A Sticky Situation: Naming a Tyrolean Summit From the Stickers on Its Cross

Title: A Sticky Situation (Bellingcat Challenge, Globetrotters series)

Description: In August 2022, Bellingcat’s Foeke Postma found himself looking over this beautiful view, complete with a Bellingcat sticker.

Question: What is the name of the mountain on which Foeke Postma was standing?

The answer, up front: a summit in the Alpbachtal, Tyrol, Austria. The stickers in the photo are on the summit-book box of its wooden cross, and a Google Maps photo from one month later shows the same box with the same stickers.

Wiedersberger Horn (2127 m), Alpbach, Tirol

The rest of the post is the route: which stickers carried information and which didn’t, a detour past Tyrol’s famous summits, and the X search that got it from “somewhere in Tyrol” to one valley.

The whole brief. There’s no EXIF worth having, so everything has to come out of the picture.

Step 1: What’s in the frame

Two halves, and they’re useful in different ways.

The left half is the view: a steel cable running diagonally through the frame (a guy wire, as it turns out, not a lift cable), a grassy ridge with scattered spruce below, and beyond it a wide, flat, settled valley floor with higher, rockier mountains behind. That’s classic Northern Limestone Alps scenery, but there are hundreds of views like it in Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland.

The right half is the object: a wooden post with a rusty metal box nailed to it. A wooden post at a viewpoint with a box on it is almost certainly a summit cross with its Gipfelbuch box, the tin that keeps the summit register dry. So the photo was taken on a summit, and the cross is made of wood.

The box is covered in stickers, and stickers are what hikers leave behind. Each one is a small, free hint about who comes up here.

Ten stickers. Five of them say something about the place, five don’t.

Step 2: Sorting the stickers

I went through them one by one and wrote down only what each one could say about the location:

The QR code decodes to the Spreadshop store readyformountain.myspreadshop.at. The shop itself sells hiking merch and says nothing about this summit, but every Spreadshop has a legal imprint, and that has an address. The imprint (/imprint) gives an Austrian address with postcode 6260, which is Bruck am Ziller, at the mouth of the Zillertal in Tyrol.

The ibex sticker has a handle on it, but I ran it through reverse image search anyway to be sure it wasn’t a generic design. The hits were groups and profiles for Der Steinbock in Linz: Austrian, but not Tyrolean, so it’s a visitor’s sticker, just like the Macedonian one.

Upper Austria, not Tyrol. One more Austrian among the visitors, not a place marker.

Five stickers, five times Austria, and the ones with a specific region (the Felsenfreunde, the imprint, Zillertal) all say Tyrol. That’s the working area.

How sure? Sure about Austria. Tyrol is a strong lean, not proof: a sticker only says where its owner comes from, and hikers travel. But a local shop’s QR code and a local valley’s hiking group on the same box point at the neighbourhood.

Step 3: Wrong turn, the famous summits

Tyrol has thousands of summits with crosses. My first idea was to try the well-known ones first, on the assumption that a visitor would pick one of those. I checked each against the only hard feature I had: a wooden cross with a rusty box, on the post itself.

• Zugspitze, Großglockner, Wildspitze, Serles, Großer Rettenstein, Ehrwalder Sonnenspitze: metal crosses, or the box sits somewhere else. Ruled out.
• Großvenediger: metal and wood, no stickers visible.
• Olperer, Brandberger Kolm, Wilder Kaiser, Kalkkögel: wooden crosses, but none of them had this box with these stickers in any photo I could find, and at the Kalkkögel a bench was in the way.

Ten summits, ten misses. Lesson: “famous” is a guess about the photographer, not a property of the place. It’s a reasonable first try but only worth a few minutes. Past that, it’s time to look at the photographer instead of the mountains.

Step 4: Reverse image search on the view

The stickers gave a region; the view might give a valley. I cropped the left half (the view, without the stickers, so Lens wouldn’t just match “bellingcat sticker”) and ran it through Google Lens with the extra search term österreich.

No exact match, but a cluster: three of the top visual matches are from the Kitzbüheler Alpen.

No exact match. What Lens did return was a pattern: three of the top visual matches were Kitzbüheler Alpen. That’s a range, not a summit, and Lens visual matches only show what looks similar. But it’s consistent with the stickers: the Kitzbüheler Alpen border the Zillertal on the east side.

Step 5: The pivot, where was Foeke Postma in August 2022?

The brief gives a name and a month, and that’s a second way in. People at Bellingcat post about where they are, and so do the events that invite them.

A plain Google search for Foeke Postma August 2022 was noisy. X’s advanced search operators are much sharper, because they limit the search to a date window:

foeke postma since:2022-08-01 until:2022-08-31

That returned a thread from the Alpbach community, dated 28 August 2022:

A fireside chat with @bellingcat on 29 August 2022, “at Alphof, Bauernstube”. Late August in Alpbach is the European Forum Alpbach.

The first post only tags @bellingcat. The same author’s thread goes on to list the panel, and there he is by name:

“Foeke Postma, investigator and trainer at Bellingcat.” The person from the brief, on a panel in Alpbach, on 29 August 2022.

So Foeke Postma was in Alpbach, Tyrol in the last days of August 2022, which fits both the brief and the stickers. The Alphof is a hotel in the village of Alpbach:

The Alphof, in Alpbach. Someone at a conference here has a free morning and a mountain on the doorstep.

Step 6: Combining the two

Now the three leads point at the same corner of the map:

1. Stickers: Tyrol, with Zillertal hints.
2. Lens: Kitzbüheler Alpen.
3. X: Postma on a panel in Alpbach, 29 August 2022.

The Alpbachtal sits exactly in between: a side valley of the Inn, with the Zillertal to the south-west and in the western Kitzbüheler Alpen. That reduces “Tyrol” to one valley and the summits around it.

The Alpbach municipality. The summits that ring it are the candidates.

The German Wikipedia article on the Alpbachtal lists around ten summits in the valley. Ten is few enough to check by hand, and I used the same test as in Step 3: a wooden cross with that sticker box.

• Großer Galtenberg: doesn’t match.
• Großer Beil, Sonnenjoch: too far away; neither fits the view in the photo.
• Standkopf: wooden cross, no sticker box.
• Wiedersberger Horn: a match.

Step 7: The sticker match

Google Maps has user photos for the Wiedersberger Horn. One of them, from September 2022 (one month after the challenge photo), shows the summit cross from below:

Wiedersberger Horn, Sept 2022. A wooden cross, steel guy wires (the cable across the challenge photo), and a small dark box on the post.

Zoomed in on the box, next to the challenge photo:

Left: the challenge, August 2022. Right: Wiedersberger Horn, September 2022. Same round sticker top left, same pale torn-off patch next to it, same QR code, green circle, MUY BIEN, ibex and Bergbuddys square, all in the same places.

That’s the match. A single sticker could be on any cross in Tyrol; six stickers and one torn-off patch in the same arrangement on the same rusty box can’t be. The one thing that doesn’t show on the right is the black bellingcat strip. Whether it had already been removed a month later or is lost in the low resolution, the photo doesn’t say, and it doesn’t need to: the layout around it is the fingerprint. The guy wire also explains the cable across the challenge photo.

Where exactly: the summit of the Wiedersberger Horn, 2127 m, at 47.361238, 11.922878 in OpenStreetMap. The Alpbach lifts run up close to it, so it’s a short walk for someone with a free morning at a conference.

Answer

Wiedersberger Horn

Takeaways

• Stickers are a local survey. Each one says where one visitor came from. One is noise; five that agree give you a region. Sort them into “says something about the place” and “doesn’t” before you search anything.
• A QR code is a link, and a shop has an imprint. The shop told me nothing; its legally required imprint gave me a postcode.
• When the place won’t talk, ask about the person. The brief named someone and a month. An X search with since:/until: turned that into a village in one query, which ten famous summits hadn’t.
• Leads that agree beat one strong lead. Stickers, Lens and X each pointed somewhere vague. Where all three overlap is one valley with ten summits.
• Match the object, not the view. Mountain panoramas repeat; a rusty box with six stickers in a fixed arrangement doesn’t.

Sources

• Bellingcat Challenge 1: A Sticky Situation
• readyformountain.myspreadshop.at/imprint, Spreadshop imprint (postcode 6260)
• Google Lens, visual matches for the valley crop
• X advanced search, foeke postma since:2022-08-01 until:2022-08-31
• Alpbachtal on German Wikipedia, list of summits
• Google Maps, user photo of the Wiedersberger Horn summit cross (September 2022)
• OpenStreetMap: Wiedersberger Horn