Hillary and Tenzing Everest footprints

March 1953. The Everest expedition led by John Hunt began its approach march. About 17 days later it reached Thyangboche monastery in the Khumbu. On 29 May, at about 11:30 am, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest.

Wikipedia's Yeti article says that in 1953 Hillary and Tenzing "reported seeing large footprints while scaling Mount Everest." That is the whole of it. No date. No camp. No altitude, no casts, no photographs. The line is repeated widely in near identical words, but no first-hand statement from either man has yet been found behind it.

The expedition's best yeti account came from elsewhere. The afternoon of 28 March 1953. Thyangboche. Hunt, Charles Wylie and Tenzing were guests of a senior monk, the young Abbot being away. The old dignitary "at once warmed to this subject." A Yeti, he said, "had appeared from the surrounding thickets a few years back in winter, when the snow lay on the ground." It came "loping along sometimes on his hind legs and sometimes on all fours." It "stood about five feet high" and "was covered with grey hair."

Then it stopped. "The Yeti had stopped to scratch." It "had picked up snow, played with it and made a few grunts." The monk acted it out as he spoke. "The inhabitants of the Monastery had meanwhile worked themselves into a great state of excitement." "Conch shells were blown and the long traditional horns sounded." The creature "had ambled away into the bush."

Wylie wrote his own account. The acting Abbot, he recalled, described how a yeti "had visited the alp two winters before," then looked out of the window and pointed to where it had "rootled about looking for grubs in the ground" and "where it had sat sunning itself on a rock."

Tenzing never claimed to have seen one. In his first autobiography, written with James Ramsey Ullman, he said he believed the yeti was a large ape, and that his father had seen one twice. Later he became "much more sceptical."

Hillary went looking. His World Book expedition of 1960 and 1961, the Silver Hut expedition, set cameras, tripwires and capture guns around the Ripimu Glacier. It borrowed the Khumjung scalp. In return, the village asked for a school, the start of the Himalayan Trust. In Tokyo in December 1960, Hillary was blunt. "I have never believed in the existence of the snowman." The tracks, he said, "were obviously made by the effect of the sun's rays and wind on the tracks of smaller animals." Marca Burns later concluded the scalp was probably made from serow skin.

Himalayan footprints are generally interpreted as bear-made, or as smaller tracks enlarged by melting. Napier thought the Abbot's observation "could apply to a bear." There may be a mix-up too. The famous 1951 Menlung Glacier footprints photographed by Eric Shipton were found with Sherpa Sen Tenzing, not Tenzing Norgay. And one popular account places a Hillary and Tenzing find in the Barun Khola in 1953, though Hillary's Barun Valley expedition came in 1954.

The 1953 footprints remain reported but unsourced. The monk's story was written down twice, by men who heard it. Graham Hoyland counts it among his top 10 yeti sightings. A grey creature in the winter snow, described to the expedition before it ever reached the mountain.