A French climber who was innocently scaling up a Mont Blanc glacier had the surprise of his life when he chanced upon a box literally filled with treasures.

Treasure Find Surprise

The climber described as ‘someone in his early twenties but refused to divulge his identity’ by local authorities accidentally came upon the box filled with emeralds, rubies and sapphires buried, it seems for decades based on the box’s look, in the French Alps’ snow. It lay there on Glacier de Bossons, part of the Mount Blanc mountain range, hidden below ice crystals. There are approximately 100 gems crammed inside.

The jewels’ worth is estimated to be around $332,000. The box containing the precious gems is made of metal and the jewels were in groups placed inside sachets, some with the inscription ‘Made in India’ making local police believe it was part of an Indian plane crash that happened in the dreary cold landscape over five decades ago.

Surprisingly, the climber who found the box earlier this month turned out to be very honest as he decided on turning over his find to the police when he climbed down Mount Blanc.

“This was an honest young man who very quickly realized that they belonged to someone who died on the glacier,” local gendarmerie chief Sylvain Merly said in an interview. “He could have kept them but he preferred to give them to the police.”

As of now, French authorities are in contact with their Indian counterparts in the hope of finding the family or the heirs of the jewels’ owner.

One local French police had even commented that the climber may have not wanted to own something from someone who died, and that was why he sought police help about it.

However, he will have no choice about owning the jewelry if no one claimed the find or no owner is traced. As stated in French law, the jewelry could be given over to its finder if no one connected to it is identified – in this case, the French mountaineer.

Story Behind the Jewels

There were two plane crash incidents that happened on the mountains that could be attributed as the jewelries’ origin.

Two Air India planes had crashed on different years into Mount Blanc – the first one was in 1950 and the second one was in 1966.

One particular crash accident that happened in the mountain killed 117 individuals, including Homi Jehangir Bhabha, a pioneer in India’s nuclear program. Police have deduced the box of jewels were on the same flight.

The find, though very surprising, is not at all unique in the mountains. Due to the plane crash incidents that happened, the area is known to be littered with debris, baggage and even human remains, and climbers going through the Alps routinely find them.

Just in September of last year, India reclaimed a bag filled with diplomatic mail from the Kanchenjunga, the Boeing 707 plane which came from Mumbai and crashed on Mount Blanc’s southwest face 44 years ago, on January 24, 1966.