Closure for mountaineer as remains of friends lost in Himalayas 30 years ago found 
 
 Published on 10 December, 2018 
 
 A Kirk official who spent weeks searching for two friends who disappeared in the Himalayas more than 30 years ago has spoken of his relief after their bodies were finally found. Steve Aisthorpe, 55, was with Kristinn Rúnarsson and Þorsteinn Guðjónsson on an expedition to Pumori on the Nepal-Tibet border when he fell ill partway through the expedition and told his friends to go on without him. Their remains were discovered last month by an American mountaineer at the snout of the glacier below the climb route which suggests they fell down the face, into the crevasse at its base. The bodies were brought back to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, by a group of local climbers and a cremation service was attended by relatives of the men who took their ashes home to Iceland. Photograph: Steve Aisthorpe/PA 
 
 Aisthorpe, a mission development worker for the Church of Scotland, said: “The discovery of the remains of Þorsteinn and Kristinn after so many years have inevitably brought many emotions to the surface for all who knew and loved these wonderful guys.” 
 
 The bodies were brought back to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, by a group of local climbers. “I plan to go to Reykjavík in Iceland to meet their families soon and pay my respects.” 
 
 Kristinn Rúnarsson by a lone red tent at an Pumori expedition camp. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Aisthorpe, now 55, fell ill part of the way through the expedition. Recalling the tragic episode, Mr Aisthorpe, authorof The Invisible Church, said: “I’ve never felt as alone as the day I arrived back at our high camp. “As I worked my way upwards, I desperately hoped that Kristinn and Torsteinn had descended safely and were now lying in their sleeping bags in the tiny red tent camp. “As it came into view, I called out at the top of my voice - my calls echoed from the rocks and ice before fading. Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The silence was palpable’: the empty tent belonging to the missing mountaineers. “It was then that my guts started to twist and a cold sweat began.” 
 
 Steve Aisthorpe. Mr Aisthorpe said he summoned help and a helicopter search was finally launched five days after the men were last seen. “A couple of weeks later I left the area, convinced that Kristinn and Torsteinn must have fallen somewhere high on the face, and their remains swallowed by the cavernous crevasse below. His son, also called Kristinn, is the spitting image of his father and was part of the party that went to Kathmandu for the cremation service. Aisthorpe said that Rúnarsson’s fiancee was pregnant with his child at the time of the tragedy and he now has a son who is 30 years old. UMN director Joel Hafvenstein said it would have been “impossible” for the charity and its local partners to help thousands of people if it wasn’t for the Kirk’s Let Us Build a House campaign.
– The bodies of those who succumb to the Himalayan mountains likely stay on the slopes forever—it's often too difficult, dangerous, and costly to retrieve them. That fact didn't stop Steve Aisthorpe of Scotland from his recent mission on the Nepal-Tibet border: to get "closure" on the fate of Kristinn Runarsson and Thorsteinn Gudjonsson, friends and fellow climbers who vanished during a 1988 expedition with him. Aisthorpe, who the Guardian notes found out just a few weeks ago his friends' bodies had been seen at the end of a glacier on Pumori mountain, recalls on the Church of Scotland's website how his group started as four climbers in October of that year, though one of the men fell ill early on and dropped out. Aisthorpe, then 26, came down with the flu, and so he climbed back down on Oct. 16, 1988, to seek medical attention. When Aisthorpe realized he was in no condition to attempt the climb, he sent a message back to Runarsson and Gudjonsson, both 27 and from Iceland: "Feel free" to go for the summit without him. The two men were never seen alive again after Oct. 18. When Aisthorpe finally felt well enough to head back to the last camp where he'd left his friends, "my calls echoed from the rocks and ice before fading. … the silence was palpable." Fast-forward 30 years, when an American climber spotted their bodies just last month; a group of local climbers brought the remains down. Among those at the cremation ceremony in Kathmandu for the men was Runarsson’s 30-year-old son; Runarsson’s fiancee had been pregnant when the father of her child was lost to Pumori. More on their tale here. (Two highly experienced climbers died on El Capitan over the summer.)