A Backpack Lost in a Glacier for 60 Years Finds Its Way Home
An 86-year-old mountaineer has been reunited with his backpack and climbing gear after the kit emerged from a melting glacier in Austria's Tyrol region, more than six decades after he left it behind on the ice. The Guardian
In July 2026, a hiker on the Sulztalferner glacier discovered the cache at an altitude of 2,955 metres (9,700 feet). The items, which date from the 1950s or 1960s, included an ice axe, a camera, and a pipe. Austrian police launched an investigation and, working from heavily frayed documents found inside the backpack, identified the owner by name and tracked him down.
The story behind the equipment dates to August 1963. The man, then in his early twenties, had been crossing the glacier with friends when he fell into a crevasse — a deep crack in glacial ice. His companions, who were holding a rope, pulled him free. Police said that during the rescue he removed his backpack and threw it into the crevasse to reduce his weight. The pack then vanished into the ice for over sixty years.
Police did not publicly name the man. They said he was too ill to collect the items in person, and the equipment was returned to him through his son.
The recovery is the latest in a series of archaeological and historical finds emerging from retreating Alpine glaciers as rising temperatures accelerate ice loss across the range. In 1991, two German hikers found the 5,300-year-old mummified body of a hunter, known as Ötzi the Iceman, in the Ötztal Alps close to Italy's border with Austria. That body is now on display at a museum in Bolzano. In 2015, a barracks where Italian troops had sheltered while fighting the Austro-Hungarian army during the White War of the First World War was discovered on Mount Scorluzzo, a peak overlooking the Stelvio Pass.
These discoveries span vastly different eras, yet they share a single enabling condition: glaciers that preserved their contents for decades, centuries, or millennia are now yielding them up as they thin and retreat. The Sulztalferner, like Alpine glaciers broadly, has been losing mass at an accelerating rate. Objects once sealed deep in the ice are surfacing at the top or becoming exposed at the edges of the glacier as it contracts.
For glaciologists — scientists who study glaciers and ice — and archaeologists, each find carries dual significance. The objects themselves, whether a 5,000-year-old mummy or a mid-century ice axe, offer tangible links to specific moments in human history. But the frequency and conditions of these discoveries also serve as informal indicators of the pace of glacial retreat. A backpack discarded in 1963 sat undisturbed through more than six decades of ice dynamics before the glacier released it, a timeline that reflects both the glacier's long-term stability in the mid-to-late twentieth century and its more recent, rapid loss of volume.
The broader context here is one of accelerating change across the Alpine cryosphere — the frozen-water portion of the Earth's surface. Glaciers in the Tyrol region, as across the Eastern Alps, have experienced some of the steepest mass-loss rates in Europe. The objects emerging from the ice range from the mundane to the historically momentous, but the mechanism producing each find is the same: warmer temperatures, reduced winter snowfall, and prolonged summer melt seasons are stripping away ice layers that had been stable for generations or longer.
For the mountaineer at the centre of this particular story, the return of a backpack he jettisoned in a crevasse at the age of twenty-three is a personal echo of a moment of survival. For those monitoring the Alps, it is another data point in a pattern of retreat that continues to expose the past as it erases the ice.
