LIMA, Peru – Searchers on Saturday found the bodies of two U.S. mountaineers who apparently plunged to their deaths off a ridge after ascending a glacier-capped 20,000-foot Peruvian peak, the rescue coordinator said.
“They did summit and they got into trouble on the way down,” said coordinator Ted Alexander. “What led to the fall, I cannot tell you now.”
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Gil Weiss, 29, and Ben Horne, 32, fell an estimated 1,000 feet off a ridge after reaching the west summit of Palcaraju in the Cordillera Blanca range in mid-July, he said.
“Unfortunately, they died whenever they fell because they had been there long in the snow,” he said from the nearby town of Huaraz, where he runs a guide business.
He said a private plane had helped the three-person search team piece together what might have happened. He said he would have a better idea of how the climbers died after examining photos taken by rescuers on-site.
Both Weiss, of Queens, N.Y., and Horne, of Annandale, Va., were experienced climbers. Weiss was a repeat visitor to the Cordillera Blanca while this trip was Horne’s first.
Both belong to the pullharder.org climbers’ collective and Horne wrote about the first, six-day leg of their trip on its blog, They did not have a satellite phone, Weiss’ sister Galit said.
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