Warning: Some readers may find the images within this article graphic.
American mountaineer Bill Stampfl left his home in San Bernardino County, California, 22 years ago to climb in Peru with his friends Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine. They hoped to climb one of the tallest mountains in the Andes: Huascarán (6,768m/22,204ft), whose easiest route has steep snow, complex ice falls, and WI 3 climbing. The three men were caught in an avalanche on the mountain and died.
Erskine’s body was found shortly after the avalanche, but Stampfl and Richardson’s corpses remained entombed on the mountain. Then, last month, an unknown American climber enroute to Huascarán’s summit found Stampfl’s body lying fully clothed on the glacier.
The climber searched the corpse for any identification and found Stampfl’s perfectly preserved driver’s license in a hip pouch along with a pair of sunglasses, a camera, a voice recorder, and two wilted $20 bills. Stampfl’s gold wedding ring was still on his left hand. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Lenin Alvardo, one of the police officers who participated in the recovery operation, told the Associated Press.
The climber got in touch with Stampfl’s family members, who began organizing a body recovery through a Peruvian mountain rescue association. Eight mountain guides from Grupo Alpamayo and five police officers from an elite unit participated in the recovery operation.
Jennifer Stampfl, Bill’s daughter, said the family plans to move the body to a funeral home in Lima where it can be cremated and his ashes brought back to the U.S.
Ice-melt exposing bodies and equipment is not a new phenomenon, particularly in medium-altitude ranges where temperatures can flux wildly over time. In 2014 the body of Patrice Hyver was found at 8,155 feet (2,485m) on the slopes of Mont Blanc, 32 years after he went missing. And after Canadian Robert Maiman plummeted into a crevasse on the Athabasca Glacier—forced to abandon nearly all his equipment, including skis, backpack, and stove—he found it all 12 years later, washed up on a rocky moraine like some twisted, expensive memento.
In the Andes, it is likely that similar body recoveries will occur with greater regularity as the region warms. According to official figures, the Cordillera Blanca has lost 27% of its ice sheet over the past five decades—and the peaks above 5,000 meters are experiencing the brunt of this melt out.
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