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Some call it field work, geologists say they are "in the field" when it comes to activities outside the office. When working in the open air, away from all paths and security, everything has to be expected. Caution is advised, you can expect encounters, discoveries and surprises that you don't want at all; Foresters, zoologists, botanists, geodesists and even mushroom hunters know about this.
What surprised me was an email from Gerhard Malecki on August 17th of this year with the subject "Corpse": "Hello Thomas, While browsing I found an old note from me: The body was found in the Untersulzbachtal on July 29th 1974 at around 2:30 p.m. If you're still interested. By the way: Congratulations on your Greenland blog! LG Gerhard."
Of course I'm still interested. I asked Gerhard on May 18th of this year to tell me about the discovery of his body. Information that I owe to my geologist friend Albert Schedl, who said that Gerhard found the body while working on his dissertation. He also warned me that he could get very detailed on this topic, as he had already told the story many times, which apparently still affects him today.
At the beginning of his long email, which reached me late in the evening on May 18th, Gerhard set things straight: "Albert is making a mistake, the body didn't come my way at the Diss, but in the second field summer at the GBA [Federal Geological Institute; today: GeoSphere Austria] in August [sic!] 1974. I warn you, now it's going to be detailed, because I remember every detail." Gerhard Malecki, born in 1944, studied geology at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in 1972 with the thesis "On the geology of the Silberpfennig area, Hohe Tauern (Salzburg)" and began working at the GBA on January 2, 1973. His activities in the Deposits and Raw Materials Department included the geological survey as well as mining and deposits agendas.
His superior, Herwig Holzer, said he should look at the former copper mine in the Untersulzbachtal (Salzburg), since Malecki was involved in geological mapping nearby. The mine in question - which had long been closed at the time - has a long history as the Hochfeld copper deposit, where gold was once mined. Today it can be visited as the Hochfeld show mine in the Hohe Tauern National Park. In 1974, the idea of putting the abandoned Hochfeld mine back into operation was considered; but nothing was to come of it. To stay with Malecki, who had prepared well for his work. "From the documents in the archive it emerged that under certain circumstances an open shaft could be expected. That's how it was, a heavily overgrown, open shaft. On the other (left) side of the valley I saw a tunnel mouth hole and malachite efflorescence on the rock walls." If there was malachite over there, then there must also be this green copper mineral over there, according to his geological reasoning.
No sooner said than done. "While searching, I saw two stockinged legs on the banks of the stream! My first thought: How did a mannequin get here? But immediately followed by "Ogottogott" a human being!!!" The sight must have been terrible for him. "The legs ended under boulders, on the other side of which you could see a partially skeletonized skull. What do I do now?" Everything had suddenly changed for Gerard. "I can't possibly get back to business as usual! I just scramble up the steep slope to the forest road (Stockeralm), run down to my car. I drive to the gendarmerie in Neukirchen am Großvenediger, briefly introduce myself and say: 'I've just come from the Untersulzbachtal. I found a body there.' The reaction of the gendarmes there was a mixture of surprise and relief. 'Ah, you found it! They've been looking for three weeks!'"
We now went to the site together. "We climbed down to the stream. The gendarme asked me if everything was in the same condition as I had found it. He took photos from all sides, then we climbed back up." And this is where the geologist's powers of observation became apparent: "Above the discovery site, shell-shaped cracks could be seen on the steep edge of the embankment, but these were missing directly above the corpse. Instead, there was a vertical crack mark in the steep slope. Everything was as clear as day! Apparently the woman had stepped too close to the edge to take photos (?), had fallen and was killed by the rubble that had been carried along."
Another interview followed in Neukirchen. "So I described the circumstances to the detectives and overheard one of the officers talking to the daughter of the woman who died in the accident on the phone. A camera had been found on the body, which is now being evaluated by the authorities. That was the end of the matter for me, but the circumstances are burned into my brain."
Before the 33-year-old geologist from the k.k. Geological Reichsanstalt (today: GeoSphere Austria) Guido Stache described a dramatic experience of his colleague Heinrich Wolf in the "Neue Freie Presse" on October 11, 1866, he dispels romantic and romanticized ideas about geological field work. Stache urgently warns "certain gentlemen from the Bureau" who had no idea about the work in the field: "You neither had to wade through the swollen streams of the wild, wooded valleys of the Marmaros in torrential rain, misled and abandoned by your guides at nightfall, nor had to swim around in the treacherous Quarnero in a storm on a nutshell of a boat; you were neither through pandours and with pitchforks and scythes Armed peasants were summoned from your work before a Hungarian magistrate, and you also fell into the hands of a Czech local magistrate who thought you were a spy.
Heinrich Wolf, born in 1825, was a trained shoemaker who found no satisfaction in his craft, strived for higher things and sought contact with geologists. In the summer of 1850 he joined the k.k. as a porter. Geological Reichsanstalt and grew - learning by doing and through self-study - into the everyday life of geologists. The Reichsanstalt, founded in November 1849, was looking for such people; its purpose was to systematically record the geology of the monarchy. Wolf soon turned out to be an all-rounder and worked in "almost all of the monarchy's crown lands," said Franz von Hauer in his obituary about Wolf, who died in 1882, and who had made it to the position of chief geologist.
In September 1866, Wolf was traveling alone in Liptauer County, a region in the north of what is now Slovakia, after which cheese spread is named. At first he was attacked by overzealous wolf dogs, "the local sheepdogs", who misjudged him as a supposed attacker of a flock of sheep. Wolf defended himself with the geologist's hammer and "shot the stones out of the well-filled pocket." After he survived this relatively harmless encounter, things got worse: he fell into a bear trap.
In the region there, five oxen and three horses were killed by bears in the summer of 1866. No wonder that the local population went after the bears. Stache, who wrote down his colleague's stories and made them accessible to a wide public: "With fresh courage and without being disturbed by the thought of the unpleasant annexers [the bears], Wolf marched past the already deserted Alpine hut on a wide, well-trodden path towards the south. Suddenly, he was barely 200 fathoms away from the hut, his right foot sank and at the same time he felt so violent and sudden iron clamps reinforced with teeth two inches long and one inch thick, so that he fell to the ground. Our geologist had caught himself in a bear trap.
Thanks to a drawing on the cover of a regional newspaper from November 1, 1903, showing the writer Jan Havlasz, who also fell into a bear trap, we can imagine what happened to Wolf. Stache reported his situation: "The prospect of having to slowly starve or die of thirst on a mountain over 4,000 feet high, clamped as if between the teeth of a shark's jaws [a metaphor for the trapping iron], or of being attacked and eaten by bears and wolves in a half-exhausted state, is truly horrifying." Wolf kept a clear head in this emergency situation and worked for two hours "in the strongest heat of the day" with a geologist's hammer and boulders to free himself. "He first knocked away some of the teeth of the tentacles that were most hindering the driving of wedges and drove wedges of wood, which he strengthened by adding stones, further and further towards the pivot point between the iron springs." Eventually he managed to "pull his leg out of the dangerous trap." Wolf was lucky, unlike Jan Havlasz, whose leg had to be amputated. He healed completely and was able to continue his work in the field over the next few years.
Wolf presented the scientific results of the summer of 1866 at the meeting of the kk. Geological Reichsanstalt on March 5, 1867 ("The geological conditions of the Liptauer and Thurocz counties on the left bank of the Waag river between the towns of Sucan and Hradek").
The list of “nature experiences” would be long if I wrote down everything my colleagues tell me about their work in the field. It has often been shown that the geologist's hammer often served well beyond its intended purpose for chipping off pieces of rock. (Thomas Hofmann, September 12, 2025)