bear/monkey theory seems unlikely as both of these animals normally move on all four feet. The tracks were clearly that of a biped.

　　Shipton's and Ward's reputations argue against a hoax on their part and the remoteness and height of the trail's location argues against them being hoaxed.

　　Shipton's footprints were not the first or last discovered by climbers among the Himalayas. Even Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay, on their record ascent to the top of Mount Everest, in 1953, found giant foot prints on the way up.

　　One of the more curious reports of a close encounter with a Yeti occurred in 1938. Captain d'Auvergue, the curator of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, India, was traveling the Himalayas by himself when he became snow-blind. As he neared death from exposure he was rescued by a nine foot tall Yeti that nursed him back to health until d'Auvergue was able to return home by himself.

　　In many other stories, though, the Yeti hasn't been so benign. One Sherpa girl, who was tending her yaks, described being surprised by a large ape-like creature with black and brown hair. It started to drag her off, but seemed to be startled by her screams and let her go. It then savagely killed two of her yaks. She escaped with her life and the incident was reported to the police, who found footprints.

　　Several expeditions have been organized to track down the Yeti, but none have found more than footprints and questionable artifacts like scalps and hides. The London Daily Mail sent an expedition in 1954. American oil men Tom Slick and F. Kirk Johnson financed trips in 1957, 58, and 59. Probably the most well-known expedition went in 1960.

　　Sir Edmund Hillary, the same man that had first climbed Everest in 1953, lead the 1960 trip in association with Desmond Doig. The expedition was sponsored by the World Book Encyclopedia and was well outfitted with trip-wire cameras, as well as time-lapse and infrared photography. Despite a ten-month stay the group failed to find any convincing evidence of the existence of the Yeti. The artifacts they examined, two skins and a scalp, turned out to belong to two blue bears and a sorrow goat.

At the time Hillary and Doig wrote off the Yeti as legend. Later, though, Doig decided that the expedition had been too big and clumsy. They didn't see a Yeti, he