The expedition that found abandoned cameras 85 years ago on a Canadian glacier

An expedition has discovered a cache containing cameras and climbing equipment left behind in 1937 by famous American mountain climbers, Bradford Washburn and Robert Bates, after summiting Mount Lucania, then the highest unclimbed peak in North America, located in the Yukon Territory. , Canada. The history is viral in the social networks.

Washburn had already explored the Yukon Mountains a few years earlier: he was the first to take aerial photographs of the region and mapped most of its lakes and snow-capped mountains. In 1937, accompanied by Bates, he reached the top of Lucania, 5,226 meters high and located in the remote mountains of Saint Elias, between the state of Alaska (United States) and the Yukon Territory.

During their bumpy descent due to bad weather, Washburn and Bates were forced to lighten their packs and had to leave several cameras and climbing equipment buried in the snow. After walking more than 100 miles through the spring thaw, they were finally rescued by members of an indigenous Yukon community.

85 years later, skier and mountaineer Griffin Post organized an expedition to find the hiding place left by the explorers. In the search for him, which took several months, he enlisted the assistance of glaciologist Dora Medrzycka of the University of Ottawa. “They embarked on an unprecedented mission: to find an incredible piece of history”Parks Canada wrote in a Facebook post.

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A high risk expedition

The team, made up of extreme sports video creators Teton Gravity Researchtraveled to Kluane Park in the Yukon Territory with the mission to find the hiding place of the cameras and other lost teams.

The team began the search in April 2022 and toured the area on foot, on skis and paddle boards. snowboard. To get their bearings, the researchers carefully studied the photographs Washburn took during his historic expedition. Also, glaciologists tried to determine the current location of the cache, which changed over the years due to the movement of the glacier. However, this first attempt was unsuccessful.

This story is amazing – Bradford Washburn’s camera from 1937 expedition found on glacier in Yukon! @ParksCanYukon @Cryospheric @griffpost https://t.co/UCpjwAPZCv pic.twitter.com/Gyot26Qsds

— Prof Dan Shugar (@WaterSHEDLab) October 27, 2022

During his second trip, Medzycka proposed a new hypothesis about the movement of the glacier and recalculated new coordinates, which finally allowed the hiding place to be located, which was about 22 kilometers from its original place. Inside found a Washburn Fairchild F-8 aerial camera and two motion picture cameras with the film still loadedas well as mountaineering equipment, detailed in a statement.

In addition to the success of finding the team, Post said the trip also gave the scientific community a significant amount of data about how the glacier has developed. “They have all this information about how this glacier has behaved over the last 85 years, which is a very good contribution to science,” he said.

Now, a group of Parks Canada conservators is working to preserve the artifacts.

Source: Elcomercio

Ronald Payne

I, Ronald Payne, am a journalist and author who dedicated his life to telling the stories that need to be said. I have over 7 years of experience as a reporter and editor, covering everything from politics to business to crime.