Officials in Peru said Tuesday they recovered the body of American mountain climber William Stampfl, who was buried in an avalanche 22 years ago while attempting to climb 6,768-meter Mount Huascaran.
Police told The Associated Press that the area’s freezing temperatures and ice had preserved the climber’s body, clothing and other possessions, including his driver’s license, which said he lived in Chino, California, in San Bernardino County.
Stampfl traveled to the Andean area with two friends in 2002 — Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine, according to the AP report. The trio traveled the world together to climb mountains and had summited Kilimanjaro, Rainier, Shasta and Denali, AP reported.
Richardson’s body remains missing, while Erskine’s was recovered shortly after the avalanche.
Meanwhile in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday that six volunteer climbers, led by Pakistani mountaineer Abbas Ali, found and recovered the body of Hiroshi Onishi, a 64-year-old Japanese climber who died recently as he was descending Golden Peak, one of the country’s tallest mountains.
He was the third of three Japanese climbers to die in Pakistan in less than a month.
Onishi had reached the peak of the mountain but fell into a crevasse during his descent and died, AP reported.
The volunteers mounted their recovery effort after bad weather prevented helicopters from retrieving the body. It took the volunteers six days “of arduous work to find and bring the body down,” according to AP.
Earlier, on June 13, two other Japanese climbers were also reported missing on the same mountain as Onishi. Ryuseki Hiraoka’s body was found two days later. Recovery efforts for Atsushi Taguchi’s body were unsuccessful, and he is presumed dead.
