Explorers Bradford Washburn and Robert
Bates traveled to the remote
Yukon wilderness in 1937 to climb Mount Lucania,
but the month of bad weather that preceded their trip had left the Walsh
Glacier, the starting point of their expedition, covered in “fathomless” slush
and “cut to ribbons by dozens of new crevasses”, Washburn wrote in the Alpine
Journal.
اضافة اعلان
The poor conditions made it impossible to get a
flight off the glacier after their climb, so the men hiked more than 100 miles
to safety, shedding heavy supplies.
Nestled in the cache they left behind were cameras
that Washburn, a renowned photographer, had planned to retrieve a year later
but never did.
Instead, a
seven-person expedition team recovered the cameras in August, 85 years later
and more than 12 miles from where they had been left. The team of explorers
announced their discovery on Thursday.
The explorers found a portion of one of Washburn’s
aerial shutter cameras, a Fairchild F-8. They also recovered two motion picture
cameras with the film loaded, a DeVry “Lunchbox” camera model and a Bell &
Howell Eyemo 71, as well as mountaineering equipment.
Conservators at Parks Canada, which oversees
national parks in Canada, are treating the cameras to see if any images can be
recovered.
The idea to recover the cameras came from Griffin
Post, a professional skier who had learned about the cache while reading a 2002
book about the explorers’ harrowing journey.
He enlisted the help of scientists and this year led
two expeditions to the glacier in Kluane National Park and Reserve in the
northwest corner of Canada.
To find the items, the team enlisted Dorota
Medrzycka, a glaciologist who interpreted maps and historical observations of
the glacier’s flow to determine where the cache might be. But she could only
provide estimates, and the group spent days searching the glacier.
The group could not simply return to the spot where
Washburn and Bates had left the cameras, because the glacier’s flow had changed
the landscape.
Toward the end of the team’s weeklong trip in
August, Medrzycka noticed two anomalies in the pattern of the ice and was able
to calculate a new estimate about where the items might be.
The revised estimate ended up sending the team to the items
the next day.
Read more Odd and Bizarre
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