Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch and Migo are some of the names of the creature that was once known as the ‘Abominable Snowman’. This hairy and bipedal creature is known to roam the Himalayas (and many other regions around the world) and evaded mankind for thousands of years. The term ‘Abominable Snowman’ was coined in 1921 when Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury led the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition, which was chronicled in his book Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921. In the book, Howard-Bury wrote an account of crossing the Lhakpa La at 21,000 ft (6,400 m) where he found mysterious footprints that his Sherpa guides said belong to ‘The Wild Man of the Snows’ or ‘metoh-kangmi’. ‘Metoh’ translates as ‘man-bear’ and ‘kang-mi’ means ‘snowman’. The use of ‘Abominable Snowman’ began when Henry Newman, a longtime contributor to The Statesman in Calcutta interviewed the Sherpa Guides of the British Mount Everest Expedition on their return to Darjeeling. Newman translated the word ‘metoh’ as ‘filthy’ and decided to replace it with ‘abominable’ instead. This was when the legend of the ‘Abominable Snowman’ was born and has since fired the Western imagination. To this day, the Bigfoot is still considered a myth due to a […]