print.

The bear did not convince everyone. Reviewing the book in 2018, Jeff Meldrum argued that the Barun evidence came down to a single print photograph without proper scale. Readers, he wrote, must "accept his interpretation that the single print depicts inferred features, such as a divergent inner digit (the hallux), without any other prints for comparison." Local people, Down to Earth reports, do not accept the bear theory. No hoax has ever been alleged.

The valley is now protected inside Makalu-Barun National Park, and a Yeti Trail runs about 25 km through it to Makalu Base Camp. National Geographic editor Bill Garrett said Taylor's work "gives us a believable yeti." In April 2019 the Indian Army reported yeti footprints near Makalu base camp. Taylor told Reuters they were probably made by a bear.