Expedition Finds Cameras Left by Yukon Mountaineers in 1937

Explorers Bradford Washburn and Robert Bates traveled to the remote Yukon wilderness in 1937 to climb Mount Lucania, but the month of bad weather before their trip caused Walsh Glacier, the expedition’s starting point , covered in a layer of “meaningless” mud and Mr. Washburn wrote: “cut into ribbons by dozens of new folds. in Alpine Magazine.

Dirty conditions prevented them from landing on the glacier after climbing the mountain, so the men walked more than 100 miles to safety, dumping items that might have been too heavy to carry.

Hidden in the cache they left behind were the cameras that Mr. Washburn, a famous photographerplanned to get it back a year later but never made it.

Instead, a seven-person expedition team recovered the cameras in August, 85 years later and more than 12 miles from where they were left behind. The group of explorers announced their discovery on Thursday.

Explorers found part of one of Mr. Washburn’s aerial shutter cameras, the Fairchild F-8. They also recovered two motion picture cameras loaded with film, a DeVry “Lunch Box” model and a Bell & Howell Eyemo 71, as well as climbing equipment.

Conservationists at Parks Canada, which oversees national parks in Canada, are processing the cameras to see if any images can be recovered.

The idea to restore the camera came from Griffin Post, a professional skier who learned about caching while reading a 2002 book about explorers’ arduous journeys, “Escape from Lucania” via David Roberts.

He has read Mr. Washburn’s journals, enlisted the help of scientists and this year led two expeditions to the glacier in Kluane National Park and Preserve in Canada’s northwest corner to find Find the cameras.

“You do all this research, you have all this science-based reasoning, and you think it’s entirely possible: We’re going to go in there and look at this certain field, and it’s going to get there,” Mr. Post said on Saturday. “And then, for the first time, you actually see the valley of the Walsh Glacier and how huge it is and how many fissures it has, how rugged the terrain is, your heart sinks and you’re like like, no way, there’s just so much terrain. “

To find the items, the team turned to Dorota Medrzycka, a glaciologist who interprets maps and historical observations of the glacier’s flow to locate a possible cache. But she could only provide estimates, and the team spent days searching for the glacier.

“It will take us all day to walk 10km up the glacier and back to the camp,” Ms. Medrzycka said. “And going up, there are quite a few twists and turns, so there’s a lot of twists and turns to try to find points to jump over them.”

The group could not simply return to the spot where Mr. Washburn and Mr. Bates had left the camera, as the flow of the glacier changed the landscape.

Glaciers move at a constant rate from year to year, but not the Walsh Glacier, Ms. Medrzycka said. Unlike most, it is a rising glacier, meaning that every few decades it moves faster over a period of one or two years.

In a normal year, the Walsh Glacier typically flows less than a meter per day. While the water is rising, it moves more than 10 meters, or about 32 feet, every day. Since the 1930s, there have been two spikes.

At the end of the group’s week-long trip in August, Ms. Medrzycka noticed two anomalies in the ice’s pattern, which she guessed was caused by rising water, and was able to calculate a new estimate of the ice’s location. items.

The final revised estimate sent the team to the categories the next day.

“Knowing that the educated prediction I made has actually paid off and is right, it is a very unbelievable feeling,” Ms. Medrzycka said.

Her findings also provide a new data point on glaciers that will be useful to researchers.

“We can now better understand dynamics of changes on the Walsh Glacier and be better able to predict how this particular glacier might change over time,” said Ms Medrzycka. future”.

She says whether the increase is linked to climate change remains unclear.

“This unusual flow means that they are not as active as other glaciers in the region,” Ms. Medrzycka said. “It’s very difficult to say what percentage of what happens on the Walsh Glacier has anything to do with climate or if it’s just internal behavior.”

The group is supported by Teton’s Gravity Studya company that creates extreme sports media and plans to release a movie about the item recall.

Mr. Post said that while this seemed unlikely, he was cautiously optimistic that researchers would be able to recover images from the camera.

“It is very difficult to find the cache in the first place after 85 years,” he said. “Yes, it’s unlikely that some of those films are salvageable – but it could be.”