Jim Weinman was a skilled mountaineer and extreme adventure who grew up in Clifton Park and went missing at age 32 on a solo ice climb in the Andes Mountains on June 3, 2000. His remains were recovered two decades later after global warming accelerated melting of the mountain’s glacier. The remains were returned to the family by Chilean authorities last year.
Linda and Bob Weinman look at a photo of her son and his brother, Jim Weinman, who died at 32 in 2000 while on an ice climbing ascent in the Andes Mountains.
Linda Weinman, 79, keeps urns of her son Jim and husband Jim’s ashes along with photos and mementos in a memorial shrine in her living room in Malta.
Bob Weinman and his mother, Linda, look over a scrapbook of photos and newspaper clippings after Jim Weinman disappeared on June 3, 2000, on Cerro San Francisco in the Andes Mountains near Santiago, Chile, on a mountain that had defeated him on three previous unsuccessful attempts.
Linda Weinman with her late husband, Jim Weinman, her late son Jim and son, Bob, 55, of Queensbury in an undated photo.
MALTA — The mountains claimed the life of Jim Weinman and the mountains eventually returned him.
His family’s agonizing ordeal began with frantic search parties in the early days after Weinman vanished June 3, 2000, without a trace on a solo ice-climbing expedition in the Andes Mountains of Chile.
Their open-ended grief stretched across two decades before the missing person case was finally closed when the body was recovered because of glacial melt accelerated by global warming. Coming to terms with Weinman’s loss was far more complicated.
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Related: Missing on the mountain
Ice climbing was where the mountaineer and extreme adventurer, a 1985 Shenendehowa High School graduate, felt closest to God and began to ascertain his place in a mysterious universe.
Above the clouds, on death-defying vertical faces of ice and rock — each swing of the ice tool and toe kick a calculated risk that required precise training and intense concentration — was where Weinman had always been able to lift himself out of debilitating depression.
“Mountain climbing was his medicine,” said his brother, Bob Weinman, 55, of Queensbury. He is 18 months younger than Jim, who was his best friend and mountain climbing partner.
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Raised in Clifton Park, the thrill-seeking brothers moved to the Pacific Northwest after college in the late 1980s and spent time in Seattle and Portland before settling in Hood River, Ore.
“Their dad and I always told them it was a big, wide world out there and they should explore it,” said their mother, Linda Weinman, 79, a retired marketing director for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, who lives in a senior community in Malta. Her husband, Jim Weinman, died last year.
The couple’s footloose sons cobbled together odd jobs out West, earning enough money to indulge their twin passions: windsurfing in the Columbia River Gorge and ascents of Mount Rainier and Mount Hood — before they........