In a remarkable encounter with his own past, an Austrian mountaineer has recovered his long-lost backpack, sixty-three years after he fell into a deep alpine glacier.

The belongings remained perfectly preserved inside the frozen ice high in the Austrian Alps until recent thaw cycles exposed them. A passing trekker discovered the surprisingly intact rucksack last month and promptly alerted local mountain rescue teams.

The extraordinary reunion highlights both the incredible preserving power of deep ice and the alarming acceleration of glacial retreat across European mountain ranges.