Deep in the rocky mountains of the Sierra Nevada in California, the artist was lost in a Blizzard.

It was a freak snowstorm in the middle of the summer of 1945 – rolling in on Aug. 2, just days before the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Giichi Matsumura had only set out to paint. He had joined a group of fishermen on an expedition into the mountains, an escape from the Manzanar internment camp 220 miles north of Los Angeles where, like thousands of other Japanese Americans, they had spent more than three years incarcerated during the war.

But Matsumura would be trapped out there, too. He split from the group – and then the blizzard hit. The fishermen took shelter in a cave. Matsumura disappeared.

He was dead by the time a pair of hikers found him weeks later near a lake in a rocky wasteland. More than 10,000 feet above sea level, near the Mount Williamson summit, Matsumura’s body was so unreachable that he had to be buried beneath jagged slabs of rock at the spot he was found, where not even his family could get to him.

Over the next seven-plus decades, the remote burial site would be lost to time – until finally, a pair of hikers stumbled on Matsumura’s body yet again.

On Friday, the Manzanar National Historic Site and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office revealed that the skeleton the hikers found in October near Mount Williamson belongs to the former Japanese American prisoner – a discovery that preservation officials said they hoped would offer closure to Matsumura’s descendants who have never been able to visit his grave. Near the lake where Matsumura died, the hikers saw a bone jutting out from beneath a rock. They found a full skeleton resting on its back, its arms crossed over its chest, as they told the Associated Press at the time. The remains were airlifted to the Inyo County Coroner for DNA testing, the results of which confirmed Matsumura’s identity this month.

Bernadette Johnson, the National Park Service’s superintendent of the Manzanar National Historic Site, said that descendants of Matsumura and those incarcerated at the camp had been telling the story of Matsumura’s loss for the last 74 years – with some never believing they could find his resting place.

“We have always wanted to respect his family’s privacy for the tragedy they endured near the end of their three year incarceration, being so close to leaving camp,” Johnson said in a statement. “After 74 years, we were quite shocked when we heard about a hiker finding his grave a few months ago, and we hope that his family will have some closure and peace now that a positive identification has been made by the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office.”

The Manzanar camp opened in 1942, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Japanese Americans a national security threat in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, forcibly relocating more than 110,000 Japanese Americans. Surrounded by mountains and arid desert, the camp was inescapable even without the barbed wire and armed guards.

But still, Bruce Embrey, co-chair of the Manzanar Committee, told The Washington Post on Monday that some detainees at the camp managed to indulge in small getaways into the mountains – often risking their lives to do so.

“There were people sneaking out under the barbed wire, dodging the search lights, and they could have been killed – yet they chose to do that to go fishing,” said Embrey, whose mother was incarcerated at Manzanar and spearheaded the national historic site, as well as founded the Manzanar Committee. “It’s such a powerful image to me. Here are people who have been deprived of everything by their government, and they’re just trying to live a normal life, recapture some of their humanity.”

That’s what Embrey said he believes Matsumura was doing when he died trying to paint.

“It’s a powerful reminder of the impact of government policies on families’ lives,” he said.

By 1945, when Matsumura went on his trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains with the fishermen, the government had lifted the exclusion order on the West Coast and allowed Japanese Americans to come and go from the Manzanar camp. But that didn’t necessarily mean they could go home, Embrey said. Like many Japanese Americans, Matsumura’s family had no home and no livelihood waiting for them hundreds of miles away in Santa Monica, Calif., their hometown. And so according to the National Park Service, they had no choice but to continue living at the camp.

Kazue Matsumura, who was 10 when her father disappeared in the mountains, recounted in a 2018 oral history the terror of losing him just months before families were scheduled to evacuate the camp, according to the Park Service. She remembered that her mother, Ito, stopped eating. Her mother’s black hair, all of a sudden, “turned white when we couldn’t find him,” Kazue said.

Friends and family organized search parties for the missing father with the permission of the War Relocation Authority, according to the Park Service, but he didn’t surface until Sept. 3, 1945, when the two hikers found his corpse.

On Sept. 6, 1945, Manzanar Project Director Ralph P. Merritt allowed a party of six to ascend into the mountains to bury Matsumura, according to the Park Service. Ito offered a white sheet to cover him. The Buddhist Church held a funeral for him at the camp, without his body.

“They had to leave him there,” Kazue said. “. . . That was very hard, because it’s so high and we can’t get up there. And to this day, it seems like he’s not passed away. It seems like he’s gone someplace, because I didn’t see his body.”

In November 1945, the federal government shut down the camp, gave detainees $25 and a bus ticket, and sent them on their way. Ito Matsumura returned to Santa Monica as the single parent of four children, working two or three jobs to support them, Kazue said.

Ito died at the age of 102 years old in 2005, and Kazue died in 2018 at the age of 83 years, and not reaching his father’s grave.

Matsumura’s last child, Masaru, died last summer, the AP reported in October.

But his grandchild, Wayne Matsumura, told the AP then that if the remains near Mount Williamson turned out to be Giichi Matsumura, he would know exactly what to do: His body would be moved to the Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica, to be buried next to his wife.