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It would be another five months—after the spring thaw had broken up the snowpack—until the search resumed. With grizzly bears emerging from their dens and beginning to congregate below a waterfall on the west face, their noses leading them in the direction of decay, rangers once again climbed up the bowl. On May 23, 1970, a couple of rangers,
exploring on foot, made a remarkable discovery. There, lying on the chunky wet snow, was another camera, flung from its case, lens pointed at the sky. It had clearly been wrenched free from a climber's neck or from the pocket of a backpack. The case, lying nearby, had James Anderson's name on it. The last picture on the roll showed all five boys standing
together at about 8,000 feet on the west face.
Like spring buds sprouting from winter hibernation, more gear began to pop to the surface. On June 7, a wool knit cap on the main avalanche path. Three days later, a rucksack. A week of nothing, and then a plastic bag containing flashlight batteries.
Two weeks later, five rangers ascended the west face in intermittent rain and snow. At 9 a.m. on June 29, at about 6,800 feet, they climbed up the side of a waterfall that, frozen-over in winter, had now begun to drain the western bowl. Above the waterfall, the snow—although solid and deep—had been hollowed out by running meltwater. Thirsty
from the climb, Jack Christiansen bent down to get a drink and caught the unmistakable whiff of decomposition.
Carefully, nervously, the men shone a flashlight up under the meltwater cave and peered into the darkness. The sound of running water, inside the tunnel, was loud; a full-fledged stream ran right past the men. Peering deep inside the cave, the rangers made out a head and a pair of arms hanging down from the six-foot snowpack. There, attached to a red
Perlon rope, was the body of Ray Martin.
As searchers followed the rope from Martin's waist to its terrible end deep in the snow, they discovered four more bodies. All were found in states of violently arrested tumble. It took several days of relentless digging, but once the bodies were removed from their encasement, the cause of death became grotesquely clear. The boys had not lived long
enough to suffocate. They had been killed by the fall, carried half a mile down the slope and some 1,500 vertical feet by a vast, tumbling wall of snow. Ruby Martin would recall that her son Ray "was six-foot-six-and-a-half, but when they found him he was six-foot-13 because of a broken back and neck."
The searchers set about identifying the bodies and putting them into the body bags that Bob Frauson had ordered. The last thing they did was take pictures of the dead boys. Strangely, none of the photographs came out. 
McKay Jenkins's book The White Death, from which this article is excerpted, will be published this month by Random House.
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