Bitter Solstice: An Auditor's 42 Frames
In February 2026, a hunting party high in the southern Carpathians — not where the Austrian Alpenverein said he'd been — recovered a weatherproof camera case containing an Olympus TG-5 and a USB thumb drive. The owner: Hans Kirchmayer, a forensic accountant declared dead on a "solo winter ascent" more than six years earlier. His sister Lena reached out to us with the material in March. We're opening the drop.
"The police there are part of it. Please — find out where he really was, when he really stopped, and who wanted him to stop." — Lena Kirchmayer, Vienna, 2026-03
We will not publish our own analysis until we've had enough eyes on the raw material. Hans left 42 frames; three of them have GPS tags that are mutually inconsistent with the camera's own internal sensor timestamps. The official track log (Alpenverein Brașov) is included alongside for comparison.
The USB thumb drive contained a single encrypted file
(dossier.enc, AES-256-CBC, OpenSSL format). Hans left a
note saying the password was "where and when I last looked up".
We believe the answer lives inside the 42 frames. That, reader, is
your part.
SECURE DROP · bitter solstice
Leave an email — we will reply only if we've opened the dossier and need a corroborating pair of eyes. Or skip the form: the entry point to the evidence is public, anonymous, and cached on IPFS.
What we know:
- Hans vanished on or around 2019-12-21.
- The Austrian Alpenverein in Brașov filed his last ping as the Pietrele hut in Retezat at 18:04 UTC that day.
- His camera was recovered 260 kilometres east of that location.
- Three frames (IMG_0007, IMG_0012, IMG_0021) show a GPS position matching Retezat. The others contradict it.
- The foundation's director, who registered Hans's ascent, has a public OpenStreetMap account. He edited it on 2019-12-22 at 10:14 UTC — the day after Hans stopped transmitting.
What we're asking: reconstruct where Hans actually was
at 19:47 UTC on December 21, 2019. When you find the coordinates and
the exact four-digit UTC time, derive the password for the dossier in
the format LAT-LON-HHMM (five decimals each, UTC without
a colon). OpenSSL AES-256-CBC with -pbkdf2 -iter 100000.
The flag is inside.
#osint #geoint #carpathians #alpinverein #solstice