Two daughters of a legendary Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago, have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences.
Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas.
Then last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44.
ANDRES LARROVERE/AFP via Getty Images
In February this year, the three set out with four other guides and two filmmakers on an 11-day journey to recover the bag from an altitude of about 6,100 meters (20,000 feet) — close to the summit of the 6,600-meter volcanic peak.
“In my family, the word ‘mountain’ was always forbidden. My mother wants nothing to do with the discovery of this backpack. It’s a family that has been broken by grief, by the void,” Azul, who was just 4 years old when her father died, told AFP.
“It all seemed crazy to me, and I didn’t want to go back to the volcano where he had died. But as the months went by… I started to loosen up, and began thinking: ‘Why not?'”
Inside the backpack, the women found a jacket, a sleeping bag, a water bottle, aspirin, Vitamin C tablets, a set of knives and two rolls of film that had belonged to their father.
ANDRES LARROVERE/AFP via Getty Images
“Spiritually, it felt like a greeting, like: ‘I’m still here, I exist. You’re not alone,'” Azul recounted.
“That slope has never been scaled again”
The experience also allowed her to learn more about a man she never got a chance to know.
“My mother never really told us who he was. We knew he had died in the mountains and that he was a mountaineer, but not much more than that. So, it was like rediscovering his story, like saying, wait… we have a father who had a life, a history. So it was like discovering him all over again.”
Photos taken from other film found inside the same backpack by Cavallaro a year earlier, showed that Vieiro and his partner Leonardo Rabal, 20, had been the first climbers to reach the top of Tupungato from its eastern side — the most challenging route.
“That slope has never been scaled again,” Cavallaro, who lives at the foot of Tupungato in the city of the same name, told AFP.
“What they (Vieiro and Rabal) accomplished has real historical value in Argentine and international mountaineering,” she added.
According to the Smithsonian Institution, Tupungato is a Pleistocene stratovolcano capped by a lava dome complex that is about 800,000 years old. There have been no reported eruptions there in modern history, according to Andean Geology, which noted that “landslide and sector collapse events are likely” on certain parts of the mountain.
The bodies of Vieiro and Rabal were recovered shortly after they died.
Azul and her sister said they would donate their father’s belongings in an attempt to share a “piece of Argentine mountaineering history” with others.
ANDRES LARROVERE/AFP via Getty Images
The journey to retrieve Vieiro’s belongings come just months after another deceased climber’s possessions were found on a peak in South America. Last summer, the preserved body of American mountaineer Bill Stampfl — who disappeared 22 years ago while scaling a snowy peak in Peru — was found by a climber. A hip pouch contained Stampfl’s driving license, a pair of sunglasses, a camera, a voice recorder and two decomposing $20 bills. A gold wedding ring was still on the left hand.
