Yet somehow, Waterman overlooked a last, crucial detail in planning his own death. On his way to Franconia Notch that February morning, he mailed letters to several friends, including Dunn, Mayer, and Young, assuming that at least one of them would immediately visit Laura, the only person who knew where he had gone, and then climb Lafayette to retrieve his body. The problem was, none of those friends were at home when the letters arrived.

After three days, Laura couldn't stand it anymore, and she snowshoed into East Corinth to find a telephone.

"It was late in the morning when I got the call," Rebecca Oreskes says. "I couldn't get ahold of any of Guy's friends. All those guys who live up here and work in Boston. There was a big storm forecast for the next day. I told Laura, 'We can try to get a helicopter to look today, because we may not find him tomorrow.' She said, 'No, I don't think we want that.' But in the end, we all decided we had to call. Nobody wanted some hiker to stumble on him three weeks later."

Shortly after noon, Fish and Game, the agency responsible for all rescue and recovery missions within the state, contacted the New Hampshire National Guard in Concord, the nearest place a helicopter was available on short notice. A Blackhawk helicopter was dispatched at 12:30 p.m. and arrived at Franconia Ridge at about 2:15. The helicopter flew until about 4:00, at which point it had to return to the nearby Laconia airport to refuel. The search was suspended for the night. "The crew probably flew over him several times," says Fish and Game Sergeant Doug Gralenski, "but with the rime ice and dull clothing, he wasn't found."

Meanwhile, Oreskes agonized about her decision to call in a helicopter. "Helicopters!" she groans. "If you knew Guy, it would have confirmed exactly what he felt, which is that none of us was listening."

Concerned about the approaching storm, Gralenski decided to postpone a ground search until Saturday. But later that afternoon, Guy's inner circle—Mayer, Dunn, and Young; another longtime friend, Jon Martinson; and Mike Pelchat, the head of Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue—asked Gralenski if they could attempt a private retrieval the next day. "I had no problem with it," Gralenski says.

The party of five men and one dog arrived at the summit around noon on Friday, February 11. "It was snowing and blowing about 40, and visibility was under a hundred feet," Pelchat recalls. "All things considered, not so bad." The group fanned out and began a slow march down the ridge toward the subpeak called North Lafayette. Pelchat was 500 feet north of the summit when he noticed an oddly straight piece of rime ice standing five feet off the trail. It turned out to be an ancient wooden ice ax inscribed with the initials A.T.W. Guy was on his side next to it, his back against an outcropping of rock, his crampons still strapped to his boots. One overmitt was off; otherwise, there was nothing to suggest that he'd done anything other than plant his father's ax, lie down, and die.

Standing in the swirling snow, the men embraced one another and the frozen form of their friend. Then they put him in a litter and began the long process of sliding him down the mountain. "It's strenuous work, but he wasn't a big man," Pelchat says."Really, I think we all liked the idea of him taking us on one last hike."