After falling into an Austrian crevasse in 1963, 23-year-old Alfred Rothfischer had to drop his gear to survive. Accelerated glacial melt just brought it back.
A photo taken during the 1963 summit attempt (Photo: Courtesy of Tyrol State Police)
Published August 30, 2026 06:57AM
In August 1963, German climber Alfred Rothfischer, then 23, was returning from summiting Schrankogel—Austria’s second-highest peak in the Stubai Alps—when he fell into a crevasse. He was crossing a glacier, and it could have been a mountaineering disaster save for his quick thinking. He hucked his heavy backpack, lightening his load and steadying his feet.
He was safe; only his backpack was lost. That is, until 63 years later.
On July 16, 2026, a mountain guide leading a group across Sulztalferner Glacier discovered the backpack and its contents partially revealed in melting ice, Austrian officials with the Tyrol State Police said in a statement.
The weathered bag sat at an elevation of roughly 9,695 feet. Inside were an ice axe, a camera, a whistle, and a damaged folder with papers dating to the 1950s and 1960s. Police said they initially investigated whether the pack could be tied to an unreported accident from decades ago, but a closer inspection of the papers in the sack showed Rothfischer’s name faintly written, according to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung.
“When I entered the name into the search engine, a landline number in Bavaria appeared. I called it,” investigating police officer Gregor Gatt from the Neustift police station told Kronen Zeitung.
Now 86, Rothfischer recounted his harrowing tale over a phone call with Gatt. He was hiking with two climbing partners at the time of his accident, a three-man rope team, when he slipped and fell. He dangled about 24 feet above the crevasse before his friends helped him out. Rothfischer survived the fall with minimal injuries and reported the missing backpack with identification documents to local police, according to Kronen Zeitung.
On August 25, police returned the recovered equipment to Rothfischer’s son.
Sulztalferner, where Rothfischer dropped the pack, lost about 67 feet between 2024 and 2025 and has retreated 4,970 feet since 1923, the Austrian Alpine Club estimates. Those trends are consistent across Europe, too. A 2025 study published in the science journal Nature found that glaciers in the continent’s central part, including the Alps and the nearby Pyrenees, lost about 39 percent of their ice between 2000 and 2023.
The backpack is among the latest slew of weird items recovered from melting glaciers.
In July 2026, a hiker encountered human remains on Switzerland’s Trift Glacier that DNA testing later identified as two Belgian alpinists who disappeared in 1992, The Associated Press reported. In October 2025, hikers found a body that melted out of a glacier on Ober Gabelhorn, Switzerland. Authorities later determined it belonged to a climber who went missing in November 1994. And in July 2023, hikers came across the body of a climber uncovered in melting ice near the Matterhorn, also in Switzerland.
Melting ice has revealed more than just bodies, too. In August 2026, the wreckage of a 1968 crash melted out of the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, and a retreating glacier in Italy’s Stelvio National Park exposed a complete shelter built by WWI-era soldiers. Here, archaeologists later found beds, coins, clothing, and furnishings. Since 2010, search teams in Alaska have also found the remains of several plane crashes in melting glaciers, including the remnants of an aircraft with 52 people on board.
