Singalila Ridge Footprints

In 1944 Lt-Col Conrad Reginald "Reggie" Cooke, known in print as C. R. Cooke, was no stranger to the high Himalaya. In 1935 he had made a solo ascent of Kabru North. By the middle of the war he was Director of Line Construction for Posts and Telegraphs in New Delhi. That June he was travelling with his wife, Margaret Cooke, and a party of porters beneath the Singalila Ridge. The ridge marks the border between India and Nepal, and climbs through West Sikkim towards Kangchenjunga.

At about 14,000 ft, just below the ridge, the track crossed soft mud. Something had walked through it. "These prints were strange and larger than any normal human foot, 14 inches heel to toe," Cooke wrote, "with the great toe set back to one side, a first toe, also large, and three little toes closely bunched together."

The trail told its own story. Whatever made it had come up through bushes on the steep hillside from Nepal. It crossed the track. Then it kept climbing, up towards the ridge.

The porters knew what it was. The "Jungli Admi". The wild man. Cooke went a step further. He suggested the prints belonged to a yeti.

Nobody saw the animal. There were only the prints, so the Cookes recorded them. "We laid Maragaret's sunglasses beside each print to indicate its size and took photographs," Cooke recalled. The account appears in his self-published memoir, Dust and Snow: Half a lifetime in India, in 1988.

One of those images survives on Wikimedia Commons. The sunglasses lie beside the print. A human boot heel print crosses the middle of the footprint.

The debate came later, and it has leaned towards bears. The best-known version of that idea belongs to Daniel C. Taylor. When a bear climbs, its hind paw lands on top of its front paw print and stretches it into one long foot. "Steep hills make big Yetis, and almost flat slopes make small Yetis," Taylor wrote, adding that "no credible Yeti prints have ever been photographed of a Yeti going downhill." That excerpt does not mention Cooke, but the Singalila tracks did climb a steep slope.

Genetics has pointed the same way. Charlotte Lindqvist's DNA work found that 8 of 9, and then 23 of 24, "yeti" samples came from bears. Current studies, as one Czech feature put it, attribute such tracks rather to Himalayan bears.

Cooke's pictures came seven years before the Shipton photograph of 1951. They "did not create the same stir that Shipton's later would," All That's Interesting observed, but they "remain a vital part of Yeti lore."

They sit on a long Himalayan thread. Tombazi at the Zemu Glacier in 1925, Smythe in 1937, Peter Byrne near the Zemu Glacier in 1948, Shipton in 1951, and in April 2019 the Indian Army's prints near Makalu. Somewhere in that line stands a muddy path below the Singalila Ridge, a pair of sunglasses, and a footprint 14 inches long.