Body of trainee guide Patrice Hyvert who went missing in 1982, aged 23, has been found by two mountain-climbers

When Patrice Hyvert, a French trainee mountain guide, set out on a solitary climb of the Nant Blanc face he was taking advantage of a perfect mountaineering season on the Mont Blanc range.

But on that fateful day of 1 March 1982, the weather changed abruptly in the afternoon when a snowstorm descended and the 23-year-old climber never returned.

His father, Gérard, gave up hope after days of rescue searches and mourned his son's loss. But the chance discovery of Hyvert's body last Thursday on the Talèfre glacier at an altitude of 2,600 metres, 32 years after he was reported missing, means his family will have to grieve all over again.

"We were alerted by a climber that he had found a body on the glacier," Captain Patrick Ribes of the Chamonix gendarmerie rescue service told the Guardian. He sent two gendarmes to the glacier where Hyvert's frozen body was lying on the surface. "We identified him straight away," said Ribes. "He still had his ID papers on him, and all his equipment, including his skis."

Gérard Hyvert, now 82, described it as a body blow like a "second death" when two gendarmes and an official from the local mayor's office came to his door with the news that his son's body had been found.

"I can't say that it came as a relief. I would have preferred him to have stayed up there," he told Le Parisien newspaper. Hyvert, who alerted rescue services to the fact that his son had gone missing, had presumed he was "under a rock" somewhere on the mountain face.

Patrice Hyvert had intended to scale Nant Blanc then ski back down the Couturier corridor. Another experienced mountaineer, Jean-Marc Boivin, set out at the same time and headed for the northern face of the Grands Charmoz in the Mont Blanc range.

Boivin was also caught in the winter storms and was only evacuated by rescue helicopter two days later after the weather cleared. He phoned Hyvert senior and described the dangerous weather conditions. Boivin himself was fatally injured when jumping from the world's highest waterfall in Venezuela in 1990.

Patrice Hyvert's father presumes his son reached the summit of Nant Blanc despite the bad weather, and had decided to return down the other side, on the Whymper corridor.

Hyvert was training to be a mountain guide at France's ENSA national ski and mountaineering school in Chamonix, where officials confirmed that he was registered although he never completed his training.

A memorial service is being arranged for 17 July in Chamonix, after which Hyvert's ashes will be scattered on the glacier where he was found.

His father said: "Mountains were his passion. I thought I would be dead before they found him."