A backpack that spent more than six decades entombed in an Austrian glacier has been returned to the 86-year-old climber who left it behind, after a hiker spotted it emerging from the melting ice last month.
The man was crossing the Sulztalferner glacier in Austria's western Tyrol region in August 1963 when he fell into a crevasse. He was roped to companions who pulled him free, but the group left his pack behind in the ice, according to CNN. The pack stayed hidden for the 63 years that followed.
A hiker found it resting on the surface of the glacier, at nearly 3,000 meters above sea level, and alerted Tyrol police. Inside, officers found an ice axe, a camera, a whistle and a weathered document folder — preserved well enough in the cold that investigators could still make out the owner's name on the papers and track him down.
The man, now in poor health, was unable to travel to collect his belongings himself; his son received them instead, and the family expressed its gratitude to police for the return, according to a statement from Tyrol authorities.
The find fits a pattern that has become increasingly familiar across the Alps. Just over a week earlier, searchers identified the remains of two Belgian mountaineers who vanished on Switzerland's Trift glacier in 1992, after the retreating ice exposed their bodies, ITV News reported. Downed aircraft, wartime debris and the remains of climbers missing since the 1940s have all resurfaced from Alpine ice in recent years, as glaciers that once seemed permanent shrink at record pace — Swiss glaciers alone lost roughly a tenth of their total volume between 2022 and 2023.
For now, the backpack itself will likely end up as a keepsake rather than evidence of anything more than one bad afternoon six decades ago — a small, personal artifact of a mountain that is giving up its secrets faster than anyone expected.