policemen and mountain guides<\/a> put Stampfl\u2019s body on a stretcher, covered it in an orange tarp, and slowly took it down the icy mountain. The body was found at an altitude of 5,200 meters (17,060 feet), about a nine-hour hike from one of the camps where climbers stop when they tackle Huascaran\u2019s steep summit.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJennifer Stampfl said the family plans to move the body to a funeral home in Peru\u2019s capital, Lima, where it can be cremated and his ashes repatriated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor 22 years, we just kind of put in our mind: \u2019This is the way it is. Dad\u2019s part of the mountain, and he\u2019s never coming home,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Police said Stampfl\u2019s body and clothing were preserved by the ice and freezing temperatures. His driver\u2019s license was found inside a hip pouch. It says he was a resident of Chino in California\u2019s San Bernardino County.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The effort to retrieve Stampfl\u2019s remains began last week, after an American climber came upon the frozen body while making his way to the Huascaran summit. The climber opened the pouch and read the name on the driver\u2019s license. He called Stampfl\u2019s relatives, who then got in touch with local mountain guides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Joseph Stampfl said they worked with a Peruvian mountain rescue association to retrieve his father\u2019s body, which was about 915 to 1,200 meters (3,000 to 4,000 feet) below where he and his two friends were believed to have been killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe was no longer encased in ice,\u201d the son said. \u201cHe still has got his boots on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A team of 13 mountaineers participated in the recovery operation \u2014 five officers from an elite police unit and eight mountain guides who work for Grupo Alpamayo, a local tour operator that takes climbers to Huascaran and other peaks in the Andes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eric Raul Albino, director of Grupo Alpamayo, said he was hired by Stampfl\u2019s family to retrieve the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lenin Alvardo, one of the police officers who participated in the recovery operation, said Stampfl\u2019s clothes were still mostly intact. The hip pouch with his driving license also contained a pair of sunglasses, a camera, a voice recorder and two decomposing $20 bills. A gold wedding ring was still on the left hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen anything like that\u201d Alvarado said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Huascaran is Peru\u2019s highest peak. Hundreds of climbers visit the mountain each year with local guides, and it typically takes them about a week to reach the summit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, climate change has affected Huascaran and the surrounding peaks higher than 5,000 meters, known as the Cordillera Blanca. According to official figures, the Cordillera Blanca has lost 27% of its ice sheet over the past five decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stampfl was with friends Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine in trying to climb Huascaran in 2002. They had travelled the world to climb challenging mountains and had reached the peaks of Kilimanjaro, Rainier, Shasta and Denali, according to a Los Angeles Times report at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Erskine\u2019s body was found shortly after the avalanche, but Richardson\u2019s corpse is still missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jennifer Stampfl said a plaque in memory of the three friends was placed at the summit of Mount Baldy in Southern California, where the trio trained for their expeditions. She said they may return to the site with her father\u2019s remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Janet Stampfl-Raymer, who was Stampfl\u2019s wife, said that when her husband wasn\u2019t working as a civil engineer, he loved to be a mountaineer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe was a kind man. He was humble. He loved God, and he loved the mountains,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe all just dearly loved my husband. He was one of a kind,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re very grateful we can bring his body home to rest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stampfl carefully planned his mountaineering expeditions, his daughter said. She also said he was very humble and did not like to draw attention to himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe fact that he is in the news, it is so not my dad,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty two years ago, an avalanche buried American climber Bill Stampfl as he made his way up one of the highest peaks in the Andes mountains. His family knew there was little hope of finding him alive, or even of retrieving his corpse from the thick fields of snow and the freezing ice sheets that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":29470,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[29578,28725,29577,29579,29576],"class_list":["post-29469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-avalanches","tag-climbers","tag-climbing-the-andes","tag-corpses","tag-twenty-two-years-ago"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29469"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29471,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29469\/revisions\/29471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}