Yoshiteru Takahashi, the expedition leader, who climbs as a hobby, is on his second yeti hunt. He says he found humanlike footprints made by a “rather large animal” in a cave about 15,000 feet up Dhaulagiri on a previous expedition in 1994. “I want to find out what made those footprints,” Takahashi said. “They definitely didn’t belong to a bear.”
Leaving Sunday, the expedition plans to “ambush” the elusive creature, believed by Takahashi to be some kind of primate, by setting up about 15 cameras that are automatically activated by infrared sensors.
Takahashi, 60, described his expedition, which has no backing from Japan’s academic community, as “just bunch of climbers” who had all seen unfamiliar footprints on past ascents of the Dhaulagiri range.
“I don’t consider this a mystery,” he said. “The yeti exists. I just want to figure out what kind of animal it is.”
Besides Takahashi, many people claim to have seen a yeti or its tracks here. In 1971, Japanese alpinist Mitsuhiko Yoshino says he ventured across an animal about 1.5 meters tall with a hairy body on Dhaulagiri mountain. He says he was no more than 20 meters away from it. In July 1975, adventurer Norio Suzuki says he saw five animals that looked like gorillas in the area. Some were big; some were small, he said. And two months later, Michiko Imai, a doctor and a member of Takahashi’s expedition team, found footprints the size of about a 2-year-old child’s in the snow. She found bigger footprints higher up in mountain.
Other methods for finding a yeti are also available for the less physically inclined who don’t want to tackle the inclines of mountains.