The Sunday Read: ‘Ghosts on the Glacier’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2024

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Fifty years ago, eight Americans set off for South America to climb Aconcagua, one of the world’s mightiest mountains. Things quickly went wrong. Two climbers died. Their bodies were left behind. Here is what was certain: A woman from Denver, maybe the most accomplished climber in the group, had last been seen alive on the glacier. A man from Texas, part of the recent Apollo missions to the moon, lay frozen nearby. There were contradictory statements from survivors and a hasty departure. There was a judge who demanded an investigation into possible foul play. There were three years of summit-scratching searches to find and retrieve the bodies. Now, decades later, a camera belonging to one of the deceased climbers has emerged from a receding glacier near the summit and one of mountaineering’s most enduring mysteries has been given air and light.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Oh, Hi, my name is John Branch, and I've been a reporter at the New York Times since 2005.
0:27.0	I grew up in Colorado, skiing and hiking in the mountains,
0:31.0	but the people I write about are often doing things that I would never or could never do myself.
0:36.0	I think I live vicariously through them, and I find that readers sometimes do too.
0:42.0	This story that you're about to hear began for me in
0:46.4	2020 right before COVID. I got a note from somebody I didn't know, a journalist and mountain guide in Argentina named Pablo
0:57.5	Betancourt.
0:59.5	He said that he had a story that might interest me. So we started talking and he told me that some porters had found an old camera on a massive melting glacier atop Aacinthagua. It's a mountain in the Andes, the tallest in the world outside of Asia.
1:16.8	And the camera had undeveloped film in it. Then Pablo told me something else. He said that the camera had a label on it and
1:27.8	a name. Janet Johnson.
1:40.0	In 1973, eight Americans set out to summit Aukuncagua. It was an interesting expedition for a couple of reasons.
1:44.0	One, because it happened to include a NASA engineer,
1:48.0	a man in the control room for the Apollo missions.
1:51.0	But also, there was a woman in the crew, which was rare for the time.
1:57.0	That woman was Janet Johnson.
2:00.0	She was probably the most experienced climber of all of them.
2:03.0	Most of the Americans were weekend climbers.
2:06.0	Aukincagua would be the biggest, toughest mountain
2:10.0	any of them had climbed.
2:13.3	Back then, not a lot of people had climbed Aukin Kogwa.
2:17.2	It was hard to get to.
2:19.0	There were no real established base camps
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.