You know, if you leave your camera behind on a massive chunk of ice in the Yukon hinterlands, you're not going back for it. It's not like leaving your wallet at Applebee's. That baby is there to stay.
But never fear, you can be reasonably assured that someone will find it eventually:
The quest for lost treasures has long been a staple of travel legend. So has the idea of ill-fated exploration expeditions. Now, seven months after the discovery of Ernest Shackleton's ship HMS Endurance, comes a new discovery: the cameras of explorer Bradford Washburn, lost on a remote mountain glacier 85 years ago. ...
They were due to start and end their climb at the Walsh Glacier, halfway up at 8,750 feet, but it wasn't to be. Freak weather meant there was slush on the glacier -- the plane which brought them there became stuck, and the pilot refused to return for the explorers. Stranded, the pair had to make not only the ascent, but also the full descent back on foot, hiking over 150 miles through the wilderness to the nearest town. In order to do that, however, they had to dump their belongings: a 900-pound cache of gear including tents, mountaineering equipment and three cameras.
The cameras were retrieved by [explorer Griffin] Post's team, along with the rest of the equipment -- and two of them were still loaded with film. They have now been handed over to the Parks Canada team which will try to develop the photos.
There really is a poetic magnificence to this story:
Post tells CNN that he'd got the idea for the expedition two years ago when reading "Escape from Lucania," which tells the story of the Washburn-Bates expedition and mentions the abandonment of the cache.
"In the epilogue they fly over the area and Washburn says, 'We should go back and look for that gear.' Six months later I was still thinking about it," he says.
