Yeti of the Khumbu Glacier

My grandfather used to say that the high snowfields above Khumbu are not empty. Long before the first climbers came with their ropes and oxygen bottles, the Sherpa people knew of the Yeti — the Migö, the wild man of the snows.

One autumn, a young herder named Nima was driving his yaks back from the high pastures when a sudden storm swallowed the trail. He sheltered in a shallow cave, shivering and certain he would freeze before morning.

Sometime in the deep night he heard heavy footsteps in the snow outside — slow, deliberate, enormous. A great white shape filled the cave entrance. Nima pressed himself against the rock wall and shut his eyes.

When he opened them, the creature was gone. But at his feet lay a pile of dried yak dung — enough fuel to light a fire that would last until dawn.

Nima never saw the Yeti clearly. But every winter after that, he left a bowl of tsampa porridge outside his door before the first snow fell — an offering for the guardian of the glacier, who had onc