Half his crew had already flown out. The weather was ready. Then, on the last afternoon of the search, one of the team’s scientists came up with a new theory about where the equipment might be. “We literally had an hour before we left when we started finding parts of their gear and remnants of their trip that were definitely theirs,” Post said of the mission 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 traced where the cache might have moved, based on predicted glacier movements. (Leslie Hitmeyer) The team recovered a portion of Washburn’s beloved F-8 aerial camera—a format for which he would later become world-famous—as well as two motion picture cameras and old climbing equipment, tents, and cooking supplies. (That included part of a T-bone steak, Post noted — “They ate pretty well out there, it seemed.”) “It was just the full range of gear that they used in the 1930s,” said Post, a professional skier and mountain explorer. 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 time. Figuring this out was a big challenge for the team, since Walsh Glacier doesn’t move like normal glaciers — rather, it goes through cycles where it has a slow, regular flow, followed by a decade of “growth,” he said. “The swelling 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 uncovered an aerial camera 58 as well as two motion picture cameras and old climbing equipment, tents and cooking utensils. (Submitted by Teton Gravity Expedition) Standing on the ice, she noticed long streaks of debris that gave her an idea of how and when the glacier had moved up. “Based on that idea, I basically extrapolated the movement of the glacier and came up with a new estimate of where the crypt could be — and it turned out to be quite a spot,” he said. “Personally, for Griffin, for the team, for me, it’s pretty epic. We went on a treasure hunt and we happened to find it.”
A few stray paragraphs and a dream
This treasure hunt has been going on for a long time. Post had been fascinated by Washburn’s failed 1937 attempt to climb Mount Lucania—in which he abandoned gear—ever since he read about it in a book. It was a few paragraphs from that book, which said no climbers had reported seeing the equipment, that “set the wheels in motion,” he said. He had to build a case for the shipment, using a 3D mapping program and photos from Washburn’s trip to try to triangulate where the equipment would be hidden. Then he started emailing glaciologists. Luke Copeland, a glaciology professor at the University of Ottawa and Medrzycka’s teacher, showed interest, having studied this area in the past. “There is a record of finding fairly old artifacts in glaciers in other areas,” Copeland explained. “I didn’t think it was completely out of the question – but, of course, finding out where it was 85 years later is a really difficult challenge.” The team used innovative glacial mapping procedures to figure out where the cache may have moved over eight decades. (Submitted by Teton Gravity Expedition) Fortunately, they determined that the equipment 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 predicted it would have moved maybe 10 kilometers down the glacier, but when they actually got to the field, it had moved a lot further than that,” he said. The glacier is more than 70 kilometers long and several kilometers wide, Medrzycka noted — “a huge landscape” to search for such a small cache. Post said his heart sank a little when the team reached the glacier. The venture suddenly seemed strange, a needle in a haystack. “It’s funny, you go in, you’ve done all this research, you’ve got this map, you’re like, ‘we’re going to find it for sure,’” he said. “Then you fly into that valley and the Walsh Glacier for the first time, and you see how vast it is, how wide and how many crevasses there are.” In addition to the success of finding the equipment, Post said the trip also gave the scientific community a significant amount of data on the glacier’s growth. “They have all this information about how this glacier has behaved over the last 85 years – which is a very nice contribution to science,” he said. Washburn’s equipment is now with a team of conservators from Parks Canada, who are working to preserve the items.
