When the American mountaineers Bradford Washburn and Robert Bates summited Canada’s third-tallest peak in 1937, bad luck forced them to jettison hundreds of pounds of gear – including tents, fuel, ice axes and valuable cameras – on a glacier before they began their ascent.
They then had to rework their planned route back due to poor weather, transforming a celebratory descent into a harrowing trek through Yukon territory.
Almost nine decades later, a long-shot expedition, relying on a mix of amateur detective work and sophisticated knowledge of glacier movements, has finally recovered the lost gear and significantly expanded knowledge of the region’s enigmatic ice giants amid a changing climate.
Washburn, a famed photographer and cartographer, had long cultivated an obsession with summiting Mount Lucania. Given its remote location, the peak was seen as “impregnable’’ at the time – a barrier that only energised him.
After multiple trips to the Walsh glacier to unload gear, Alaska bush pilot Bob Reeve finally dropped the pair off, only to find the plane stuck in the “fathomless bullshit” of thick slush. It took five days to free the plane, which the pair of climbers knew couldn’t return for them.
Travelling with minimal gear, the only route down from their planned ascent was a 100-mile (160km) hike across unforgiving lands to the Yukon outpost of Burwash Landing.
Their trek was hampered by swollen glacial rivers, adding dozens of miles to the slog. With food supplies dwindling, the pair planned on raiding a cache left behind by a previous expedition.
When they arrived, however, they found it had been ransacked by wildlife, leaving them with only a container of peanut butter and meagre rations. They were forced to subsist on small game such as squirrels as they made their final push to Burwash Landing.
“It’s just this amazing story of survival and human perseverance,” said Griffin Post, a professional skier who led the expedition in search of Washburn and Bates’ jettisoned equipment this August. “But the idea of the cache stuck on the glacier was with me for months. Maybe it melted into the ice. Maybe somebody found it and didn’t report it. But what if none of that happened – what if it’s still there and no one has even really looked for it?”
After studying maps and photos of the 1937 expedition for more than a year and transposing that information into GPS coordinates, Post estimated where the cache might have been left.
Glaciers inch forward each year, and Post recognised the current location of the gear was likely far from its original location. He asked University of Ottawa’s glacier program for help.
Most glaciers shift at predictable speeds, but the Walsh is a rare “surging glacier”, meaning it lurches erratically – sometimes as much as 330ft (100 meters) a day – during a surge period, according to Dorota Medrzycka, a glaciologist at the university.
With satellite data only going back a few decades, she wasn’t sure when the surges had happened.
“It’s really hard to reconstruct the movement over long periods of time, especially when we’re working with limited information,” said Medrzycka.
Sponsored by Teton Gravity Research, Post cobbled together an expedition team and travelled to Kluane National Park and Reserve. But even after more than a year of studying maps and photographs of the search area, the big-mountain skier wasn’t prepared for such a sprawling and unforgiving landscape.
“To fly around the corner and look at the Walsh glacier for the first time – and how massive and vast it is – your heart just kind of sinks. There’s no way we’ll find it. It’s just so daunting,” said Post. “But like any big project, you go day by day, chunk by chunk.”
The team spent six unsuccessful days traversing the sprawling ice field, scouring the snow and the ribbons of crevasses. The mood, initially jubilant and excited, slowly faded.
“I felt very responsible for figuring out where the cache could be today. I’m the one that supposedly understands how glaciers work,” said Medrzycka.
But as the team searched, she noticed two cracks in a nearby moraine – the material left behind by a moving glacier – and suspected each corresponded with a surge.
Armed with fresh insight and more data, she recalculated the scope of the search, pushing the team miles further than previously thought.
With mere hours to go before their helicopter departed, a member of the team spotted a fuel canister in the snow. And then a pair of goggles.
“At that moment, you realise that it’s real. We were right. It was just surreal,” said Post. “You kind of stare at it for a second. And then you just want to give everybody a big hug. Because it was such a group effort.”
The team was able to recover Washburn’s famed Fairchild F-8 aerial camera, as well as two motion picture cameras loaded with film: a DeVry “Lunchbox” camera model and a Bell & Howell Eyemo 71.
Parks Canada later travelled to the location and is now in possession of the cameras. Restoration experts will determine if any of the images can be salvaged from the film.
Post is “cautiously optimistic” the Parks Canada will recover images from the film, lost for 85 years under the snow and ice.
“I get chills thinking about it. Because you’re found something that’s long been considered lost and is such a key piece of mountaineering history,” he said, adding the successful discovery also “backfills” decades of information about how the glacier moved. “Even if we get nothing from the camera, we’ve given future generations critical information. That’s pretty cool.”
But the expedition comes with a sombre note. In comparing the images of Washburn’s, the scope of disappearing ice due to the climate crisis was stark.
More than 32ft (10 meters) of ice had disappeared from where the base camp had been in the 1930s, said Medrzycka.
“As scientists, we don’t really look at things with feelings or emotions. We’re not supposed to be influenced by that. But we’re still human,” she said. “I love the environments that we work: in the mountains, the glaciers. I don’t want it all to disappear. But to see the loss – that’s a striking feeling.”
