THE SOUNDS ARE TERRIFYING. Cracks. Crunches. Crumbling. It's as if the enormous mountain outside has come alive tonight and is angry. Or, maybe the entire world is falling apart? Either way, all Ryan Cooper can do is lie in his tent and hope the mountain doesn't swallow him up.
It's June 2024, and Cooper is high up on one of the world's most daunting mountains, Peru's Huascarán. He and his group count their blessings when the sun comes up the next morning. So far, the trip has been one obstacle after another. Avalanches, rockslides, snowstorms. Cooper is a 44-year-old fitness coach and endurance event organizer from Las Vegas with a wife, three kids, two dogs, two cats and two birds back home. He's not sure how many of these international attempts he will be able to make. This has to work out.
But it's not meant to be. Cooper meets with his fellow group members, including his brother, and they decide that this trip is too dangerous, and they need to turn back. It's the right decision. But it feels so wrong. To go all this way, and push so hard so many times to get to the top, and now they're just going to quit?
When Cooper first read about Huascarán, he felt a fire that mountaineers experience. They consider it a calling, and they spend months and thousands of dollars preparing for a climb. They have to go, or else the fire doesn't stop burning.
But Cooper's body feels extinguished when the group decides to turn back. As he packs up, the moment keeps stinging worse and worse. Cooper would never risk his own life -- or the life of anybody in his group -- for the sake of a summit. And yet, he just stands there for a while -- he has never made a right decision that pulled his guts out like this one does. The group charts a course back down the 22,205-foot mountain and begins its descent. Good mountaineers learn to climb another day.
As they start down, Cooper notices something in the distance. The mountain is pure white from the snow, but there is a small cluster of something dark in one spot up ahead. At first, Cooper thinks it's equipment or trash that people left behind. But as the group gets closer, Cooper squints, questioning if he's seeing what he thinks he is seeing.
When they are only a few feet away, the entire group pauses in shock.
It's a body. A frozen body.
COOPER IS 6-foot-3 and ripped. He looks 10 years younger than his driver's license alleges. He works out all the time with an eye on peak fitness for summiting mountains, which requires incredible cardio and strength to endure some of the world's harshest conditions.
Still, even on a perfect day, Huascarán is an almost insurmountable challenge. It's the highest peak in Peru, and its summit is the spot with the lowest gravitational pull of any place on Earth. In rankings of the world's most dangerous mountains, Huascarán is routinely placed near Mount Everest, sometimes higher. And as Cooper sees firsthand, climate change has made Huascarán incredibly volatile. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range has lost nearly half of its glacier mass over the past 60 years. That destabilizes the mountain, causing more melting ice and frequent avalanches.
By the time he and his group turn back, Cooper has come to grips with not making it to the top. The fire is out, at least for now. His mind has shifted to when he can try again.
But the moment he finds the frozen man, the fire inside him rekindles. He thinks maybe the mountain called to him -- not to get to the top but to discover the frozen body.
When they realize what they've found, everyone stands back and takes out their phones. They want to document everything so that they can better aid recovery efforts.
After a few minutes, Cooper approaches the body. The man's clothes and equipment indicate that he's been frozen for years. A feeling steamrolls Cooper that the man must get home, and Cooper must do everything possible to make it happen. If he can do that, the whole trip will be worth it.
Cooper can see that the man's neck seems to have been broken and that his head also has a significant injury. Perhaps the most jarring thing about the man's body is his hands. He's covering his face, his hands raised in a last-second panic to protect himself from what must have been the thousands of pounds of rock, snow and ice that took his life. An avalanche.
As Cooper looks closer, he notices a shiny object in the man's hand -- a wedding ring. He approaches the body and reaches into his fanny pack, where he finds the man's wallet. Like the body itself, everything is intact. The man's skin is leathery and cold, but the wallet opens like a normal wallet. Cooper pulls out a driver's license and sees that the man is American. His name is William Stampfl, and he disappeared 22 years ago.
The fire inside Cooper is burning hotter than ever. He can't get the visual of Stampfl's wedding ring out of his head. There must be someone out there in the world with a matching ring, wondering what happened to their spouse. He's determined to track them down.
Like so many bodies discovered on the world's highest peaks -- more than 300 people have died on Mount Everest, for instance -- Stampfl can't be taken down the mountain by Cooper and his group. These kinds of peaks are so dangerous that mountaineers must weigh out every ounce of their packs and keep their gear to an absolute bare minimum, so there's no wasted energy. The best they can do is document coordinates, contact the family and leave the excavation to a trained rescue team.
So, that's what Cooper does. As soon as he gets a cell signal at the bottom of the mountain, he connects with his wife and gives her Stampfl's name and address. He eventually gets contact information for someone named Joseph Stampfl, who he believes is the man's son.
Cooper pauses for a few seconds. Now that he has the contact info, Cooper realizes that this might be the most difficult cold call in human history. How do you even start a conversation like this? Will the person on the other end of the phone be grateful? Devastated? Both?
Cooper works up the courage to call from a hotel room in Peru. It's a New Jersey area code, and the phone just rings and rings. He leaves a voicemail, hangs up and sends a text. Part of him is glad that Joseph doesn't pick up. He's still unsure of how to break the news. At least now he has some time to sit with it and try to come up with the right thing to say.
But a few minutes later, his phone starts to ring. It's that New Jersey area code. There's no more room for planning. It's time for one of the toughest conversations of Cooper's life.
WHEN HE FIRST listens to Cooper's voicemail, Joseph Stampfl thinks it is a scam. Anybody could have looked up the basic details of his dad's disappearance and could attempt to con him with those details.
But two things stick with him. The first: Why would someone scam him 20-plus years later? The second: Cooper's voice. There is a vibe, a softness that makes him feel kindness, not chicanery.
About 15 minutes later, Stampfl calls back. His inner voice is saying the same thing that Cooper's is: How the hell do I even start this conversation?
"Hi, this is Joseph Stampfl, returning your call."
"Hi, Joseph. My name is Ryan Cooper. I'm in Peru, and I'm sure this is a shock, but I found your dad."
Stampfl never thought he would hear that sentence.
Stampfl doesn't say anything. He'd dreamt of this call for so long that he'd accepted that it might never come. Now it's happening, and he has given up on figuring out what to say next. So, he just says nothing.
Cooper fills the air with details. He tells Joseph what Bill Stampfl had been wearing, that he had his driver's license and that he'd taken a bunch of photos. Joseph Stampfl asks if Cooper could send him the photos, and Cooper says he would. The call is five minutes long, and when it's over, Stampfl struggles to shake the feeling that this is some sort of cruel joke.
But when Cooper texts him the photos, he melts. Now he knows it is real. And when Cooper says, "Tell me about your dad," Stampfl finally finds his words.
He tells Cooper that his dad worked as an engineer, that he had two kids, Joseph and Jennifer, and two stepsons, and that Bill Stampfl was someone who finished things. He'd find a hobby -- mountaineering, multiple musical instruments, woodworking -- and then it wouldn't be a hobby for long. He would launch himself into projects with complete abandon, including becoming an elite mountaineer. He wasn't the kind of guy who dabbled with playing the guitar or going for hikes; he wouldn't stop until he felt like he'd mastered it.
That made his disappearance an impossible thing for the Stampfls to handle. The family eventually came to grips with the idea that Bill died on Huascarán. But they couldn't process the concept that his story would be unfinished. For them, the sadness of his death was outweighed by the pain of his not having mastered his own ending. "It was crushing for him dying to be so open-ended," Joseph Stampfl says. He's silent for a few seconds, and then just says it again. "Crushing."
And so, after talking to Cooper, he spends the next 90 minutes trying to track down his sister, Jennifer, his stepmom Janet and his dad's brother, Uncle Herb. He tells them only that his dad's body had been found -- he wants Cooper to tell them the full story. Finally, they all sync for a phone call with Cooper, and Cooper tells them what happened. Cooper talks -- and keeps talking -- and at the end of the call, they all express deep appreciation.
Then, the family calls each other. They'd never really closed the book on Bill Stampfl's life together and had never been on the same page about his disappearance. Janet had moved on with her life and remarried a few years after her husband vanished, and her contact with her stepchildren dwindled over the years. She moved to Missouri, and Joseph relocated to the New York area, so the drift was inevitable.
But now, they are together again, with a finality none of them knew they needed as much as they realized. They are ecstatic to understand how it happened, no matter how much it hurt.
"We had closure," Janet says. "Finally."
There's a cliché about mountaineers and other adventure sports athletes: "They died doing what they loved." It can be both true and absurd because no climbers, surfers, football players, accountants, or anyone wants to die doing something they love. "When I'm in the mountains, I don't want to die," Cooper says. "It's where I am most glad to be alive."
The Stampfls scoff at that notion, too. But there is incredible joy in their voices about the end of Bill's story. Yes, his death was sad, and the details of his last moments are heartbreaking, and the photos of him are a haunting reminder of Stampfl. But his family laughs and smiles and rejoices, with no hushed tones and somber pursed lips about Bill; they needed to know what happened to him, and suddenly they did.
But now they are presented with a new question: How would they get him home?
FOR A MONTH after Cooper's voicemail, Joseph Stampfl squeezes in his full-time job as an architect in the New York City area around a second job -- finding a rescue team in Peru to retrieve his dad. Cooper helps from afar, but getting a body from high on Huascarán to the United States is a wild, complicated ordeal.
Stampfl needs to book a rescue crew and a police presence to accompany them on the retrieval. He manages to do that from his New Jersey home. Once Bill Stampfl's body is brought to the bottom of the mountain, Joseph then must find a local funeral home to cremate his father's remains and ship them back to the U.S., requiring a morass of paperwork for the necessary approvals.
On the day the crew goes to the location of his body, the Peruvian police tag along and promptly send out photos and a news release about what they find. The photos are graphic and not approved of by the family, and Joseph Stampfl still gets a little hot talking about the tone of the news release, which makes it sound like the police had discovered his dad's body.
"Ryan and his group deserved all the credit for finding my dad," he says.
The day after the news release, some American media outlets report on the discovery of Stampfl's dad before the family can even get Bill home. The family sits down for interviews and signs off on Cooper telling his part of the story. Cooper defers to the Stampfls on what they would like him to share, and they insist that he be front and center. They want the world to know the gratitude they feel toward him.
"He's a hero to us," Jennifer Stampfl says.
Bill Stampfl's body makes it down the mountain, and he is cremated. There are some hang-ups with his belongings -- Janet wants to get his wedding band back, and Bill had a camera with him on the trip. The Stampfls aren't rich, so even though they'd love to have his things returned, they needed to pay Peruvian authorities $800 to do so. Bill's equipment and most of his belongings sat in Peruvian purgatory for months, but the family recently paid for everything to be returned.
His ashes are shipped to Los Angeles, and Jennifer picks them up at the airport. She arrives and opens the package when she gets to her car -- and there is her dad, cremated into one big 13-pound urn. She cries at the finality of it. But she is so, so happy. These are the most wanted tears of her life, tears she stored for 22 years, hoping to empty someday.
The plan is to pour the ashes into three different urns. One will go home with her, one will go with Joseph back to New Jersey, and the family will hold on to the third until they can gather together on Mount Baldy, a 10,064-foot snowy peak about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles that served as Bill's starter kit to mountaineering. They want to scatter Bill's remains where his climbing career began, and they plan to do it around Stampfl's birthday, Nov. 26. He would've been 81.
Jennifer places the urn in the backseat and has a feeling come over her that it's not ashes; it's her dad. He's with her in the car, and he's with her in life again. The drive takes about an hour and a half in stop-and-barely-go L.A. afternoon traffic, with her wishing the entire time that she had put him up front in the passenger seat. She looks toward the backseat and says, "At least it's really warm today, Dad."
Stampfl spends most of the drive telling her father that she has managed to merge their shared passion, music, into a career as a teacher. She talks about her side business making purses and jewelry, knowing he'd have been her No. 1 customer. She says that she can't wait for him to be around Joseph to hear the same life updates from him. She can't help but throw out a spoiler that Joseph named his daughter after him: Wilhelmina. "I bet you're wondering if your daughter ever shuts up, huh?" she finally asks him.
She also expresses the emotional toll of losing him, but not being quite sure she lost him. About how this is a sad moment and also a happy moment and also a devastating finality and also the perfect ending and also so damn funny. "Dad, you hated the cold, and that's how you died? Frozen? Really?" she laughs into the rearview mirror.
Jennifer jokes now about what that visual must have looked like for other drivers. "I cried after it first happened," she says. "But there was so much uncertainty that the crying didn't feel final. I didn't really let it all out. I never had that moment. Having him in my backseat, knowing that this was finally it, I was able to just let it go. It was definitely ugly crying."
When she gets home, she takes him inside and puts him on the table. She tells her dad that she'll be back in a bit, that there's more to be said, but that they have so much time together now. "I've done a lot of healing over 22 years," she says. "He hasn't been here. I've had to navigate life without him as a part of it.
"Now I can navigate life with him again."
COOPER'S FAVORITE PART of meeting the Stampfl family is hearing them talk about Bill. In the months after discovering Bill, he has gotten to know Janet, Jennifer and Joseph, and they all talk about how Cooper can't get enough of knowing the man he brought home.
Janet told him their love story. She met Bill in the late 1970s. Both were divorced and in their mid-30s, with two kids apiece. She liked how he had his own life and wanted her to have her own life, too. He was the breadwinner, working as a civil engineer, and she was a steady, resilient force that kept their lives humming along.
Bill Stampfl was constantly fidgeting -- always finding new hobbies and passions. Stampfl learned how to play the guitar, harmonica, trumpet and accordion, and he'd taught himself how to be a masterful woodworker. The common theme of his hobbies was that they were solitary pursuits. Stampfl liked to work alone, and he always had.
He grew up as an Austrian immigrant in the U.S. right after World War II, picked on nonstop for his thick accent that American kids just assumed was German. The anxiety caused him to turn inward and work on getting rid of his accent by himself, away from the world that mocked him. Years later, as an adult, he became the kind of man who was so quiet that when he did speak, people listened, and they didn't hear an accent.
The one place where Bill Stampfl felt like he could be a little loud was with his family. Janet still remembers the long car rides where the whole gang would sing "She'll be Coming 'Round the Mountain" until their throats hurt. "He was an amazing, multifaceted man," Janet says.
Cooper chuckled when Janet told him about how, later in life, Bill discovered what would ultimately be his favorite hobby: mountaineering. Cooper got into mountaineering deep into his adult life, too.
The family used to laugh at Bill's choice of hobbies because of how much he hated being cold. He would bundle up around the house in a sweatshirt and a blanket, then go to summit Mount Baldy.
Stampfl climbed Mount Baldy once and then again, and soon he was doing it once a week, with 65 pounds of cat litter in his backpack as he pushed his body to prepare for bigger peaks. He'd spent years calculating the amount of things he'd need on a big summit and landed on the number 65 for the weight of his ideal backpack. Jennifer remembers a few times when he got up extra early and summited Baldy twice before lunch. He was hooked, and he'd go on to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Rainier and a slew of others.
When Cooper spoke with Jennifer, she described working for years as an EMT in the Los Angeles area before she went back to school to study music. In 2002, at age 31, she'd gotten her degree to teach music around the time that Bill announced to the family that he was going to try to climb Huascarán. In one of her last conversations with her dad, Jennifer delivered great news: She'd been hired as a middle school music teacher in the Los Angeles area. He was so happy for her. Music was their thing, and now it was her livelihood.
She told Cooper that Bill went to Huascarán in June 2002 with two other mountaineer friends, Matthew Richardson and Steve Erskine. He was training hard, sometimes doing aggressive half-hour hikes up and down the stairs in his house with the cat litter backpack. He'd be dripping sweat, pushing himself the way he believed he needed to be able to handle Huascarán. His family would always laugh about the visual of the guy who hated cold, sweating his butt off, so that he could hike some of the most frigid, icy places on Earth.
In Bill Stampfl's mind, Jennifer said, he'd climb Huascarán and then start thinking about trying to summit Mount Everest. He was serious -- he never had an interest in becoming famous, but at age 58, he saw himself on a trajectory to becoming one of the most successful older climbers in mountaineering history.
In his last call with Janet, Bill was in good spirits. He was a meticulous planner on his summits, to the point that the danger of these trips receded into the background because of all his drawings and notes. Stampfl's family always felt comforted by all the mapping that he did, because it felt like he'd carefully solved a math problem before he ever set foot on the mountain in question. He knew the truth, though: Climbing plans can be reassuring, but also not worth the paper they're drawn on if a mountain comes to life.
There were other groups on Huascarán the day Stampfl disappeared. They reported seeing Stampfl and his two friends in that area when a massive avalanche swept down the mountain. Erskine's body was found later that week, about 1,000 feet away from where Stampfl's would ultimately be discovered decades later. Richardson's body is still missing.
Even though Stampfl's body wasn't found in 2002, the American embassy notified Janet that her husband was presumed dead and that a search helicopter had had no luck finding any sign of him or Richardson. It was hard to imagine an outcome other than that Bill Stampfl had died on Huascarán that day.
But the human mind has never figured out how to process this kind of vague finality, and the Stampfls were no different. Janet felt in her heart that the reports from the other groups were true, that he'd died on the mountain. Joseph and Jennifer, though, held out hope. How could they not? Their dad had always come home; he had always been Superman. Jennifer thought about how many 1980s movies and TV shows she'd seen where someone gets bonked in the head and has amnesia -- maybe her dad was wandering around a Peruvian village, she thought, trying to remember who he was and what life he left behind. Or what if he got trapped somewhere but has a pocket of air? What if he were injured, lying out there in the cold? Even if he had died, she wanted to know how.
She worried and she hoped.
Cooper's heart hurt listening to them talk about how their hopes dwindled as 2002 wore on. The family celebrated his life on Mount Baldy, in a ceremony organized by the local mountaineering community, and Bill Stampfl was declared legally dead. But still, the power of not knowing kept a hold on the family, and they all had a tough time moving on.
Maybe, just maybe, Dad was still out there.
But 2002 turned to 2003, and 2004, and the calendar pages just kept turning. Eventually, even Jennifer gave up hope that her dad was alive. When she told others the details of her dad's disappearance, she noticed that people would make a certain look, like they had accepted his death, while she had not.
"I thought maybe somebody would find him 1,000 years from now," Jennifer says.
THE WEEKEND BEFORE Thanksgiving, Cooper is working all day to help put on an ultramarathon. He sleeps a little on Saturday night, Nov. 23, then he gets in his car at 4 a.m. to drive to Mount Baldy.
The Stampfl family has gathered there to say their final farewell to Bill. His widow, Janet, flew in from Missouri. Joseph came from New Jersey. Jennifer drove from her nearby home. And they all can't wait for Cooper to arrive.
The original plan isn't going to work; they initially wanted to give everybody the option of either riding ski lifts to the top or climbing it by foot before spreading Bill's ashes, but many of the trails are closed because of fire concerns. Everyone is a little disappointed, especially Cooper. He drove from Las Vegas, propelled by the idea of honoring Bill by filling his backpack with 65 pounds of rocks and then summiting Bill's favorite mountain.
The entire crew takes the ski lift to the top, and Cooper and Joseph Stampfl continue a conversation they've been having for a while. They talk about how maybe someday they'll go to Peru together with some of Bill's ashes, and they'll take him to the summit and leave part of him where he died trying to get to. Maybe they could look for Matthew Richardson while they are there, they say.
But a funny thing happens at the top of the mountain. A Stampfl family friend appears on the trail and says she had been told by a Baldy official that certain trails are OK for hiking. Cooper exchanges a look with Joseph and before they can spend much time investigating it, they're darting down the mountain so they can climb right back up.
They're both on fire.
At the base, Cooper scrounges around for a rock that might weigh 65 pounds. He's hell-bent on seeing through his homage. He eventually finds one and mashes it into his backpack. He tells Stampfl, "When it gets tough, our thoughts will be on your dad. We're suffering for a good reason."
They make the hike to the top, where the rest of the Stampfl friends and family are waiting. They gather in a circle to say goodbye to Bill, once and for all. A fog has rolled in and surrounds the group in an eerie way. The sun is out, so the orange light makes the huddle glow.
Everybody in the circle can see each other well, but not far beyond the outside of the circle. It's just them in there with Bill, tucked away from the foggy world. That makes it hard to know exactly what happens or doesn't happen within that circle. But could some of Bill Stampfl's ashes have accidentally landed on this spot that was the center of his existence? Who can say?
Each person makes a few comments about Bill, sheds a few tears, and finds closure. The whole thing lasts about five minutes, and then it's time to go home. The weather is in the mid-40s, but people take note that it feels more pleasant than the thermometer would have you believe. And as they make their way down the mountain, everybody can't help but smile.
Bill Stampfl is warm again, and he always will be.