John Hunt's Zemu Gap Yeti Tracks, Sikkim

Late autumn, 1937. John Hunt was a young army officer on a private Himalayan trip in Sikkim. With him were his wife, Joy Hunt, and the Calcutta-based climber C. R. "Reggie" Cooke. Sixteen years later, Hunt would lead the 1953 Everest expedition.

The Zemu Gap is a col between Kangchenjunga and the Simvu massif. The Zemu Glacier lies on its north side. The Tongshyong, or Talung, glacier falls away to the south. Its height is given as 5,861 m in some sources and 5,891 m in others. Hunt's visit was only the third ascent.

16 November. Joy Hunt went back to base, and Cooke was bound for the North Col of Kangchenjunga. Hunt set out for the Gap with a single Sherpa, Pasang. Two of the porters, Hawang and Kitar, "could not be relied on where 'rappels' and difficult ground were encountered."

Hunt described "a monotonous trudge of five hours on the 16th" that "took us some 3 miles up the glacier." The snow was often knee or waist deep. In his words, "it was merely a gruelling struggle up the glacier." The next camp was pitched at the foot of the ice-fall below the col.

18 November. At 9.45 a.m., the two men reached the col. On the final slope, there were tracks. A later account attributed to Hunt says they followed them to the narrow neck of the gap, then traced them down the precipitous Talung side. Nobody saw an animal. There is no size, no colour, no sound, only the prints in the snow.

A short descent took the men to where the slope ends in a vertical ice-cliff. The place was "exceptionally chilly." They were back at Boulder Camp in about 3½ hours.

Later recollections gave the tracks a name. George Band's entry on Hunt in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says one of the party's Sherpas told them the tracks were those of the Yeti. Cooke's 1988 memoir, Dust and Snow, says the footprints were thought to belong to a pair of Yetis. Cooke named the Sherpa as Pasang Sherpa, later Pasang Dawa Lama. Other reports name Pasang Kikuli. They were different men. The question is still open.

Hunt's own report in the Himalayan Journal of 1938 tells it differently. "Once again tracks were visible on the final slope," he wrote. Then: "the German party must have been here as well." On 6 November, on Nepal Peak, he had found "distinct wind-raised tracks of the Germans," left by Schmaderer, Paidar and Grob weeks before. The article never mentions a yeti.

In wind-scoured snow, old boot tracks can stand up as raised pedestals. Hunt had just seen it happen. That was his explanation in 1938. Others point to bears. Zoologists identified Frank Smythe's 1937 prints as Himalayan brown bear, and melt-enlarged animal tracks are a general explanation in the scientific literature.

Hunt came to believe. In his foreword to Charles Stonor's The Sherpa and the Snowman, dated February 1955, he wrote that a scientific expedition should "take the field." In 1979 he cited "personal observations of tracks" and a "yelp-like call," and concluded there was "an ape-like primate." The next July, Tilman crossed the Gap, and a modern retelling says he too found a trail there. Exactly when the German tracks became a pair of Yetis has never been fully traced.