After six days of searching Walsh Glacier in the Yukon’s Kluane National Park for a decades-old cache of cameras, the Griffin Post expedition team was ready to pack it up.
Half his crew had already flown out. Bad weather was about to arrive. Time passed and the crew seemed no closer to finding the lost gear that legendary mountaineer Bradford Washburn had hidden in the glacier 85 years earlier.
Then, on the last afternoon of the search, one of the team’s scientists came up with a new theory about where the gear might be.
“We literally had an hour before we had to go, when we started finding parts of his gear and remnants of his trip that were indisputably his,” Post said of the expedition that took place in August.
“It was so surreal. You’re kind of in disbelief and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, we were right!’ This exists!”
Dora Medrzycka pointed out where the cache might have moved, based on the projected movements of the glacier. (Leslie Hittmeier)
The team recovered part of Washburn’s beloved F-8 aerial camera, a format for which he would later become known worldwide, as well as two film cameras and old climbing equipment, tents and kitchen items. (That included part of a T-bone steak, Post noted: “Looked like they were eating pretty well out there.)
“It was just the full range of gear of what they were using in the 1930s,” said Post, a professional skier and mountain scout.
Dora Medrzycka, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa and the scientist who came up with the new theory, said the discovery came down to how far the glacier had moved since Washburn’s day.
Figuring this out was a major challenge for the team, as Walsh Glacier does not move like normal glaciers, but instead goes through cycles where it has a slow, regular flow, followed by a decade of “surge “, he said.
“Glacier glaciers … have these short periods of intense activity and this erratic behavior that really makes it difficult to reconstruct the movement of these glaciers over long time scales,” he explained.
The expedition discovered an aerial camera 58, as well as two film cameras and old climbing equipment, tents and kitchen items. (Submitted by Teton Gravity Expedition)
Standing on the ice, he noticed long bands of debris that gave him a clue as to how and when the glacier had formed.
“Based on that idea, I basically extrapolated the movement of the glacier and made a new estimate of where the cache might be, and it turned out to be pretty accurate,” he said.
“Personally, for Griffin, for the team, for me, it’s pretty epic. We went on a treasure hunt and we found it.”
Some lost paragraphs and a dream
That treasure hunt took a long time.
Post had been fascinated by Washburn’s failed 1937 attempt to climb Mount Lucania, during which he abandoned the team, since reading about it in a book. It was a couple of paragraphs in that book, which mentioned that no climbing group had ever reported seeing the gear, that “set the wheels turning,” he said.
He had to build a case for the expedition, using a 3D mapping program and photos from Washburn’s trip to try to triangulate where the equipment would have been kept.
Then he started emailing glaciologists.
Luke Copeland, professor of glaciology at the University of Ottawa and Medrzycka’s teacher, became interested, having studied this area in the past.
“There is a record of finding quite a few ancient artifacts in glaciers in other regions,” Copeland explained. “I didn’t think it was completely out of the question, but of course figuring out where it was 85 years later, that’s a very difficult challenge.”
The team used innovative glacial mapping processes to figure out where the cache might have moved over eight decades. (Submitted by Teton Gravity Expedition)
Fortunately, they determined that the gear would have been left at the bottom of the glacier, rather than at the top where it would have been covered by decades of snow.
“We projected that it would have moved maybe 10 kilometers down the glacier, but by the time they actually got to the field, it had actually moved a lot further,” he said.
The glacier is more than 70 kilometers long and several kilometers wide, Medrzycka noted — “a massive landscape” to search for such a small cache.
Post said his heart sank a little when the team reached the glacier. The enterprise suddenly seemed strange, a hunt for a needle in a haystack.
“It’s funny, going in, you’ve done all this research, you’ve got this map, you’re like, ‘Sure we’re going to find it,'” he said.
“Then you fly into this valley and the Walsh Glacier for the first time, and you see how vast it is and how wide it is and how many crevasses there are.”
Aside from the success of finding the team, Post said the trip also gave the scientific community a significant amount of data on how the glacier has developed.
“They have all this information about how this glacier has behaved over the last 85 years, which is a pretty fantastic contribution to science,” he said.
Washburn’s team is now with a team of conservators from Parks Canada, who are working to preserve the artifacts.