Vanished duo found years later in glacier

On the slopes of Tibet’s Shishapangma — the world’s 14th-tallest peak, a glacial mountain that rises some 26,000 feet above the sea — a pair of European climbers stumbled upon the remains of a disaster that struck 16 years earlier. Locked under a layer of blue ice for more than a decade, but exposed in an early melt brought about by hotter than average weather, was another pair of climbers.

Hikers David Goettler and Ueli Steck have, in all likelihood, found the resting place of David Bridges and Alex Lowe. The latter pair vanished in a massive avalanche that left the mountaineering community reeling — as USA Today reported at the time of the catastrophe in October 1999, Bridges and Lowe were “two of the best.”

Goettler and Steck, who found the bodies in late April, reported seeing the remains of what are believed to be Bridges and Lowe wearing yellow mountaineering boots and North Face backpacks.

To Conrad Anker — a climber who survived the onrushing snow that claimed Lowe, his closest friend — such a description leaves little room for question. After a phone call with Goettler, Anker “concluded that the two were undoubtedly David Bridges and Alex Lowe,” according to the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by Jennifer Lowe-Anker, who was married to Lowe at the time of the avalanche.

“After sixteen-and-a-half years, this brings closure and relief for me and Jenni and for our family,” said Anker.

Both Bridges, 29, and Lowe, 40, were master climbers: Bridges, a champion paraglider in addition to a mountaineer, was acting as the expedition’s cameraman and videographer at the time of the avalanche and had led a successful expedition to the top of K2 at 23.

To accomplished climbers, Shishapangma is a socalled easy mountain — in the sense that there are no sheer vertical walls to scale.

Shishapangma does, however, have a history of avalanches.

For every 100 successful summits there have been about 8 deaths.