The Daily Mail Snowman Expedition Footprints

The idea began with a conversation. Ralph Izzard, a Daily Mail journalist, talked it over with Tom Stobart, the cameraman of the 1953 Everest expedition. The newspaper paid for a search in the Khumbu region of Nepal. Its quarry was the yeti. The abominable snowman.

John Angelo Jackson led the mountaineering. Charles Stonor, a British biologist, left Kathmandu in December 1953, ahead of the main party, looking for prints as he trekked east. Gerald Russell, an American traveller and animal collector, joined the hunt. In February 1954 the main team met Stonor at Namche Bazar.

18 February 1954. The Khumbu Glacier, about 18,500 feet up, north of Pangboche. Jackson found a line of tracks in the snow. Each print was about 10 to 11 inches long and 5 to 6 inches wide. They looked like the work of an animal walking on two legs. One track ran about 80 yards in a straight line. The party followed it to the lateral moraine of the glacier. There, among the stones, it disappeared.

In March the searchers climbed an old glacier moraine in the Chola Khola. Fresh tracks waited at the head of the valley. Stobart was reportedly there with Jackson. The prints, Jackson wrote, were "close together and very large."

In the upper Dudh Kosi valley, Izzard and Russell found tracks of their own. They followed them for over two days. These prints were a little smaller, about 9 by 5 inches, with a stride of roughly two feet three inches. They resembled Shipton's 1951 prints. Only the round big toe was missing. Izzard argued that only a two-legged animal could stand with its feet in the "ten to two" position the team saw.

The hunt also led into the monasteries. At Tengboche, Jackson photographed paintings of the yeti. At Pangboche, the team examined a relic kept as a yeti scalp. Biswamoy Biswas, a zoologist with the Zoological Survey of India, studied it. Hairs were taken. On 19 March 1954 the Daily Mail reported on them. Black to dark brown in dim light. Fox red in sunlight.

Professor Frederic Wood Jones bleached the hairs, cut them into sections and compared them with bear and orangutan hair under the microscope. The object, he concluded, was not a scalp. The hair came from "the shoulder of a coarse-haired hoofed animal." Scientists in the United States and Europe were later reported calling it "a bit of goat fur." Biswas found no conclusive evidence of a yeti either.

The footprints were harder to dismiss. Nobody has alleged a hoax against them. Jackson photographed many, and most could be identified. Some large ones could not. One explanation offered since is erosion, with wind and particles widening the prints.

No member of the expedition ever saw a creature. Yet it brought back zoological specimens, and Biswas described two new bird species. Jackson went on to make the first trek from Everest to Kangchenjunga. Izzard wrote The Abominable Snowman Adventure. Stonor wrote The Sherpa and the Snowman. Both appeared in 1955.

Russell later joined the Slick-Johnson Nepal Snowman Expedition of 1957 and 1958, and its report recalled the tracks in the upper Dudh Kosi. In 2017, a National Geographic interview with Daniel Taylor named this expedition as the moment "yeti fever" took off.