Two decades following Bill Stampfl disappeared in an avalanche while climbing Peru’s highest mountain, his daughter, Jennifer Stampfl, had come to terms — to some extent — with the fact that she had lost him forever.
Sometimes he still dreamed that he was alive in Peru, suffering from amnesia, not knowing he had family in the United States. He hated the cold, he knew, so the idea of him being trapped in the ice was unsettling. But he believed he had finally accepted that the mountain would stay with his father.
Then, one Saturday last month, she got a call from her brother, Joseph Stampfl. The first thing he asked her was if she had a place to sit.
“He told me they had found Dad,” she said. “I said, ‘What?’”
Ryan Cooper, another American, had sought out Joseph Stampfl to tell him that he and a group of climbers had found his father’s body on Huascaran, a 6,768-meter-high peak in the Andes. Peruvian police said Tuesday that Bill Stampfl’s body had emerged from the ice that had preserved him since he disappeared during an expedition he made with two friends in 2002 as a result of the melting of the mountain’s glaciers due to climate change.
On June 27, the climbers were descending Huascaran when they saw a dark shape sticking out of the snow, Cooper, 44, a personal trainer in Las Vegas, said Tuesday. As they got closer, they realized it was a body, huddled in a defensive position like someone trying to protect themselves during an avalanche.
The body was completely exposed on the ice, Cooper continued. “It’s not like half of it was under the ice or anything; it was on the ice,” he said. Judging by the outdated clothing and mummified state of the body’s skin, it was clear the body had been there for “a very long time.”
In a fanny pack they found a still-legible ID and passport. Cooper and his brother, the only two Americans in the group, knew they had to find and notify Stampfl’s family.
“He still had his wedding ring on his finger,” she said. “That’s how I knew he had been married, and I knew he probably had a family and that at some point someone was waiting for him at home. And he didn’t come home.”
They found the body by pure coincidence. Cooper said his group had attempted to reach the summit, but had turned back following determining that conditions were too dangerous. On the way back, he said, they took an older route that is rarely used anymore, because of the way the mountain’s environment has changed.
At first, Cooper was very disappointed that he had not managed to reach the summit, he said. “But when I saw how things turned out, I realized that I was not meant to summit,” he said. “I was meant to find Bill.”
Even before the group had finished descending, Cooper contacted his wife in Las Vegas for help locating Stampfl’s family. With the help of old newspaper articles, they began to piece together the story of his disappearance. Two days following discovering the body, Cooper spoke by phone with Joseph Stampfl, now 51.
In June 2002, Bill Stampfl set out from California with two friends, Steve Erskine and Matthew Richardson, to summit Huascarán. While climbing, they were caught in an avalanche. Only Erskine’s body was recovered.
Bill Stampfl, 58 at the time, was the oldest of the three friends. As Joseph Stampfl explained, his father had only taken up mountaineering in his late 40s or early 50s, but he trained and prepared intensively for his expeditions. Jennifer Stampfl, now 53 and a teacher in Paloma, California, recalled how her father and Richardson would run up a local mountain with 60-pound bags of cat litter in their backpacks as part of their training.
When her father disappeared, she said, “it was almost unreal.”
“One day he was here and the next he was gone,” he continued. “And we don’t know where he is.”
Over time, the family had come to accept that they had lost Stampfl forever, she said. That made it “an even bigger shock” when Cooper got in touch, she said.
At first, she even wondered if the call was some kind of scam. But when Cooper told them the details of his experience and sent them photos of his father’s documents, they finally got it.
After digesting the news, Jennifer and Joseph Stampfl hired an alpine rescue team to retrieve his body from the mountain, which they did on Friday, accompanied by Peruvian authorities. Stampfl’s body will be driven nine hours to a morgue in Lima, Peru’s capital, where it will be cremated, Jennifer Stampfl said.
As at other peaks around the world, melting glaciers at Huascarán may lead to more discoveries of long-buried bodies, said Lenin Alvarado, an officer with the High Mountain Rescue Unit of Peru’s National Police.
Cooper said the effects of climate change were evident when he was on the mountain. “It’s basically falling apart, it’s just crumbling,” he said.
Once Stampfl’s remains return to the United States, his son and daughter hope to scatter some of his ashes on Mount Baldy, the peak where Stampfl used to train.
Seeing her father once more, frozen in time, has reopened old wounds for Jennifer Stampfl. But it has also brought closure.
Now that she knows for sure what happened to him, she hopes those dreams of him still being alive and lost will come to an end, she said. Knowing he won’t be alone in the cold anymore and will be with his family once more is a relief to her.
“I don’t want him on the mountain; I want him back with me,” she said. “He needs to be with me.”
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