In the two decades since Bill Stampfl disappeared in an avalanche in the Peruvian Andes, his son Joseph had come to accept that his father would be forever lost under the mountain’s icy expanse.
Joseph Stampfl, 51, occasionally entertained thoughts that his father had somehow escaped the deluge of ice and snow and was roaming Peru with no memory of his former life. “But of course,” he said, “that’s just a fairytale. A dreamland, you know.”
Then one morning late last month, he received a phone call from Ryan Cooper, a fellow American, with startling news. Cooper had located his father’s body while climbing Mount Huascaran, Peru’s highest peak.
“I had my doubts initially, just because that’s so out of left field 20 years later,” Stampfl said. “But it was pretty immediately apparent that this was real and that he had, in fact, found my father.”
Cooper, 44, a gym owner from Las Vegas, said he had been attempting to climb Huascaran on June 27 with a group including Wesley Warne, his brother and regular mountaineering partner, and Daniel Milla Lliuya, a local guide. When treacherous conditions forced them to turn back, they descended along a glacial sheet that had been melting at a precipitous rate in recent years.
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Cooper said he spotted a dark shape in the distance that caught his eye. He went to investigate and realised it was a body, exposed above the ice at an altitude of 16,500 ft (5,000m). It was curled up in a foetal position, as if it had been bracing for impact, he said.
He could tell from the faded clothing and mummified condition of the skin that it had been there for a long time. He found a hip pouch attached to the body with a camera, passport, driver’s licence, a pair of sunglasses, a voice recorder and a gold wedding ring, all intact. He was able to make out the name on the faded IDs.
Cooper’s disappointment at failing to scale the peak after months of training and planning was replaced by an urgent need to reunite the deceased climber with his loved ones. “I realised we weren’t meant to summit, we were meant to find Bill, and it all kind of made sense to me,” he said. “We knew that we had a responsibility, being Americans ourselves, to track down and get this information to Bill’s family as soon as we could.”
With patchy signal on the mountain, Cooper contacted his wife and sister, who began searching for the family. Using social media and old newspaper coverage, they worked out that Bill Stampfl had been long presumed dead in an avalanche. When Cooper returned to his hotel in Huaraz two days later, he found a number for the climber’s son and called to say: “My name’s Ryan, I’m in Peru — and I found your dad.”
Bill Stampfl, 58, from California, had been attempting to climb the 22,000ft Huascaran in June 2002 with his friends Steve Erskine and Matthew Richardson when they were caught in an avalanche. Erskine’s body was the only one recovered at the time. Stampfl had been tied by rope to Richardson, but there was no trace of his body.
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The friends had travelled the world in search of challenging climbs, reaching the peaks of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, Rainier in Washington state and Denali in Alaska.
Joseph Stampfl said his father, a civil engineer, had taken up mountain climbing only in his fifties. He had prepared by running up Mount Baldy, near his home in San Bernardino County, southern California, each day and climbing the stairs in his house wearing a backpack filled with 30kg of sand.
He would measure out the exact amounts of water and trail mix needed for each ascent. “He was in way better shape than I was,” Stampfl said.
Stampfl said that it was difficult to look at the photographs and videos that Cooper had taken of the site, which showed his father curled up as if anticipating death. “I had hoped that he was taken quickly and he didn’t have to suffer,” he said. “There might have been a moment where he had to suffer through it, and that’s an unfortunate truth.”
Hundreds of climbers and local guides climb a collection of 5,000m-plus peaks in the Cordillera Blanca area of the Andes each year. The range has been severely impacted by climate change, losing 27 per cent of its ice sheet in the past five decades.
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It was not lost on Cooper that rising temperatures melting the glaciers allowed for Bill Stampfl’s body being found. “It was just this big, empty hole and now it’s melted away,” he said of the place where he found him. “The glaciers are definitely receding and melting at an alarming rate.”
It was not the first body that Cooper and his brother had found on the ice. About two years ago, while hiking on Mount St Helens, in Washington state, they found the remains of a frozen hiker who had been caught in a storm. “They had a helicopter up there and within hours his body was able to be recovered,” Cooper said. “Obviously being in Peru the resources are a lot different out there, it’s very rugged, it’s very remote, it’s not an easy path to recover somebody.”
The Stampfl family hired professional alpine climbers to retrieve Bill’s body, and a recovery team reached his resting place on Friday along with officers from Peru’s national police service. His remains are being transported to Lima, the capital, where they will be cremated.
Once the ashes are returned to the US, the family hopes to scatter some of them on the top of Mount Baldy, where a plaque to memorialise the three friends was placed soon after their deaths two decades ago.
“I think this would be a fitting sort of closing chapter for him to hike back up the mountain again and maybe share some of him with the mountain,” Joseph Stampfl said. He added that he had struggled to explain to his daughter what had happened to the grandfather that she never met. “It’s sort of just this numb feeling that, you know, we never were able to put him to rest. And I think now we’re on the cusp of actually finally getting able to do that.”
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Cooper said he planned to attend the family service. “It would be a beautiful ending to the story,” he said.
