Rangers have recovered the body of a woman who failed to return from a ski tour at Mount Rainier National Park/Rebecca Latson file
Roughly three weeks after she disappeared during a ski outing above Paradise at Mount Rainier National Park, rangers have recovered the woman's body.
While the body of the unidentified woman was spotted the day after she set out on her ski tour, at the bottom of Moraine Falls on Pebble Creek about a mile up the mountain from Paradise, spring snow conditions made it too dangerous to immediately recover it, park staff said.
"The area was surrounded by a large, unstable snow moat that was subject to rock and ice fall, which posed too high of an immediate risk to recovery teams," a park release said.
Last Saturday rangers were able to recover the body using traditional crevasse rescue methods during a period of favorable weather. The park’s contract helicopter transported the body to Kautz Creek Helibase for evaluation by the Pierce County Medical Examiner.
Park rangers had initiated a search May 19 in response to a report of an overdue skier. The skier was last heard from May 18, before setting out to ski tour above Paradise. A ground team of two rangers searched Deadhorse Creek Basin, Panorama Face, and Alta Vista, looking for tracks over the Nisqually drainage. A team of two climbing rangers from Camp Muir looked over the Nisqually and Paradise glaciers and searched the Muir Snowfield to Pebble Creek and Panorama Point. A team of two volunteers conducted a visual search of the Nisqually drainage.
On May 19 the park’s contract helicopter conducted a reconnaissance flight during a window of favorable weather and located an unresponsive person who appeared to have fallen approximately 200 feet to the base of the waterfall.
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