Reader's Digest Australia Feb/Mar 2026

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. themountain. At about 17,000 feet, Coo- per notices something dark up ahead. At first, he thinks it’s equipment or trash that people left behind. But as the group gets closer, Cooper questions 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 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 fitness and the strength to endure some of the world’s harshest conditions. Still, even on a perfect day, the 22,205- foot Huascarán, the highest peak in Peru, is an almost insurmountable challenge. In rankings of the world’s most dangerous mountains, it’s been placed near Mount Everest, sometimes higher. And as Cooper sees firsthand, climate change has made Huascarán incredibly volatile. The Cordillera Blanca mountain range, which con- tains Huascarán, has lost 44% of its 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 and three kids 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. The group decides 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 to get to the top, and now they’re just going to quit? As Cooper packs up, the moment keeps stinging worse and worse. He would never risk his own life—or the life of anybody in his group—for the sake of a summit. And yet, he has never made a right decision that pulled his guts out like this one does. The group begins its descent down reader ’ s digest 88 February/March 2026 glacier area over the past 40 years, causing more melting ice and frequent avalanches. When the group finds the frozen man, everyone stands back and takes out their phones. They want to docu- ment everything so they can better aid recovery efforts. After a few minutes, Cooper approaches the body.Theman’s clothes and equipment indicate that he’s been frozen for years. Cooper can see that the man’s neck seems to have been broken and that his head also has a sig- nificant injury. Perhaps the most jar- ring thing is the position of his hands. They were 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 on the man’s left hand—a wedding ring. He opens theman’s fanny pack and finds a driver’s license inside. He sees that the man is American. His name is William Stampfl, and he’s from Chino, California. The group would later discover that he had disappeared 22 years earlier. Cooper is one of the only Americans in the group, and a feeling steamrolls him that hemust do everything possible to get him home. If he can do that, the whole trip will be worth it. Cooper can’t get the visual of the wedding ring out of his head. There must be someone out there with a matching ring, wondering what happened to their spouse. He’s determined to track them down. The group can’t take the body down the mountain. These kinds of peaks are so dangerous that mountaineers must keep their gear to an absolute mini- mum so there’s no wasted energy. The best they can do is document the coor- dinates, contact the family and leave the excavation to a trained rescue team. As soon as he gets a cell signal, Coo- per connects with his wife and gives her William Stampfl’s name and address. He eventually gets contact information for someone named Joseph Stampfl, who he believes is his son. Cooper pauses. How do you even start a con- versation like this? Will the person on the other end of the phone be grateful? Devastated? Both? In his hotel room in Peru, he works up the courage to call Joseph Stampfl. 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. Now he has some time 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. When he first listens to Cooper’s voice- mail, Joseph Stampfl thinks it’s a scam. readersdigest.com.au 89 Drama in Real Life “I’M SURE THIS IS A SHOCK, BUT I FOUND YOUR DAD.”