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    American Climber’s Body Found on Mountain Peru After 22 Years

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    Melting glaciers on Mount Huascarán in Peru helped uncover the body of Bill Stampfl, who disappeared while climbing the mountain with two friends.Two decades after Bill Stampfl went missing during an avalanche while climbing Peru’s highest mountain, his daughter, Jennifer Stampfl, had more or less accepted that he was gone forever.Sometimes she still had dreams of him, alive in Peru, amnesiac and unaware that he had family in the United States. She knew he had hated the cold, so the idea of his being trapped in ice was unsettling. But she thought she had made her peace with the mountain keeping her father.Then, one Saturday last month, she got a call from her brother, Joseph Stampfl. He began: Are you sitting down?“He told me that they found Dad,” she said. “And I said, ‘What?’”A fellow American, Ryan Cooper, had tracked down Joseph Stampfl to tell him that he and a group of climbers had stumbled upon his father’s body on Mount Huascarán, a 22,205-foot peak in the Andes range. As climate change helped melt the mountain’s glaciers, Bill Stampfl’s body emerged from the ice that had preserved it since he went missing during an expedition with two friends in 2002, the Peruvian police said on Tuesday.On June 27, the climbers were descending Mount Huascarán when they saw a dark shape that stood out against the snow, Mr. Cooper, 44, a personal trainer from Las Vegas, said in an interview on Tuesday. As they drew closer, they saw that it was a body, curled in a defensive position, like someone trying to protect himself during an avalanche, he said.The body was completely exposed atop the ice, Mr. Cooper said. “Not like half of him was under the ice or anything — he was on top of the ice,” he said. Judging by the outdated clothing and the mummified condition of its skin, Mr. Cooper said, it was clear that the body had been there for a “really long time.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robbi Mecus, Who Helped Foster L.G.B.T.Q. Climbing Community, Dies at 52

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      Ms. Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who worked in the Adirondacks, died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska.Robbi Mecus, a New York State forest ranger who led search-and-rescue missions and became a prominent voice within the L.G.B.T.Q. climbing community, died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska on Thursday. She was 52.Her death was confirmed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where she worked for 25 years.Ms. Mecus, who worked mostly in the Adirondacks, searched for and rescued lost and injured climbers facing hypothermia and other threats in the wilderness. Last month, she helped rescue a frostbitten hiker who was lost in the Adirondack Mountains overnight.At age 44, she came out as transgender, she said in a 2019 interview with the New York City Trans Oral History project. She then worked to foster a supportive community for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning climbers in the North Country of New York.“I want people to see that trans people can do amazing things,” she said in an interview for a climbing website, goEast, in 2022. “I think it helps when young trans people see other trans people accomplishing things. I think it lets them know that their life doesn’t have to be full of negativity and it can actually be really rad.”Basil Seggos, former commissioner of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, called Ms. Mecus a “pillar of strength” and a tremendous leader for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, noting she was “always there” for the most difficult rescues and crises.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      A Rock Climber Finds a Softer Strength

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      I don’t know what time it was when my husband at the time, the rock climber Tommy Caldwell, finally scrambled over the summit. The sun had risen sometime during the first part of the climb and had set again hours later. I squinted up at him, tired eyes burning as I watched his shadow moving in the beam of my headlight. He had just completed the second free ascent of the Direct Route on the northwest face of Half Dome, a 2,000-foot climb in Yosemite National Park.We were elite professional climbers, and this was what we did best. Sometimes we made history together; other times I supported him in his feats, belaying and carrying all the gear. Either way, the days were long and hard.The climber Todd Skinner spent 61 days in 1993 working to establish the Direct Route, then considered the most difficult big wall climb in the world, before reaching the top. On our climb in 2007, our 2 a.m. wake-up, more than 24 hours earlier, hadn’t even felt all that early to me. Sleeping in past midnight? That meant what I was getting up for wasn’t that rad, that hard core. Tommy made it to the top in a day, adding a move that made the climb more difficult than the one Mr. Skinner had pioneered. It felt routine.Hanging in the middle of Half Dome was an ordinary thing. Ascending ropes with bloody knuckles and a heavy pack thousands of feet off the ground was as conventional to me as grabbing the bananas and apples in the produce section: just part of my day. Climbers pride themselves on being better than normal people. Not just in the “I climbed a mountain and you didn’t” type of way, but in the fabric of how we approach life. How we eat, where we sleep, the stories we walk away with: It’s all better.By the time I was in my mid-20s, I was a walking archetype of how to succeed in that world because of the belief system I followed: suck it up, persevere, win. I was used to pushing the level of climbing further, used to doing things that no other women had done — and even, a couple of times, things that no guys had done.I specialized in free climbing, a particular (and particularly challenging) discipline that requires a climber to rely on her gear only for protection from a fall, not for any assistance in moving up the rock. I had free-climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan three times, by three independent routes. Elsewhere in Yosemite, I had established a new route in 2008, Meltdown, that was widely viewed then as the hardest traditional climb in the world, not repeated until 2018. (“Traditional” meaning I depended on a rope suspended by gear I placed myself, rather than on bolts permanently installed in the rock.) For a decade, I had appeared in climbing films and on the pages of climbing magazines. Pushing through the pain, sacrificing my body, shoving my fear away: It’s all what made me better than the rest. I liked being better than the rest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More