Peggy LeMaitre no longer holds out hope that her husband is alive five weeks -- and multiple searches -- after he vanished on Alaska's Mount Marathon during a popular extreme race.

"The only hope I have is that they will find him and bring him home, so we can put him to rest," the Anchorage woman said.

Her husband of 43 years, Michael LeMaitre, was last seen on July 4, about 200 feet from the top of Mount Marathon in Seward, south of Anchorage. The 65-year-old was competing as a rookie in the 85th running of the annual race on the steep 3,022-foot-high mountain.

Family and friends have coped by doing what they could, Peggy LeMaitre said. A group of doctors who work with her daughter, Michelle Lynn, a nurse, arranged to have a cadaver dog flown up from Oregon. A friend of the family paid for helicopter search time. Another friend took high-resolution photos of the mountain, studying them for hours on his computer.