Maybe I’m picturing it all wrong? I thought it was a 70 degree angle. The earlier description led me to believe the body would remain where it fell.
They had to go in to attempt a rescue, even though the inside opinion was he died yesterday as a result of the fall (or hypothermia did it last night). The preliminary evidence from yesterday inferred a recovery, but rescue officials wouldn’t admit to that. That’s probably why the bigger helicopter was flown in from Whidbey Island NAS today. That chopper found the body on the second pass. Details haven’t come out yet but it appears they were able to locate the body in short order and it was possible to secure it and fly it out.
Leaving the body is always an option, but it’s a last resort option. Rescuers will try to remove a body even at the risk of their own lives because you always try to bring them home to their loved ones. At the same time, the Mount St. Helens crater contains an active and growing glacier (Crater Glacier). It was quite possible that no recovery might mean the body would become part of the glacier in due course. Had that occurred, recovery would be impossible until the body emerged at the mouth of the glacier, perhaps 20 years from now. (About five or six years ago, a body emerged from one of the glaciers atop Mount Adams, north of Mt. Hood and due east from Mount St. Helens. The story goes that a climber disappeared about 25-30 years before then and was never found. That is, until the body appeared.)
The slope where the cornice broke was 70 degrees, but the body would have eventually come to rest somewhere that wasn’t so steep, at least according to reports. But these rescuers are trained to be able to get people off vertical cliffs, so if the weather cooperates most extractions are possible. In this case it doesn’t sound like it was necessary.
Search on “High Angle Rescue” for some more details.