I lifted out a packing label then saw "Mount Everest Expedition 1953" as clear and pristine as the day it was shipped 50 years before. My heart started doing the Macarena and I called the guys over to see. Now it was clear, now it was certain. It made sense about what all this "stuff" was. Nobody had to remind any of us that in world history, the year 1953, and in particular the British Everest Expedition of that year, was pivotal- the big blip in the human timeline: Mount Everest climbed successfully for the first time. And I got all those good butterflies to know that the history of my chosen world and its greatest players was all right there around me and at my fingertips.

We'd been camped next to, and climbing alongside "commemorative expeditions" for a month that spring. The irony had me shaking my head in wonder. In the build up to the big anniversary year, we were so close to filming efforts that had climbers costumed as the men from the 50's, chopping steps in ice for the cameras. Sir Edmund Hillary's son, Peter, was going for the summit as part of one such trip. There was even a Swiss group with Tenzing Norgay's grandson, Tashi Tenzing, climbing and commemorating. Meeting the sons of the great climbers was a link with history, but somehow, our "commemoration" did more for me.

Peter Hillary, however nice a guy, was not lost or forgotten, while the old base camp and its time was. We had found it simply by taking the trouble to look for it, just a hundred yards from where so many modern day Everest fanatics were encamped.

I looked a bit more the next day. I did find a pattern to things, old tents still in place, piles of cans and crampons, more packing crates. And sadly, a little farther out in the ice, another shattered fragment of human life. But nothing did it for me as much as that packing label, transporting me through time so that I could look back up at the mountain from a "new" vantage point, seeing it as they saw it in 1953: massive and unclimbed, full of fresh mystery regarding the limits of men and women.

When I got home to my books, I kept exploring their pages. Pouring over the 1953 accounts and whichever old photos of the Khumbu I could find; matching up the relics we'd seen with the oxygen gear in the pictures. I even saw one of the packing labels in a photo from the time. I puzzled over the position of their camp relative to our modern, seemingly obvious site for Base Camp. Some things just didn't make sense at first, until I realized how much ice had disappeared from the Khumbu glacier in 50 hot years.

Eventually, I came to believe that we had seen what was left of both the British and Swiss camps, that both had been in the same place initially. In fact, there were pictures of British climbers in 1953 working in camp amid Swiss 1952 barrels.

Within weeks, I got back up to Washington and met my good friend Nawang Gombu, a long-time Rainier guide and one of the only surviving members of the Sherpa team on that '53 trip. I was proud to have visited, in some small way, Gombu's footsteps. That had been his first climbing expedition, and he'd begun to make a great name for himself, climbing to the South Col despite his youth. He'd gone on to become the first man to summit Everest twice, in '63 & '65. But Gombu showed little surprise that we'd found signs of his passage. "Yes, I told you I was there," he said humbly, smiling.

What we found back in May won't be a museum exhibit. We didn't want the political hassles that might have come with trying to take things from Nepal. And after all, it was just some old garbage out on the ice. Times, and environmental awareness, have changed; we don't leave our garbage there on modern climbs. But I'm still buzzing with excitement to have found where John Hunt, Ed Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, and the gang left theirs.

— Dave Hahn, MountainZone.com Columnist