The Track Grew Four Shoe Sizes Between Dawn And Noon. We Filmed It.
A search volunteer's widow gave us 61 plaster casts and the field cards filed with them. Fifty-four match outsoles you can buy. The most famous was lifted at 13:40 from a track laid before dawn.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
SKYKOMISH, Washington — Fifty-four of the sixty-one plaster casts match an outsole you can buy.
Four match boots worn by named members of the search unit who were on the hill that day, at the hour written on the card.
Three are unresolved.
Dennis Vaupel-Straw carried a bag of dental stone in his pack for thirty years. He was a volunteer with a search-and-rescue unit in the central Cascades from 1989 to 2019, and his rule was that any track he could not name got cast before the team moved on. He died in November 2024. In March his widow gave this newspaper the whole cabinet: sixty-one casts, sixty-one field cards in his handwriting, and the unit's callout rosters back to 1994.
What is in the cabinet
Two forensic podiatrists measured the sixty-one blind, separately, from the casts themselves and from scale photographs, against the commercial outsole reference collections used in criminal casework. Neither was told what the collection was.
Fifty-four came back as manufactured soles. Eleven are the same lug pattern — a work boot sold through farm-supply stores in this part of Washington between 1979 and 1993 — which is what you get in a valley where people buy their boots in the same three shops.
Four more we could put on the hill ourselves. The rosters name who was out; three of those searchers still own the boots.
The two reports agree on fifty-nine of sixty-one. Dr. Cassius Merriweather-Baptiste reads two of our four searcher matches as unresolved, which would make our three unresolved casts five. Both reports are published entire, disagreement included.
Cast 41
One cast in that cabinet is famous.
It was lifted on 14 March 1998 from a snowfield at about 1,150 metres. It measures 43.4 centimetres from heel to longest toe and 17.1 across the ball. Photographs of it appear in six books, and its author says seven.
The field card filed with it has never been published.
The card records the track as found at first light by a hasty team searching for an overdue skier. It records the cast as poured at 13:40. And in the bottom corner, in pencil, in the volunteer's own hand: took it late, no good.
We pressed a boot at 05:40 and came back at 13:40
On 22 March this year we went to the same snowfield with a size-ten boot, a wearer of 84 kilograms, a time-lapse camera firing every thirty seconds and a thermistor buried beside each print.
At 05:40, in a refrozen wind crust at −4.1°C, the print measured 31.5 centimetres.
At 13:40, on a day that reached 6.2°C in air, the same print measured 34.9.
That is 3.4 centimetres of growth in a little under eight hours. Three point four centimetres is four shoe sizes.
The rim had slumped outward by 1.7 centimetres on each side. The toe and heel had rounded. The depth had barely moved at all — 11.2 centimetres at dawn, 10.8 at 13:40 — and the thermistor at the base of the pack never came within two degrees of thawing.
The measurement melt cannot touch
A print gets longer all day. The distance between two prints does not, because both feet are melting at the same rate and the ground between them is not melting at all.
The 1998 card gives that distance: 71 centimetres, measured across four consecutive prints.
Seventy-one centimetres, heel to heel from one foot to the other, is an adult walking on the flat without hurrying. The card and the books both call this the stride, which is the wrong word for it — a stride is the same foot twice — but the number is the number and it is not ambiguous.
Six books derive a height for the animal from the length of cast 41. None of them prints the 71.
The man with the plaster
The field cards are dull, and that is their value. Boot. Elk. Dog, big. Boot — mine. Fifty-odd times out of sixty-one, the man who poured the plaster wrote down that he thought it was nothing.
He cast it anyway, because a track near a search area is evidence about a search, and evidence gets recorded whether or not it matters. That is why our eDNA survey of a Washington watershed, PX-2029, is filed as it is: eleven sites and a great deal of nothing.
His widow gave us the collection on one condition — that the cards run with the casts, whatever the cards said.
Three casts remain unresolved. One is a partial with no toes. One went into wet duff that never held detail. One matches nothing we could find, in reference collections that are thin before 1975.
We would like to end on the three. Instead we will end on the pencil. A man knelt in old snow at twenty to two in the afternoon, poured a cast he already knew was worthless, wrote took it late, no good, filed the card, and went home. Six books were written from the photograph.
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Sources & Method
We took the collection as a set rather than as a highlight reel: two forensic podiatrists measured all 61 casts blind, separately, against the outsole reference collections used in criminal work, and both reports run whole. Then we went to the same snowfield at 05:40 with known boots, a time-lapse camera and thermistors, pressed a control series, and cast it at intervals until the light went.
Who we spoke to
- Roberta Vaupel-Straw, Widow of Dennis Vaupel-Straw, search-and-rescue volunteer, 1989–2019. Interviewed at her house in Skykomish three times; gave the collection outright and read the full draft before publication February–July 2026 Set one condition on the gift: that the field cards be published alongside the casts, in full, whatever they said.
- Dr. Ingrid Palmquist-Osei, Forensic podiatrist; gives evidence in criminal casework on footwear and gait. Measured all 61 casts blind, told only that they were an evidential series from one region April 2026 Supplies the stride argument. Considers cast 41 'a size ten that has had a long morning'.
- Dr. Cassius Merriweather-Baptiste, Forensic podiatrist; second measurement, blind, no contact with the first. Given the identical casts and scale photographs, with no sight of the first report April–May 2026 Agrees on 59 of 61. Reads two of the four searcher matches as unresolved, which would make our three unresolved five.
- Callout rosters, one Cascades search unit, 1994–2019, Sign-in sheets, team assignments and times off the hill. Released by the unit's board after a written request and a vote of the membership, with home addresses redacted May 2026 Names who was out on 14 March 1998, and what time the hasty team came off.
- Emmett Crowder-Nakashima, Author; his 1999 and 2004 books reproduce cast 41. Sent the full draft, the podiatrists' reports and a scan of the field card, with four weeks to answer July 2026 Replied at 1,900 words. Printed in full under Right of Reply, including the parts about our method.
Documents
- PX-2029 — eDNA survey, eleven sites, one Washington watershed — protocol, species list and raw sequence accepted
What we could not confirm
- The three unresolved casts. One is a partial with no toe register at all. One was poured into a substrate — wet duff over gravel — that never held detail in the first place. The third matches nothing in the reference collections we could reach, and those collections are commercial, thin before 1975, and have never covered logging or military boots properly. Unresolved means unresolved. It does not mean unmanufactured.
- Whether the 1998 track was in fact laid before dawn. Nobody watched it being made. The card says the hasty team found it at first light, and everything we build on that rests on one man's handwriting on one card, written by a man who is dead and cannot be asked what he meant.
- Our own experiment. One snowfield, one aspect, one pack, one day, one wearer at 84 kilograms, run once. Melt rate depends on slope aspect, snow density, grain size and how heavy the person was. What we filmed shows what can happen to a print in eight hours. It does not show what did happen on 14 March 1998.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Meridian TelegraphSEVENTEEN INCHES: The Cascade Cast That Six Books Could Not Explain
Treated the cast as a measurement rather than as a measurement taken at a particular hour.
Had that we did not
The dimensions of cast 41, correctly, off the same tape we used.
Left out
The time on the field card, which is legible in the photograph they ran across two pages.
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ApertureThe Man Who Poured Plaster For Thirty Years
An essay on the discipline of a man who kept casting things he was almost certain were boots.
Had that we did not
The field cards, read properly and read well. Better on the man than we are.
Left out
Every number. The essay does not give a single measurement, and the measurements are what settle it.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThe Track Grew Four Shoe Sizes Between Dawn And Noon. We Filmed It.
Measured all 61 casts blind, then went back to the same snowfield and pressed a known boot at dawn to watch what noon did to it.
Had that we did not
All 61 verdicts including the two the podiatrists disagree on, the four searchers' own boots, the three we cannot place, and the pencil note.
Left out
Our headline says 'We Filmed It', as though the filming were the achievement and the thirty years of plaster were the background. The discipline in this story belongs to a dead volunteer and to the widow who kept his cabinet. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Emmett Crowder-Nakashima, author on 1 July 2026 in writing, with the full draft, both podiatrists' reports, a scan of the field card and four weeks to answer. Replied 26 July 2026, asking that it run entire. Printed unedited.
I will start with the part that costs me something, because if I bury it you will be entitled to say I buried it.
I cannot answer the stride. I have gone through my files for three weeks looking for a reason why 71 centimetres between prints is consistent with an animal of the size I have argued for in two books, and there is no reason, and I am not going to invent one at sixty-eight. If the figure on that card is the figure that was measured on the ground, then the track was made by a person walking, and the length of the individual prints is a measurement of the morning rather than a measurement of a foot. You have that. Take it.
Now the rest.
You write that cast 41 is 'reproduced in six books', which is a way of counting me that makes me sound like a photocopier. Two of those books are mine. In both of them I gave the date of the cast, the elevation, the weather station, the name of the man who poured it and the fact that he did not believe it was anything. I did not conceal the provenance. I published everything I was given, and what I was given was a cast and a photograph, because that is what he sent me, and it is what he sent everybody.
Which brings me to the card. You have printed it as though it were suppressed. It was not suppressed. It was in a cabinet in a house in Skykomish, in a drawer, and in thirty years not one person who wrote about that cast — including me, and I am the one with the least excuse — got in a car and asked to see the paperwork. That is not a cover-up. That is laziness, and it is mine as much as anyone's, and you should say so in those words rather than the ones you have used, because 'never published' implies somebody decided.
On your experiment I am less generous. You ran it once. You pressed a boot into one snowfield on one morning in March 2026 and you have written the result as though it were a physical constant. I have watched prints in the Cascades for forty years and I can show you snow that holds a lug edge until four in the afternoon and snow that is soup by nine. You know this, because you say it yourself in the third bullet of your Unverified, and then you write a headline that says the track grew four sizes as though it were the track and not your track.
And I want to say something about Dennis. He wrote 'boot' on card after card. He wrote 'elk'. He wrote 'dog, big'. He was not credulous and nobody who knew him thought he was, and the reason his collection matters is precisely that it is mostly negative — sixty-one casts and he thought fifty-odd of them were nothing, and he cast them anyway, because that is what a search log is for. You have used his rigour to embarrass people like me. That is fair. But he was not on your side. He was on the side of writing it down, and so, in my slower way, was I.
One correction of fact. You say photographs of cast 41 appear in six books. It is seven. The seventh is a school library edition of my first book, and it has the same photograph, and I would rather you had the number right.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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