Two daughters of an 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 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas.
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.
Photo: AFP / Gentileza Familia Vieiro y Familia Rabal
Last month, 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 6,100m — close to the summit of the 6,600m 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,” said Azul Vieiro, who was just four years old when her father died. “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.
Photo: AFP
“Spiritually, it felt like a greeting, like: ‘I’m still here, I exist. You’re not alone,’” Azul Vieiro said.
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,” she said. “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.”
Photographs taken from other film found inside the same backpack by Cavallaro a year earlier showed that Guillermo 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,” said Cavallaro, who lives at the foot of Tupungato in the city of the same name. “What they [Guillermo Vieiro and Rabal] accomplished has real historical value in Argentine and international mountaineering.”
The bodies of Guillermo Vieiro and Rabal were recovered shortly after they died.
Azul Vieiro and her sister said they would donate their father’s belongings in an attempt to share a “piece of Argentine mountaineering history” with others.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
RSS