Discussion on Footprints of the Elusive Yeti at Bhutan Lit Festival

Thimphu: The mystery surrounding the Himalayan Yeti attracts scores of explorers every year to the snow-capped mountains, but few returns with answers. Daniel C. Taylor, who has spent about six decades of his life in search of the elusive creature, shared his findings, insights and rare photographs at the Mountain Echoes literary lit festival here on Friday.

Taylor was participating in a session titled “Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery” along with festival co-director Tshering Tashi and Bhutanese journalist Karma Singe Dorji. The session began with Tashi asking the audience if they believed in the Yeti and a vast majority of the audience raised their hands in affirmation.

Tashi said there have been at least four organized expeditions in search of the Yeti in Bhutan. But all of them had been carried out by people from the West, who regarded it as a fascinating subject. “The core cultural understanding of the local ecology is the real answer to the Yeti myth,” said the 73-year-old scholar.

He shared that in the 1940s, his parents came to India and set up a hospital there. Therefore, as a child growing up in the mountains, legends of the Yeti made regular appearances in his life. This set in motion a quest to find the existence of the Yeti as the young Taylor thought that if there were footprints then there must be the Yeti too. For decades that followed, Taylor ventured across the Himalayas, from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh and from Nepal to Bhutan, in search of the elusive creature.

Sharing rare images from his expeditions at the session, Taylor referred to one of the first photographs of the Yeti footprint that was originally taken in 1951. Taylor, however, contended that there are many mysteries in the Himalayan mountains and said that nature has its own way of unraveling mysteries. (IANS)