Eric Simonson had found it first. I'd walked through the site earlier in our expedition with Ben Marshall after a bouldering session. There was something tickling my brain about all of the wood fragments and the crushed cans out in that particular spot on the glacial surface, but too much of last year's snow was still covering the scene when Ben and I were first there. We had found a few old human bones not so far from that particular place, in ice that must have come more recently through the surge of the Khumbu Icefall. I found those bones to be thought provoking, to say the least. They got me wondering about life and accidental death, naturally, but also about the ice-flow rates and melting patterns of the Khumbu. The upbeat discovery of that day was what a wonderful physical playground the pinnacles of the lower glacier made. A maze, jungle gym and ice palace, all in one.

I kept going back in on Base Camp rest-days and tried to drag a few of my team along as well. I kept finding all sorts of old ladder crossings and tent parts and carabiners and odd clues as to what had been up higher in the Western Cwm over the years and now was not. And I loved wandering up and down the little peaks and valleys of ice and rock, thinking that I might find something fascinating around each new corner. I don't think my climbing team ever really caught fire on the idea of lower glacier wandering though, thinking I was simply ghoulish because of the bones. Eric, the leader of our expedition, was the exception, as he often has been. When I showed him the old log bridge that somebody had once used to cross a crevasse, he needed no further incentive to begin Khumbu cruising. While we were up getting kicked around in the stratosphere on our summit bid, Eric oversaw things from Base Camp and took daily walks down low to find the good stuff.

When I came down with my tail between my legs and my team alive, Eric took me aside and showed me a bit of what he'd found. An odd metal bottle of some sort with a date on it, 1952. A Swiss crampon part, and enough other peculiar stuff to make Eric suspect he'd found the Swiss Base Camp of 1952. The first South Side expedition to seriously challenge Everest.

That afternoon, while others conducted media interviews about the 2002 Everest trip, Eric, Mark Tucker and I took a little trip out to the early 1950s. Sure enough, it was the site Ben and I had walked through weeks earlier, but now the snow was gone, a lot of water was flowing on the ice surface among rocks, mountain dirt, and old tent fabric, crampon frames, oxygen apparatus, packing cases and treasures for the patient explorer.

We found plenty of stuff right away that could probably be identified with a bit of research, but nothing that definitively told us what we were looking at right then and there. Was it Swiss? Was it British? What were those tin bottles. What were those boxes? We fanned out. Simo and Tuck seemed to be finding all of the good stuff and I was jealous. I got intensely curious about what at first looked like a soggy cardboard box on a pedestal of ice. It was that, but for some reason, I was sure there would be more. There was.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist