Yeti

Everything in this file was reported between roughly 4,500 and 6,000 meters,
in the Khumbu and the Menlung Basin west of it, above the last birch and
juniper. Sherpa accounts, the oldest the company holds, give a heavy-bodied
biped in reddish or dark hair, with a skull that rises to a point, on scree
and old snow, not in the valleys. The evidence is usually a track line:
single-file impressions crossing a slope at a stride shorter than the print
suggests.

On 8 November 1951 a survey party in the Menlung Basin, at about 5,500 meters,
photographed a print with an ice axe laid alongside for scale. The impression
is close to thirty centimeters across, with a second toe standing away from
the others. Sun cupping widens a print in high snow by the hour, which is the
standard account of its size. The same melt did not act evenly on the line:
the neighboring impressions are indistinct in the wider frame while this one
holds an edge.

Hair collected under this designation was sequenced at scale in 2014 and 2017,
and came back Himalayan brown bear, Tibetan blue bear, and once a domestic
dog. A scalp held at the monastery in Khumjung proved, in 1960, to be worked
serow hide. The hair is bear. The print is a separate question: it was made
above the altitude at which brown bear was then known in that basin, and never
cast — the party carried no plaster. Nothing has been filed
since April 2019.