Five other people remain missing in the same area....
Esther Dingley is the last name on the list of missing hikers in the Pyrenees and the Sierra de Guara. The trail of this 37 year old British woman vanished on the 22nd of November in Benasque and less than a month later (on the 19th of December), on the other side of the mountain range the same thing happened to the Aragonese lawyer
Andrés Funes, 61 years of age and resident of Huesca. Since then there has been no news of either of them, and the search operations had to be interrupted by the arrival of winter and heavy snowfall.
The cases of Esther and Andrés are not exceptional. In total, five hikers remain missing in the province of Huesca (Funes disappeared in the French valley of Aspe and it is the Gendarmerie that is handling the case), some of them since 2006. The police archives hold the files of German Reinhard Kulosa, Belgian François Dasnois, Danish Michel Nielsen and Spanish Ferrán Camps, who have never been heard of again, and now those of Dingley. The profile is that of a foreign hiker who was going alone, hence the difficulty in tracking them.
Their names appear in European police databases, from where they will not be released until they are found, "even if many years go by", the Guardia Civíl says. Those who have recently disappeared will be searched again in the spring, after the snow has melted, from where their trail has been lost, but other cases will not be pursued unless new clues are found.
"No hypothesis is ever ruled out, but if someone has gone into the mountains alone and disappeared, as long as there is no other information, an accident is assumed," according to the Guardia Civíl.
The search for Dingley ceased with the snowfalls of early December and that of Funes is also suspended, according to his family on Saturday, for the same reasons.
The oldest file, from 2006, is that of the German national Kulosa, a 44-year-old mountaineer. His last trace places him at the Marboré Lake (Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park), from where he made a phone call reporting a strong storm.
The disappearance of Françoise Dasnois, 48 years of age, in 2009, was widely publicized. Searches took weeks with ample deployments. She was hiking with her husband and son, turned around to go back to the village of Colungo alone, where they were staying, because she was tired, but did not arrive.
Another foreigner, the Dane Michel Nielsen, 65, was staying in a hotel in Benasque in 2010. He went on an excursion and left his belongings and his plane ticket there.
The only Spaniard is Ferrán Camps, 23, who camped in the Plan ibón and whose family reported him missing, also in 2010.
It can take months, years and even decades, but experience says that in the end the entrails of the mountain always end up returning the bodies. The body of Catherine Veron, a French university student, was found 18 years after she fell into a crevasse on the Aneto glacier. Another glacier, the Tempestades, kept the remains of 29-year-old mountaineer Joaquín López Valls for 47 years, between 1954 and 2001. He was trying to open a path on the Margalida peak when a whole block of rock gave way and dragged him to a rimaya (a gap between the rock and the ice). This is the longest known disappearance, which ended when some hikers found some remains (bones, a glove and a bag).
After three years, the same circumstances made it possible to find José Joaquín Ayete, a 14-year-old man from Zaragoza with physiological and communication problems, thanks to some clothes and some bones. He was 8 kilometres found from where he got lost.
When the ice melted, José María García Fernández, a 36 year old hiker from Zaragoza, was found dead, lost in the Bujaruelo valley in 2016 and discovered by a shepherd five months and 11 days later in an area outside the main tracking perimeter, far from the path.
Some disappearances also have a happy ending, such as that of the Frenchwoman Teresa Bordais, against all odds, as she survived after 11 days drinking water from a ravine and eating leaves and herbs. Time makes all the difference. It was June, winter did not impose its rules.
Cinco montañeros permanecen en la lista de desaparecidos de los últimos 15 años
