Expedition finds cache of cameras on remote Yukon glacier, 85 years after mountaineer left them behind

After six days of searching the Walsh Glacier in Yukon's Kluane National Park for a decades-old cache of cameras, Griffin Post's expedition team was ready to pack it in.

Half his crew had already flown out. Bad weather was about to set in. Time was ticking and the crew seemed no closer to finding the lost gear legendary mountaineer Bradford Washburn had stashed on the glacier 85 years before.

Then, on the last afternoon of the search, one of the team's scientists came up with a new theory for where the gear could be.

"We literally had an hour before we were going to leave, when we started to find parts of their gear and remnants of their trip that was indisputably theirs," Post said of the expedition that took place in August.

"It was so surreal. You're kind of in disbelief, and you're like, 'Oh my gosh — we were right! This exists!'"

The team recovered a portion of Washburn's cherished aerial F-8 camera — a format he would later become known for worldwide — as well as two motion picture cameras and old climbing gear, tents and cooking items. (That included part of a T-bone steak, Post noted — "They were eating pretty well out there, it appeared.")

"It was just the full array of gear from what they were using 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 thought up the new theory, said the discovery all came down to how far the glacier had moved since Washburn's day.

Figuring that out was a major challenge for the team, since Walsh Glacier doesn't move like normal glaciers do — rather, it goes through cycles where it has a slow, regular flow, followed by a decade of "surging," she said.

"Surging glaciers ... have those short periods of intense activity and this irregular behaviour that really makes it hard to reconstruct the movement of these glaciers over long time scales," she explained.

Standing on the ice, she noticed long bands of debris that gave her a clue for how and when the glacier had surged.

"Based on that idea, I essentially extrapolated the glacier movement and came up with a new estimate of where the cache could be — and it turned out to be pretty spot on," she said.

"Personally, for Griffin, for the team, for myself, it's pretty epic. We went on a treasure hunt, and we happened to find it."

That treasure hunt was a long time in the making.