Originally published in The Bee on Nov. 13, 2005.

Young William Gamber's seven-month career as a military pilot ended on a stormy November day in 1942 on a mountain range known for fierce, capricious weather.

A blizzard probably howled at the 13,691-foot Sierra Nevada peak where his training flight crashed, according to weather reports on Nov. 18, 1942. The 23-year-old Ohio native and all three Army cadets aboard died in a land of glaciers.

The Sierra high country, sometimes a cruel and stark contrast to the rest of sunny California, holds its secrets close. The 400-mile mountain range, the nation's longest, has hidden hundreds of bodies from the wreckage over decades of air crashes.

The Sierra has more than a thousand small glaciers and thousands more lakes where planes might be lost -- some maybe forever.

It was 63 years before ice climbers found the frozen body from Gamber's flight. The body was 80% lodged in the small glacier on Mount Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park.

His identity is a mystery that the military says it probably will solve in the coming months.

But other mysteries remain. From the 1942 crash reports, the plane seemed 200 miles off course. How did it wind up on a desolate mountaintop so far from its destination?

Such questions often swirl around plane crashes in the Sierra, experts say.

"That mountain range has many remote crash sites that haven't been found or explained," says aviation author Don Jordan, who has been researching Sierra air crashes for many years. "The weather over those mountains gets very dangerous, very quickly."

There's no telling how many bodies wait to be discovered. Could the other three airmen in the flight still be frozen in the glacier?

After the spring thaw next year, some people may decide to scale Mendel and look in the rock-strewn glacier for the bodies or the plane wreck.

That makes the National Park Service nervous about the prospect of the mountain being overrun with searchers.

Perhaps a bigger concern: People without backcountry experience might get stranded or injured.

The unforgiving climb to Mendel is a long way from any beaten path, another reason to respect the Sierra. Search-and-rescue operations can cost many thousands of dollars.

For that reason, park spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet says, "Our law enforcement branch may close down the glacier next year as the site of an ongoing investigation."

Hanford resident Ryan Couch hopes the glacier is accessible next year. Couch says he is a former Marine with mountain assault training, and he is organizing an expedition to find them next year.

"I was always taught you never leave a soldier behind," says Couch, 29, who says he now is a correctional officer at a substance abuse treatment facility in Corcoran. "I'm going to get together an expedition and find those soldiers up there."

He says he called the Hawaii headquarters of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies the remains of soldiers, and was told Mendel has been added to an already lengthy list of sites to search for remains.

Military officials confirm it may be many years before they can return to Mendel.

"We have 88,000 cases in many parts of the world," says Staff Sgt. Erica Ruthman of the accounting command. "This case is very important, but all of our cases are very important."

Finding the frozen airman last month was not easy for the ice climbers, park service officials say. The body was mostly buried in the ice and was not readily apparent.

"Mendel has a rock glacier," says spokeswoman Picavet. "That means there are a lot of large rocks in it. Even up close, the ice climbers weren't sure it was a human body or part of the rocks."

The park service warns that nobody should be climbing the glacier in search of plane parts or souvenirs.

"It's a federal offense to take a rock out of a national park," Picavet says, "much less the frozen body of a missing airman."

Couch says he won't remove anything. He says he will alert authorities to whatever he finds.

His trek will be a difficult challenge. The high-elevation hike from Florence Lake on the western Sierra would be about 20 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, then a steep climb off trail.

The approach from the eastern Sierra is shorter, but steeper. Mountain guide S.P. Parker, who is writing a book about ice climbing, says it is very strenuous even for a seasoned hiker.

He has climbed the glacier many times in recent years, and he skied the area in spring.

"I don't think you need to worry about weekend hikers or casual adventurers coming up here," Parker says. "You gain 5,000 feet on this hike, and there is no trail.

"If this plane had been loaded with drugs or money, you might think a lot of people would go search up there. But not for frozen bodies. It's too remote, too difficult."

The peak, named after Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, is among a group of features near the crest named after evolutionists, such as Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. The taller Mount Darwin and its glacier are next to Mendel.

The popular Pacific Crest Trail passes at a distance below the peaks through primitive Evolution Valley. It is about 75 miles east of Fresno, as the crow flies.

Between Sequoia National Park and Yosemite National Park, more than 1,500 small glaciers are scattered in north-facing cirques -- bowls gouged during the ice age near the top of mountains. They form the southernmost belt of glaciers in the United States.

"They're pocket glaciers," says geology professor John Wakabayashi of California State University, Fresno. "They are technically glaciers, but they are nothing like the large ones you would see in the Cascades or Alaska."

Glaciers, the largest reservoir of fresh water in the world, are rivers of ice that accumulate over many centuries. In the ice age, they were slow-motion battering rams, carving and polishing entire landscapes of granite in the Sierra.

The Sierra's glaciers are not only small, but relatively young. The older glaciers melted here several thousand years ago, and the new glaciers began forming about 600 to 800 years ago, scientists say.

The Alaskan glaciers, by contrast, are thousands of years old and often many miles in length.

The tiny Mendel glacier is about a half-mile wide and slowly inching down the mountain, says guide and author Doug Robinson.

The ice above Mendel glacier is well-known and well-traveled among those in the ice climbing community. It is home to a route called Ice Nine, a breathtaking chute of vertical ice above the glacier.

Ice Nine is the fictitious chemical substance in the Kurt Vonnegut novel "Cat's Cradle." In the Vonnegut novel, the chemical will freeze anything with a temperature of less than 237.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ice Nine on Mount Mendel is the toughest ice climb in the Sierra, Robinson says. He is regarded as one of the first people to climb it, accomplishing the feat in 1976.

From his ice-climbing experience, Robinson believes a shrinking Mendel glacier is the big reason the frozen body appeared.