The Metoh-Kangmi Tracks at the Lhakpa La: Howard-Bury and the Birth of the Abominable Snowman

1921. A British expedition went to Tibet to reconnoitre Mount Everest. Its leader was Lt-Col. Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury. Among his climbers was George Mallory.

By September the team had found a high col between the head of the Kharta Glacier and the East Rongbuk Glacier. They named it the Lhakpa La. The Windy Gap. It lies about 7 km north-east of Everest.

22 September 1921. The party set off at 4am in bright moonlight from a camp at about 20,000 ft. Their aim was to cross the pass. In the snow, the night had left its marks. Hares. Foxes. And something else.

"We distinguished hare and fox tracks; but one mark, like that of a human foot, was most puzzling," Howard-Bury wrote in his diary that day. His book later gave the height as 21,000 ft.

The porters had no doubt. They "at once jumped to the conclusion that this must be 'The Wild Man of the Snows,' to which they gave the name of Metohkangmi, 'the abominable snow man'". To them the track belonged to "a wild, hairy man", of a kind "occasionally to be found in the wildest and most inaccessible mountains". In Tibet the hairy snow-man was a bogeyman for children. The advice was to run downhill, because its long hair falls over its eyes. Yet nobody saw a creature. Only the prints in the soft snow.

The Times ran the story on 21 October 1921, under the headlines "Wild Hairy Men" and "Human Footprints". In Darjeeling, Henry Newman, a Calcutta Statesman columnist writing as "Kim", interviewed the porters. He rendered "metoh" as "filthy" and swapped in "abominable". On 31 October The Times printed "Tibetan Tales of Hairy Murderers", subtitled "Abominable Snowmen". Long after, Newman wrote to The Times: "The whole story seemed such a joyous creation I sent it to one or two newspapers."

The coinage is still argued over. Howard-Bury's own 1922 book already glosses the word as "the abominable snow man". An article in Oryx blames a cable sent by Howard-Bury himself. In 1961 he told the Westmeath Examiner: "The first thing I was asked about was the new race of people we were supposed to have met."

Howard-Bury had his own answer. The tracks "were probably caused by a large 'loping' grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like those of a barefooted man." In 1956 Swami Pranavananda argued in the Alpine Journal that the name pointed to a bear, from the Tibetan dred.

The story grew in the retelling. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, in Cryptozoology A to Z (1999), describe dark forms moving about on the snowfield, seen through binoculars, and footprints three times those of normal humans. Nothing in Howard-Bury's own quoted words supports either claim. One modern account says George Mallory also saw the tracks. That remains unconfirmed.

The yeti trail ran on. N. A. Tombazi saw an upright figure on the Zemu Glacier in 1925. Eric Shipton photographed prints in 1951. Ivan T. Sanderson wrote a book on the Abominable Snowmen in 1961. But the name itself was born here, on a moonlit slope below the Lhakpa La, from one puzzling footprint.