My quest for the yeti : confronting the Himalayas' deepest mystery

Reinhold Messner, the famed Austrian alpinist, has spent much of three decades climbing in the Himalayas--and, as it turns out, looking along the way for evidence of the yeti, the legendary, supposedly humanoid inhabitant of the high mountains. Messner writes of having encountered "an apparition" at the Tibetan headwaters of the Mekong River. Remembering a photograph of a mysteriously shaped footprint that Eric Shipton had taken years earlier, Messner began to collect evidence--tracks, eerie cries and whistles, fleeting glimpses--of the fabled abominable snowman. With that mounting evidence, he writes, "the mountains that I knew so well now seemed smothered in mystery." Of the yeti's existence, the climber has no doubt; his pages are taken up by his quest for plausible answers as to the creature's real identity. He writes of possibilities that many scientists have discounted--for instance, that the yeti may be a kind of ape, or perhaps a long-diverged species of bear--dismissing knee-jerk unbelievers with an impatient wave, and turning in a lively natural history of an unknown being.

With this memoir, Messner is in good literary company--Peter Matthiessen and Slavomir Rawicz, among others, have written of high-mountain encounters with yetis--and in fine form. Readers with an interest in cryptozoology and mountaineering alike will delight in his findings. --Gregory McNamee