http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/nm/20030829/od_nm/climbers_dc
Melting
Alpine Ice Unveils Decades-Old Corpses
Fri Aug 29, 2003, 7:06 AM ET
ZURICH (Reuters) -
A Swiss father who searched for his mountaineer
son's missing body for 18 years thought his quest had paid off
this
week when a glacier, thawing in Europe's record heat, gave up
a corpse.
The young son and a
companion vanished in 1985 while scaling the
Titlis peak in the central Swiss Alps. Officials concluded strong
winds blew them off the mountainside as they bivouacked.
The man's father, who
police have not named, made dozens of trips
to the area to seek his remains over the years, finding nothing
but bits of equipment.
But police said Thursday
he had discovered a corpse the day
before that had been uncovered by a receding ice pack.
"Yesterday (the
father) thought it was his son. Today he says
it is the friend," a police spokesman said. "I would
leave
this wide open for the moment ... We don't know if it is
the body of his son, his son's companion or someone else."
Several other people
have gone missing in the area over
the years. The decomposed body was given to forensics experts
for tests.
Thawing Alpine ice
has yielded several bodies this summer.
German hiker Helmut
Weiss, last seen in 1971, was found
this week at an altitude of 8,860 feet near Ischgl in Austria,
German police said Thursday.
A group of German hikers
came upon his decomposed upper body
Tuesday, protruding 32 inches from the ice. He was identified
by items in his wallet.
Austrian Police said
the bodies of an Austrian and Canadian
had been also found in the mountainous Tyrol province alone.
In July, hikers discovered
the body of a German woman missing
since 1956 near Kaprun in another part of Austria.
"Maybe we will
even find a new Oetzi," a German police spokesman
said, referring to a mummified 5,000-year-old corpse whose
discovery in Alpine ice in 1991 caused a sensation.
Hikers who found "Oetzi"
first mistook him for an unlucky
mountaineer.
