A backpack lost in a glacier crevasse in 1963 has made its way back to its owner’s family in Austria’s Tyrol region.

Austrian authorities said an 86-year-old hiker was reunited with belongings he abandoned during a mountaineering emergency more than 60 years ago, after melting glacial ice exposed the items last month.

A hiker found the backpack, an ice axe, a camera and a pipe on the Sulztalferner glacier at an altitude of 9,700 feet, prompting a police investigation.

“A barely legible name was eventually found in the badly weathered document folder. Further research led to the identification of the former owner. The now 86-year-old confirmed that the equipment was indeed his,” Tyrol state police said.

Police said the owner left the items on the glacier on Aug. 4, 1963, when he and some friends went on a high-altitude hike in the Sulztalferner glacier area.

During the crossing, he fell into a crevasse. Because the group was roped together, his friends held him and freed him using prusik loops. To reduce his weight, he took off his backpack and threw it into the crevasse.

More than six decades later, the equipment was returned to the man’s family. He could not travel to collect it for health reasons, so a mountain police officer handed the items to his son on Aug. 25.

The son told officers that the story of the lost backpack held great significance in the family, because if the man had not survived, his descendants would not have been there to collect his belongings.

The Tyrol region has also yielded older items and remains from melting glacial ice over time. Researchers have found coins, weapons, diaries, lanterns, canned food, bottles, clothes, straw beds and the remains of soldiers in uniform who were stationed in the region during the First World War.

Many of those bodies and artifacts were found in military barracks on Mount Scorluzzo, built inside a cave overlooking the Stelvio Pass in northern Italy near the Swiss border. Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic and The Guardian detailed the findings, and experts told The Guardian that most of the exhumed soldiers likely died from the frigid conditions, not in combat.

The barracks sheltered Italian soldiers fighting Austro-Hungarian forces in the White War, a series of battles across the Alps between 1915 and 1918. The barracks were known to exist, but The Guardian reported in 2021 that the site was only excavated in 2015, once the glacier had melted enough.

Before that discovery, the oldest human remains found on a glacier were identified after two German hikers accidentally found the body of a 5,300-year-old hunter-gatherer near the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. Known as Ötzi the Iceman, he is on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

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