For days, the mountain rescuers on the Hochkalter had been looking for a 24-year-old from Lower Saxony who had had an accident, with great effort and under the most adverse circumstances. Now, almost four weeks after he slid down from the ridge to the summit of the 2,607-metre mountain in wintry conditions, his body has been found almost by accident.
A police helicopter from neighboring Salzburg was on the move over the Berchtesgaden Alps for a completely different mission. The crew, who also take the shortest route via the Berchtesgadener Land on many inner-Austrian missions, for example in the Pinzgau, knew about the large-scale search in September and were always on the lookout for the missing person on the Hochkalter. On Thursday afternoon, the Austrian police officers discovered the lifeless body of the victim on a snow field on the south-west flank of the mountain.
It was at an altitude of around 2250 meters in exactly the gully where the mountain rescuers had already suspected it to be after they had located the notebook in the man’s backpack more than 200 meters above it and had dug the objects out of the meter-high fresh snow. In the meantime, the comparatively mild autumn weather has caused the snow cover to disappear significantly, even at higher altitudes, until the snow finally revealed the missing person’s body.
There was no longer any hope that the man might still be alive
There was no longer any hope that the young man would have survived the snowstorm for several days after the crash. The sporadic telephone contact with the missing person, who had made an emergency call himself with his mobile phone, had already broken off on the evening of the first day, and the rescuers in the snow storm had not even made various technical attempts to locate him. The mountain rescue service in the valley town of Ramsau and the police soon assumed it was a salvage operation rather than a rescue operation. Nevertheless, dozens of volunteer mountain rescuers had searched for the man for several days in meter-high fresh snow in the steepest terrain and with the greatest danger of avalanches.
As the Bavarian police announced on Friday, late Thursday afternoon one of their own helicopters flew two police mountain guides onto the Hochkalter, who recovered the dead. The exact cause of death is still under investigation, with injuries from the fall or freezing coming into question. External fault or the involvement of other people is ruled out.
The discovery of the corpse ends weeks of uncertainty for the man’s relatives, but also for the mountain rescuers. Why the young man, who didn’t have much experience in the high mountains, went on the demanding tour alone in dangerous wintry weather conditions will probably remain an open question.