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Futility Closet


Oct 12, 2015

In 1910, four Alaskan gold miners set out to climb Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, to win a two-cent bar bet. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the surprising story of the Sourdough Expedition, a mountaineering effort that one modern climber calls "superhuman by today's standards."

We'll also hear about a ghoulish tourist destination and puzzle over why a painter would blame himself for World War II.

Sources for our feature on the Sourdough expedition:

Bill Sherwonit, "The Sourdough Expedition," Alaska 68:4 (May/June 2002), 28.

Jason Strykowski, "Impossible Heights: The Alaskan Miners Who Conquered Mount McKinley," Wild West 24:4 (December 2011), 20.

Terrence Cole, ed., The Sourdough Expedition, 1985.

W.F. Thompson, "First Account of Conquering Mt. McKinley," New York Times, June 5, 1910.

Listener mail:

The Telegraph has a photo of the mummies in the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Sicily.

Wikipedia has a photo of Rosalia Lombardo, the immaculately preserved 2-year-old embalmed in 1920, and another appears here:

Karen Lange, "Lost 'Sleeping Beauty' Mummy Formula Found," National Geographic News, Jan. 26, 2009 (accessed 10/10/2015).

This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2005 book Outstanding Lateral Thinking Puzzles.

You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset.

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Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.

If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!