Ten Toes a' Tracking: The Himalayas Mountains, 1832 Hi Folks! Here is Number 10: For thousands of years, Nepalese and Tibetan locals have shared stories about ape-like creatures that inhabited the mountains. But the first time white men from the West encountered evidence of the Yeti (also known as the Abominable Snowman) is believed to have occurred in 1832. A party of explorers in Nepal under the leadership of British ethnologist Brian Houghton Hodgson came upon tracks in the snow that appeared to have been made by an erect biped. But they were too large to have been made by any normal homo sapiens. A number of expeditions and studies, including several in the 20th Century, have sought to find some ultimate proof of the Yeti’s existence. Since none was found, the general conclusion has been that the tracks encountered in various sightings were made by the Himalayan Brown Bear. That was an animal that could walk on two legs as well as four, but was thought to be extinct. In the Western Hemisphere, folklore seems to be more focused on the Yeti’s North American cousin: Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot. While most sightings of this creature have occurred in California and the Pacific Northwest, some have been alleged to occur in places as far east as Ohio and as far south as Florida. Serious research into the actual existence of Yeti or Sasquatch is frequently undermined by the plethora of hoaxes pertaining to them that briefly gain media attention. One of the most recent was staged in North Georgia in 2008. Nonetheless, when North American hikers and hunters set their camps in the woods for the evening, they do so with wary caution. Thanx to the digital artists at Renderosity.com, 3Dcommune, Daz 3D, or Archive3D.net, whose props were used in the composition of this image. Dr Zik