The mummified body of an American climber who went missing while summiting Peru’s highest mountain has been found after 22 years, authorities said Tuesday.
Peruvian police and mountain rescue teams found the body of William Stample on July 5, police said. The body was found near a campsite on Mount Huascaran, which is about 17,060 feet above sea level.
Police said Stampfl’s body, clothing, hiking boots and crampons had been well preserved by the freezing temperatures and ice, and authorities were able to identify Stampfl’s personal belongings, including his driver’s license and passport, which had also been preserved by the ice.
Stampfl was 58 years old at the time when he was caught in an avalanche while climbing Mount Huascaran with friends Steve Erskine and Matthew Richardson in June 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
No other bodies were ever found apart from Mr Erskine’s, the paper reported.
Edson Ramirez, ranger and risk assessor for Huascaran National Park, said glaciers in the area have been retreating for about a decade. “Things that were buried years ago are coming to the surface,” he told Reuters.
Peru’s National Institute of Mountain Glaciers and Ecosystems said in a report released in November that the country, home to about 68 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, has lost more than half of its glacier surface in the past 60 years due to climate change. Many of these glaciers are in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range, part of the Andes, and mountains such as Huascarán are visited by thousands of climbers every year.
According to the online newspaper The Independent, Stampfl is the second mummified body found in the Peruvian Andes. In 2023, the body of 20-year-old Marta Emilia Altamirano, who died during an expedition in 1981, was discovered in the Andes mountains.
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Report: American climbers discover body of William Stample
William Stample’s son, Joseph Stample, told CNN that two American brothers discovered their father’s body while descending the mountain on June 27 “after a failed attempt to reach the 22,000-foot summit.”
According to CNN, climbers identified William Stample after finding a bag attached to his body that contained his driver’s license and passport. One of the climbers and Stample’s family worked with the Peruvian Mountain Rescue Association and the Peruvian National Police to recover his body.
The rescue team included five police officers and eight mountain guides, according to the Associated Press. Stampfl’s family told the AP and CNN that they planned to move his body to a funeral parlor in the Peruvian capital, Lima, where he will be cremated.
“I was shocked,” Jennifer Stampfl, William Stampfl’s daughter, told The Associated Press. “When I got the call that he’d been found, my heart just sank. I had no idea how to feel at first.”
“For 22 years we just accepted that this was reality, that my father was part of the mountain and he was never coming home,” she added.
Article contributed by Reuters
