Into thin air

Aspen resident and accomplished mountaineer Fritz Stammberger left Aspen one day in 1975 and never returned.

It was an uncharacteristic twist in the life of a man who seemed to be uncommonly lucky. By the age of 35, Stammberger had gained a reputation for climbing peaks without oxygen, had traveled the world before landing in Aspen when he was 23, and had married a hostess from a television game show.

But when Stammberger said goodbye to his friends and wife in 1975 for a trip to Pakistan, he left his life in Aspen behind without warning. Theories on Stammberger’s disappearance range from a simple mountaineering accident to the belief that he was a spy killed fighting in Afghanistan.

Fritz Stammberger was born in Munich in 1940. Climbing was his passion from a young age, and when he was 18 he went to Switzerland to be apprenticed as a printer. He traveled the world, finally setting up his own print shop in Aspen.

Stammberger met Janice Pennington, a hostess on “The Price is Right,” when Pennington was visiting Aspen in 1973. The two were married, and when Stammberger decided to travel to Pakistan in the fall of 1975 he was vague about his itinerary.

The mountain where he was last seen, Tirich Mir, is the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush range of northern Pakistan. Stammberger’s friend and climbing partner Bil Dunaway says that Stammberger had tried to climb the mountain alone 10 years before, and had fallen on one of its steeper routes.

When Stammberger didn’t return from his trip in 1975, Dunaway and fellow Aspen resident George Vicenzi went to Pakistan to search for him. They found a knapsack that their friend had left behind in Parpish; they hiked to the mountain’s base camp but found no trace of Stammberger. Dunaway’s aerial search of the area from a helicopter owned by a German ambassador was also fruitless.

Just before setting off on his final trip, Stammberger came in to The Aspen Times several times to talk with reporter Mary Eshbaugh Hayes for a profile she was working on.

“I really had a feeling when I learned he had disappeared that he had disappeared on purpose,” Hayes says. Now a local historian, Hayes says she still believes Stammberger had something else on his mind when he came into The Aspen Times so many years ago.

“He kept saying, ‘People don’t know the real Fritz. We need to tell people about who I really am,'” she says.

Janice Pennington had her own theories about her former husband. In her 1993 book, “Husband, Lover, Spy,” Pennington spells out how she came to the conclusion that Stammberger died working for the mujahedeen, the Afghan guerrillas fighting the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Pennington believes that Stammberger was recruited by the CIA in 1974, to collect information and to help organize bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Dunaway isn’t quite as certain.

“No one know what happened to him,” he says. “In the back of my mind, I have a hard time believing it, but there are so many crevasses on flat, huge glaciers and so many avalanches. Maybe he went into Communist China to explore ” he had such a sense of romantic instinct. It’s hard for me to imagine him being dead because he was so strong, but the mountains are pretty strong themselves.”