I'm surprised also (about the cleanup). I wasn't living on the Big Island when it happened, and the local papers don't have online archives.
The clearest statement I could find was from 2001.
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2001/05/02/news/story14.html
As I'm sure you know, the Navy has a large presence in Hawai'i. The Army has a training area that would be about 3 hours from the crash site (the road is very rough, but the distance isn't great). The article reports that civilian emergency workers recovered the body, and that surprised me.
And then it was also surprising that in 2001 more of Lt. Wantz's remains were found at the site. This is surprising because the military has a large recovery and indentification operation on Oahu.
It's not a particularly hostile environment up there, although you have to be careful. As the article says, the weather was bad. There's potentially bad weather on Mauna Kea all the time, but there are predictably periods of good weather, and good times of day. Putting it another way, if somebody charged me with the task of combing that area for human remains, I'd ask for a couple of weeks, maybe a month at most, and I'd have enough good days to get the job done. Yesterday there were very strong winds at the site, but the air temperature was around 60. I could have been at the site another couple of hours, easily, before the clouds came in.
It's all surprising.
I've been all over Mauna Kea, and this site is typical -- rocks, cinder, sand, a few outcroppings of lava. I drove my old 4Runner to within 1.4 miles of the crash, and had to gain only about 600' elevation.
In other words, getting to the site wasn't a big deal. Given that, it's hard to see why a team of a couple of dozen soldiers wasn't sent there to finish the cleanup. I don't know what kind of equipment they (I don't even know who "they" were) used to get out the engine and perhaps what was left of the cockpit, the cameras, and so on. When you scar Mauna Kea with heavy equipment at that altitude, the scars remain for a long time. I didn't see anything like heavy equipment tracks around the site.
I think the site is close to the top operational altitude for helicopters, but maybe they managed to fly out what they wanted.
I'm standing near the tail section (the engine's gone), and the only other large section is what seems to be part of a wing. It just doesn't seem a very large job to me, and yet it wasn't done. So there must have been a reason.
The wreckage is a bit of a local landmark, because you can see it from some of the lower roads, but I doubt that's why it wasn't cleaned up. Certainly it's not doing any damage to anything, and that might be the reason -- just let it alone. The only degradable part I saw was one of the wheels, complete with tire.
The site is at about 19° 50.8' N, 155° 24.8' W. The news articles talk about "11,300'" but I had 2 GPS units with me, and both agreed (as does Google Earth) that it's more like 11,000'.
If you PM me with an email address, I'll get more images of the site to you.
