Two Friends Vanished on a Swiss Glacier in 1994. It Took the Ice 31 Years to Give Back the Second One.

On 4 November 1994, two climbers set out on the Ober Gabelhorn above Zermatt and never came home. One of them was recovered from the mountain in 2000. The other lay inside the glacier for another twenty-five years — until 15 October 2025, when a party of climbers on the same route saw something in the melting ice that should not have been there.

Zermatt sits below the Matterhorn and is one of the deepest-rooted climbing towns in the Alps, which is exactly why its glaciers keep handing back people it swallowed decades ago. A climber who falls into a crevasse or is buried by a slide is not usually lost to open air for long — the snow above compacts into ice, and that ice becomes part of the glacier's slow-moving mass. For years, sometimes decades, the body travels with it, entombed and preserved by cold, until the glacier thins enough near its surface or its edge to let go. It is the same physics that shapes glacier travel on our own Nepal peak climbs, where routes are re-assessed every season as crevasse patterns shift.

The Ober Gabelhorn case is not an isolated one. Switzerland and neighbouring Austria have been giving up climbers at a steady rate as their glaciers retreat:

The Austrian case in that table is typical of how these come together. In August 2024 a local resident noticed bones roughly 700 metres below the Wasserfallferner glacier, in the Rotmoostal valley. DNA analysis matched them to a 30-year-old German climber who had fallen into a crevasse while crossing the glacier on skis in March 1967 — 57 years earlier. Rescue teams at the time located the crevasse but bad weather forced them to abandon the recovery; the glacier finished the job on its own, six decades later.

The reason none of this is a coincidence is well measured. Switzerland's glacier monitoring network, GLAMOS, has recorded some of the fastest ice loss on record in the last few years: Swiss glaciers lost 6% of their total volume in 2022 and a further 4% in 2023 — as much in those two years as was lost across the three decades from 1960 to 1990. 2024 added another 2.5% despite a heavy snow winter.

Since 2015, Switzerland has lost a quarter of its total glacier volume — by far the steepest decade on record — and since measurements began in 1850, Alpine glaciers have lost roughly 60% of their mass. Every recovery in the table above is a direct consequence of that retreat: ice that held a person for decades is simply running out of ice to hold them in.

What this means for trekkers

Source: CBS News

Cover photo: Roy Egloff via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).