A mighty footprint

Conversations with Daniel Taylor, A&S '67, rarely run in a single direction. They twist and fork. Topical diversions arise, sidetracks are followed, and tangential anecdotes pile up. One minute he's describing the scourge of Himalayan leeches, next, an argument he had with actress Angelina Jolie, then he's back in '68 piloting a VW bus full of hippies from Germany to India. Did you hear about the time a black bear crawled on top of him while he lay in a tent reading Tolstoy in the Grand Tetons?

Taylor can't help himself. Coming up on his 80th birthday, he has done more things and been more places than you have. When he turns to autobiographical rumination, expect more turns and switchbacks than a West Virginia back road.

It's a fitting simile since he resides in the Mountain State, splitting his time between two extraordinary West Virginia properties, including an octagonal house he designed and built himself back in the 1970s—a redoubt some 4,000 feet up Spruce Mountain.

His other abode is a rangy, barn-red 1849 mill he restored outside the town of Franklin. This is where my wife and I drove down to meet him, spending much time warming around his fireplace. The massive chamfered spruce beams above our heads might well have been saplings when Christopher Columbus sailed westward. The gushing sound outside is Thorn Creek, rushing cold and fast down a hillside to join the south branch of the Potomac. Put a canoe in here and after a 200-mile paddle you'll float by the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Taylor has done this several times with youth groups.

But this sort of outdoor trek is small potatoes for someone who's been an adventurer from his earliest days. At age 16 he took off on a solo bicycle trek across northern India. "My parents encouraged me to not be afraid," Taylor says. "Thank you, Mom and Dad."

As mountaineer and outdoorsman, he was among the first to ascend a dozen Himalayan peaks, and the first to descend two of the region's surging rivers. He channeled his love of wild places into becoming a consummate conservationist, instrumental in creating 14 national parks across Nepal, China, and Tibet.

As educator and humanitarian, he has launched a half dozen charitable enterprises, including Future Generations University, an accredited graduate school where he's a professor. Education is the family line, as his father, Carl Taylor, was a public health giant—founding chair of the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Daniel Taylor himself spent over 15 years at Hopkins, as a senior associate in what's now called the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health.

Oh, and he also found time to discover and revive a lost dog breed; build and fly two airplanes; and author seven books, including a novel and the Mount Everest Guide to Off-Road Driving. This handy guide offers advice to intrepid motorists, such as what to do when a yak lands on your hood or your vehicle is buried in an avalanche.

Yes, it all could be a bit wearying, but Taylor never descends into know-it-all braggadocio. He's just too genial and disarming, possessing animated bushy eyebrows several hues darker than his silver hair and a tendency to punctuate conversations with an infectious and unexpected giggle. Before our visit was over my wife dubbed him The Most Interesting Man in the World, a nod to those Dos Equis beer television ads whose bearded namesake lives on in internet memes.

And all of this before we come to the yeti or the abominable snowman, bigfoot's Asian cousin said to have been haunting the Himalayas' glaciated high valleys since the 19th century. Taylor became obsessed with this cryptid as a boy and spent decades, figuratively and literally, following its footprints from the dense Nepalese jungle to the Smithsonian. It culminated in his 2017 book Yeti: The Ecology of a Mystery (Oxford University Press). Taylor knows what the yeti is. And what it isn't. And soon you will, too. But enough preamble. Buckle up, readers.

A story that unspools amid the snowcapped peaks of the Himalayan Mountains begins, where else, on the Kansas plains. That's where Taylor's grandfather, John Taylor, a sodbuster on a homestead farm, made a decision that would impact all future Taylors: He gave up the plow and went to medical school.

There he met and married a fellow student, and newly minted Drs. John and Beth Taylor made another pivotal decision: to ignore the world war that had just started and relocate to rural India as medical missionaries. "They were trying to show Christian compassion for the poor," Taylor says of their itinerant medical practice run out of an ox cart and, later, a Ford Model T. "My grandparents also worked some with [Mahatma] Gandhi, which was a privilege and a wonder."

Carl was born in Landour, India, in the Himalayan foothills and was helping in the family medical practice before entering his teens. Healing became his calling, too, and he applied to several medical schools, including Harvard where despite—or maybe because of—an unorthodox application he was accepted. Taylor discovered this admissions document, where his father wrote: "I learned anatomy helping my father skin and dissect tigers."

After graduation, Carl Taylor divided his time between the U.S. and medical work in India, so that Daniel was born in the less-than-exotic location of Pittsburgh. But Daniel was not yet 2 when he made the first of his numerous protracted visits to India as part of a bifurcated childhood: half spent in Leave It to Beaver–era America and the rest in Mussoorie, India, a Himalayan jungle town an hour's walk from the nearest motorable road. No TVs here. Langur monkeys romped across the rooftops, and leopards prowled the forests. Taylor picked up a passable command of Hindi while still in knee pants.

And then yeti stomped into his life. On a monsoon-soaked Mussoorie afternoon in 1956, a bored, preadolescent Taylor picked up a newspaper bearing an image of a large, human-looking footprint in the snow. British explorer Eric Shipton, part of a reconnaissance team trekking around yet-unconquered Mount Everest, had taken the photo five years earlier, high on a Nepalese glacier. A pickax photographed alongside the footprint for scale showed that it was a good 12 inches long. The accompanying story said additional such footprints had recently been discovered in Nepal, their pattern across the snow suggesting a biped creature. Was this evidence of a mysterious humanoid—perhaps the Missing Link—haunting the Himalayas? A curator at the British Museum threw cold water on the mystery, suggesting in the article that the prints were not made by some illusive yeti but by a langur monkey. "I knew that monkey," Taylor says. "We lived with them. I knew they weren't capable of making that footprint. So, I thought that maybe I could figure this out." A decades-spanning quest was born.

Yeti fever struck in the 1950s, when numerous expeditions were launched in search of the beast. A Texas oil millionaire named Tom Slick—aided by bluetick coonhounds—made three Nepalese treks to track the creatures. In 1959, actor Jimmy Stewart is said to have smuggled a desiccated Nepalese yeti hand to London hidden in a suitcase full of his wife's underwear. (It was dubbed the Pangboche Hand, and later DNA testing indicated it was human.)

Nepal itself was a mystery; its borders had only recently reopened after more than a century of isolation. (Carl Taylor was among the first Westerners to enter in 1949 and what he saw there—as in India, treatable diseases taking a devastating toll—encouraged him to pursue a PhD in public health.) Taylor first visited Nepal in 1961, tagging along as teenage soundman for his mother who was making a film on Nepali women. He started to pick up Nepali, learning that yetis were called bun manchi (jungle man) on this side of the Himalayas.

Back in the States, he kept abreast of yeti developments in the news—several new footprint images emerged—while planning to follow in the family footsteps to medicine. But one curious thing stopped him: his disdain for the smell of hospitals. At Johns Hopkins, where his father had joined the Public Health faculty in 1961, he nixed the premed track to study Russian literature. Following his '68 hippie bus hijinks (the vehicle was named "Yeti's Brother") and completing a master's in education planning at Harvard, he returned to Nepal on more serious business: as family planning adviser for the U.S. Department of State. For three years he spent his days traveling the country, sometimes by helicopter, holding vasectomy camps and teaching about birth control. At night, he'd sit around the fire absorbing local culture (and yeti stories). "They said bun manchi comes into their corn fields at night," Taylor says. "Well, ultimately, of course it's probably a bear, but in the middle of the night, you don't know what's eating your corn and Nepalis are good storytellers."

He parlayed the experience into a doctoral thesis at Harvard before settling down to focus on the Appalachian Mountains, founding the Woodlands & Whitewater Institute (later, the Mountain Institute) in West Virginia in 1972, a mountaintop camp offering Outward Bound–style outdoor education for children and adults.

But the yeti kept calling him back to Nepal. The most ambitious of his visits was in 1983, which was a family affair. Along with his wife, Jennifer, brother-in-law Nick Ide, and his 2-year-old son Jesse, he explored the 29-mile-long valley the Barun River carves out as it flows from glaciers flanking Makalu, the world's fifth highest mountain. This uninhabited valley presents an uncharted jungle of rhododendrons, bamboo, birch, and oak. By day, the family and Nepalese guide Lendoop hacked through a trackless wilderness home to wolves, bears, and leopards. Come evenings, they read to Jesse about Winnie the Pooh's adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood.

He did discover a trail of biped-looking tracks in the snow 10,000 feet up, not unlike the Shipton prints. Photos were taken, casts made. Thinking scientifically, he ruled out that such tracks belonged to an unknown humanoid. I mean, there couldn't be just one yeti running around, as you would need a breeding population to keep the species viable. It seemed unlikely that such a creature could remain undiscovered. "I was coming to the conclusion that what we were dealing with was probably a known animal that was making unknown footprints," Taylor says. Unlike bigfoot, yeti sightings were rare (and those that occurred featured a brown beast, not a white one as popularized in Western comics and cartoons.) The focus had to be on the footprints, which were real and left by something.

"I had a real epiphany," Taylor says. "What's more important here is not the mythical beast, it's the wild—a truly amazing piece of biodiversity. And I knew this should be preserved because in just a short while, people are going to be moving in and cutting down these forests."

Nepal's biodiversity bona fides are beyond debate. In birdlife alone, it's home to more species than all of North America. The Barun Valley itself has more than 3,000 types of flowering plants. But the region is also home to a people he'd come to admire and respect. How to model a national park that preserves habitat without completely shutting out local populations and their sustainable use of natural resources, such as cinnamon bark? What he didn't want to do was the Yellowstone approach. It might be America's most beloved national park, but it was created at the point of a gun: The army drove out the Native Americans who'd been living in the environs for thousands of years. "I envisioned a park where people were stewards of the wild rather than guardians of some animal prison," Taylor says.

Rather than organizing a park planning meeting in a Kathmandu hotel, in 1985, Taylor called up his old college classmate, Nepal's crown-prince-turned-king Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, and asked to borrow three helicopters. He used them to shuttle some two dozen Nepalese officials and Western conservationists, including the editor of National Geographic, to a lush, high-Himalayan valley called Saldima Meadow where villagers had built a rustic "conference center" out of bamboo. It took a few more years to finalize, but Makalu Barun National Park was born out of this mountain meeting—nearly 600 square miles that are home to some of the rarest animals on earth, such as the snow leopard and red panda. There is also a 300-square mile buffer zone around the park where conservation efforts are co-managed by the government and the more than 30,000 resident Nepalese who are actively involved in protecting the environment while maintaining traditional and sustainable lifestyles alongside new economic opportunities, such as ecotourism. There is even a rugged Yeti Trail for hardy visitors to follow.

Over the next decade, Taylor and associates used the Makalu Barun model to inform the creation of more than a dozen new parks and conservation areas in China. These include the Qomolangma National Nature Preserve, which sprawls for nearly 14,000 square miles around Mount Everest and the urban Lalu Wetlands National Nature Preserve protecting 1,200 acres in the shadow of the 17th century Portala Palace in the city of Lhasa. More than half of Tibet is now under some form of conservation management. Wildlife populations are responding favorably to this regional conservation revolution: Nepal's Bengal tiger population has nearly tripled, and the snow leopard has moved up from the "endangered" category to "vulnerable."

His search for the yeti led Taylor to develop improved methods of preserving environments and wildlife. Next up, how might the footprints lead him to aiding people through new forms of philanthropy?

To reach Future Generations Uni­versity, you must take the Road Less Traveled. No, really. When Taylor built his school's headquarters on a mountaintop some 5 miles west of Franklin, that's what he formally named its access road.

So we piled into our Subaru to explore more of Taylor's (now snowy) world. There are a half dozen nonprofit Future Generations entities around the world, including Haiti and Afghanistan, engaging in humanitarian work through a self-styled theory of social change called SEED-SCALE. The namesake university offers a few certificate programs and a single degree: an online master's in applied community development focused on this approach. Around 50 students are enrolled this semester while the some 200-strong alumni network is at work in over 40 different countries.

"We don't have a campus or computers," Taylor says of his school. "Our students work in communities." Its handsome collection of wood-clad buildings, festooned with Nepali prayer flags, has a ski-lodge-meets-tree-house aesthetic. Classes are occasionally held here but it's largely home to school administrators and fundraisers. Taylor, once the school's president, is now only an endowed professor.

While Makalu Barun was born in bamboo huts, the SEED-SCALE concept emerged from much cushier environs: Johns Hopkins' stately Evergreen Museum & Library. That's where a United Nations Children's Emergency Fund task force met for a few years starting in 1992, co-chaired by Carl and Daniel Taylor. "Dad is coming in from the human side of things, and I'm coming in with experience on the environmental conservation side," Taylor says.

UNICEF's then executive director, Jim Grant, had tapped them for the job. He was looking for new ways to address humanitarian challenges. Although the 20th century's sweeping public health and agriculture interventions, such as childhood immunizations and the Green Revolution, saved and improved the lives of millions, entrenched development, education, and health issues persisted. Throwing more money at them seemed to have less and less impact.

In a nutshell, SEED-SCALE is about discovering successful small-scale projects and then expanding them to create large-scale impact across communities. The concept was fully fleshed out in the father-son book, Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Own Futures, which the Johns Hopkins Press first released in 2002. A pair of Future Generations initiatives right in the school's backyard offers a case in point. In 2011, Future Generations wanted to increase broadband access across a state well behind the internet curve. Realizing that West Virginia had more firehouses than libraries, computer labs were set up alongside the fire engines in more than 60 firehouses. Another state resource they tapped (literally) is its thick forests. The Sweet Appalachia program has helped triple the state's maple syrup production and is exploring marketability of syrups from other trees, including black walnut and sycamore. "Once you start to mobilize the energy and the resources in the community, you get double the impact in half the time for one-fifth the cost," Taylor says.

Back on the snowy road, we head (slowly) ever upward en route to Taylor's mountaintop home. We pass the Mountain Institute's sprawling camp centered around what Taylor calls "the world's largest yurt."

The road ends at a two-story, eight-sided house amid the hush of the million-acre national forest surrounding it. The yeti trail ends here as well, rather unceremoniously in a metal suitcase full of skulls and feet. Bear skulls and feet. Taylor wasn't the first to propose that yeti footprints belong to bears, but he took a deep dive in this direction. Meanwhile, DNA testing on alleged yeti artifacts—bones, skullcaps, fur, and so forth—showed them to be bear, goat, or dog. Bears can engage in what's called overprinting, placing their hind feet in the snowy holes its front feet created. Carnivores do this for reason of stealth, and it makes a four-legged creature's tracks appear bipedal. Discovering which of the Himalayas' three bear species was responsible was the next task, and it involved trips to the British Museum and the Smithsonian, and to Nepal to buy bear skulls off locals.

Ultimately, the Asiatic black bear, Ursus thibetanus, emerged as the most likely yeti print maker. Once again, Taylor turned to his royal connections, calling his friend the king to get approval to anesthetize such a bear at the Kathmandu zoo. "We overlaid the prints so we could reproduce all the mysterious footprints that had been in the snow," Taylor says. A dreaming bear transformed into a cryptid right before their eyes.

The suitcase holds the last of his bear bits, the rest now residing at the Smithsonian. By the time his yeti book came out in 2017, Taylor knew it was time to move on. "For me, the yeti became passé," he says. "I mean, it was a wonderful challenge. I grew up with a yeti in the woods when other people had teddy bears."

Being identified as an expert in cryptozoology does bring odd and unwanted attention, such as the British newspaper reporter who asked Taylor to comment on a yeti reference in Stormy Daniels' tell-all book.

These days, he sees yeti not as a hirsute beast but as a concept. "I began to realize that the yeti is much more than some boogeyman," Taylor concludes. "The yeti is this mascot for the human experience in the unknown, in the wild. It's an avatar. The yeti represents the desire of many people for a connection to the wild."

Brennen Jensen is a senior writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine.