In late June, as a group of mountaineers descended a treacherous glacier high in the Peruvian Andes, they spotted a dark, out-of-place lump resting on the blinding white snow. When they approached, they realized it wasn’t a rock, as they had initially assumed. It was a corpse.
When they got a little closer, they could tell from the out-of-date clothes and the condition of the skin that the dead man had been there for a very long time. A miraculously well-preserved California driver’s license in the man’s pocket identified him as Bill Stampfl, a mountaineer from Chino who had been buried by an avalanche in 2002. Avalanches begin as loose, flowing rivers of ice and snow that sweep their victims off their feet and wash them down the mountain.
When the frozen debris stops, it quickly solidifies into something like a concrete tomb. But in recent years, as the planet has warmed and ice has melted at an alarming rate, receding glaciers on the upper reaches of many of the world’s most celebrated and deadly peaks have begun surrendering the bodies of long-lost mountaineers. It’s a blessing and a relief for grieving families who crave closure, but it creates a grim chore for public officials whose job it is to respectfully remove the remains.
Last year, on the heels of a heat wave that triggered the fastest loss of glacial ice in Swiss history, the boot of a German climber who disappeared in 1986 began poking out of a well-traveled glacier near the mountain town of Zermatt, n.