A Mountain Held His Body for 22 Years. When the Ice Let Go, His Children Got a Call They Never Expected.

In June 2024, Bill Stampfl's son got a phone call from a stranger in Peru. The stranger said he had come across a body on Huascarán, still dressed in a climbing harness and boots, frozen and largely intact. Twenty-two years earlier, an avalanche had buried Bill Stampfl on that same mountain — and until that call, his family had made peace with the idea that he would never come home.

Stampfl was 58, an experienced high-altitude climber, when he and two partners were caught by the avalanche during their descent from a summit attempt on Huascarán, Peru's highest mountain. One of the three, Steve Erskine, was recovered during the original rescue effort in 2002. The second, Matthew Richardson, has never been found. Stampfl vanished so completely that rescuers had nothing to recover at the time — no gear, no body — and the family had nothing to bury for more than two decades. Guides who lead our own Nepal technical peak climbs hear versions of that story from clients most seasons: a glacier is not a grave you can visit, until, occasionally, it becomes one you can.

That changed on 27 June 2024, when fellow American climbers Cooper and Waren, descending Huascarán, spotted what turned out to be Stampfl's remains, preserved by the cold into a mummified state, still wearing his harness and boots. High-altitude ice is dry and intensely cold, which is why the body had mummified rather than decomposed — the same preservation that makes climbers' remains recognisable, and identifiable, decades after they disappear. A passport among his effects gave police an immediate identification. His daughter, Jennifer, described the call as a shock — for 22 years, she said, the family had settled into the understanding that their father was simply part of the mountain now, and was never coming home. His son, Joseph, said the family talks about their father often, but you never expect that particular phone call to actually come.

Peru's high glaciers are retreating fast enough that this kind of discovery is no longer rare. The Cordillera Blanca — the range that includes Huascarán — has lost more than a quarter of its ice mass since the 1970s, and Peruvian government scientists have reported the country has lost over half its total glacier surface area in just over fifty years.

The pattern holds on every continent with high glaciers: Everest's Rongbuk glacier gave up a hundred-year-old clue in 2024, and a Swiss glacier near Zermatt closed a 31-year case in October 2025. What connects Nepal, Switzerland and Peru is not coincidence — it is the same warming climate thinning three separate ice systems at once, at broadly the same accelerating rate.

What this means for trekkers

Source: CNN

Cover photo: Warner Brenes Quesada via Pexels (Pexels License).