Craig Calonica's Yeti sightings on the north side of Everest

Craig Calonica was no casual visitor to the Himalaya. A California climber and extreme skier, he raced speed skiing for the US Ski Team from 1974 to 1987 and climbed more than 28 big-wall routes, mostly on El Capitan. Everest's North Face was his obsession. He tried to ski it in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

The 1998 attempt is on record in the Himalayan Database. Calonica led a small American team up the North Col and Northeast Ridge from Tibet, with Dawa Dorje Sherpa, Kipa Sherpa and Lhakpa Dorje Sherpa. They reached base camp on 2 September. It was a hard trip. Calonica was dehydrated and unable to eat early on. A slab avalanche gave Kipa rope burns. The snow fell continuously. On 11 October it was over, abandoned at 7,000 metres, the North Col, because of dangerous snow conditions.

Somewhere on that mountain, Calonica saw something. Then he saw it again. On 21 October 1998, ten days after the expedition ended, he told Reuters what it was not. "I saw something that was not human, that was not a gorilla, not a deer, not a goat and not a bear." In AFP's later account, his description ran like this: "It walked like a human, except that it had thick black fur, was about six feet (two metres) tall and had hunched over shoulders with very long arms and extremely large hands." He named it plainly. A Yeti.

No one knows the exact day. No one knows the exact spot. The Tribune placed the encounters during his September expedition. The only fixed points are the route, running from Rongbuk up to the North Col, and the weeks he spent on the mountain.

The story carries one open question. In February 1999 The Tribune wrote that Calonica saw "not one but two" Yetis. Two sightings, or two animals? Patricia D. Netzley's Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena, in 2006, said he "claimed to have seen two abominable snowmen walking together on the side of Mount Everest." The earliest wording, from Reuters, says only that he saw it twice.

There were no photographs. No film. No tracks, no hair, no casts. No official body in China or Nepal followed up. The three Sherpas on the expedition are never cited as witnesses. The case rests on one man's word, and the original Reuters report survives only in later quotes.

Friends took it lightly. Don Lounibos remembered a call from the mountain asking for a weather report. "I asked him, 'What kind of drugs are you on?' Once I told him the weather, I asked if I could try some of them." The article does not say outright that the call concerned the 1998 sighting.

No one has accused Calonica of a hoax. But the record holds context a sceptic would weigh. He was dehydrated and unable to eat on this trip. A year earlier, on the same route, severe altitude sickness and a retinal haemorrhage had ended his 1997 attempt. And the snow never stopped. General explanations for Yeti reports include Himalayan or Tibetan brown bears, Asian black bears, altitude sickness, fatigue and blowing snow. Calonica had already answered the most common one. Not a bear, he said.

His account joined a long Everest lineage, from the 1951 footprints of Eric Shipton and Ward to Hillary and Tenzing in 1953 and Messner in 1986. It remains one witness, two sightings and a single vivid description. A skier who knew the mountain, saying plainly what he believed he saw.