Melting Ice Reveals Body of American Mountaineer Missing for 22 Years in the Peruvian Andes

Two decades ago, 58-year-old mountaineer Bill Stampfl tried to reach the top of Peru’s highest mountain. He never made it home. On June 24, 2002, a deadly avalanche swept down the slopes of Huascarán, the 22,205-foot peak in the Andes that Stampfl and his two climbing partners were trying to summit.

Now, as warming temperatures melt the mountain’s glaciers, Stampfl’s body has emerged from the ice.

A pair of American mountaineers, brothers Ryan Cooper and Wesley Waren, were descending Huascarán on June 27 when they spotted an unusual-looking shape on the landscape. Upon closer inspection, they realized they’d come across a mummified human body.

The body was hunched into a defensive position atop the ice, totally exposed to the elements, but still wearing a helmet, boots, jacket and gold wedding ring. Attached to the remains, the brothers found a fanny pack that held sunglasses, a passport, cash, a camera and an identification card: They’d found Stampfl.

“Someone loved him, and someone wanted him to come home,” Cooper tells CNN’s Sahar Akbarzai. “As soon as I found out he was an American climber, I knew we had a responsibility to track down the family and give them the news.”

Cooper’s group had been trying to reach the summit of Huascarán, but they came back down when conditions became too dangerous to continue. By happenstance, the group descended via an older route that’s no longer in use. They found Stampfl’s body at an elevation of roughly 17,060 feet, report Franklin Briceño and Amy Taxin for the Associated Press (AP).

At first, Cooper was bummed out that his group couldn’t make it to the top of Huascarán. But after discovering Stampfl’s remains, his feelings changed.

“I realized I wasn’t there to summit,” Cooper tells KTLA’s Vivian Chow. “I was there to find Bill and get Bill back to his family.”

While they were still on the mountain, Cooper called his wife back home in Las Vegas and asked for her help tracking down Stampfl’s family. She began poring over old newspaper articles and learned the story of what had happened to Stampfl and his climbing partners 22 years earlier.

Two days later, Cooper was able to reach Stampfl’s son, Joseph, now 51 years old, to explain what he’d found. He also spoke to Stampfl’s widow, Janet Stampfl-Raymer, as well as Stampfl’s daughter, Jennifer, who is now 53. He sent photos of the mountaineer’s ID and other belongings.

The family was shocked by the news, but relieved to have closure after so long. They hired an alpine rescue team to recover Stampfl’s body from the peak on July 5. His remains will be taken to a morgue in Lima, cremated and returned to his family in the United States.

They plan to scatter his ashes on Mount Baldy, the mountain in California where Stampfl trained for his mountaineering expeditions by running up and down with a 60-pound bag of cat litter in his backpack, per the New York Times’ Yan Zhuang and Mitra Taj.

Though Stampfl’s body has been found, the remains of one of his climbing partners, Matthew Richardson, are still missing. After the avalanche on Huascarán in June 2002, only one body from their group, Steve Erskine’s, was found.

Cooper tells CNN he had hoped to find Richardson’s body still attached to Stampfl by a piece of rope—mountaineers often link themselves together as a safety precaution—but that was not the case.

For Cooper, the discovery was also a startling example of how climate change is reshaping the world’s landscapes to reveal long-lost human remains. As glaciers melt and lakes dry up, bodies have also emerged on Mount Everest; on Theodul Glacier in Zermatt, Switzerland; in Lake Mead and in Lake Powell.

The mountain range that includes Huascarán and other towering peaks in Peru, called the Cordillera Blanca, has lost 27 percent of its ice sheet in the last 50 years, per the AP.

“[The mountain is] basically falling apart, it’s just crumbling,” Cooper tells the New York Times.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.