Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mountain Climber Finds 6,000 Gemstones Worth $340,000 on French Mountain Where Plane Crash

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BY Epoch Inspired Staff January 4, 2022

In the decades after the 1966 crash of an Air India plane on Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, the mountain’s ice and snow have been yielding bits of debris, such as photos, old newspapers, and in 1986 even a piece of a landing gear.

Then in 2013, a French mountain climber in his 20s made the dazzling discovery of a metal box containing 6,000 precious gemstones—mostly emeralds and sapphires—worth a staggering 300,000 euros ($339,000).

The climber turned in the gems to the Chamonix authorities, who sought out the heirs of the lost trove. According to French law, if the property is not claimed by the rightful owner within two years’ time, it is forfeited and to be divided equally between the finder and the authorities.


Early in December, the municipality announced that the emeralds and sapphires have now officially been claimed by the municipality and the climber who found them.

The Chamonix council said they will display their half of the treasure at the recently reopened Chamonix Crystal Museum as part of its geological and historic mineral collection.

As the stones were very precisely categorized, they likely belonged to an Indian stone dealer who was on their way to Geneva for commercial reasons, France 24 reported.

The Boeing 707 flight that crashed on Mont Blanc so many years ago, killing 117 passengers, was the Kangchenjunga. Among the dead was Homi J. Bhabha, the “father” of India’s nuclear program, leading some to claim that the plane had been shot down by a fighter jet or missile.

The Chamonix, France .gov is a bunch of greedy commie bastards, they had no right to any of it.

A smart man would keep his mouth shut and just spend a little of it at a time.

His first mistake was telling anyone about it.

You beat me to it.

Yep he should have kept quiet and made a few trips to Innsbruck Austria to sell them through the diamond merchants there. They do a lot of diamond cutting there and he could have made a deal with a cutter to recut them into new shapes and sold them through the open market without anybody being the wiser.

Dumbass!

Yeah, just take an emerald down to the grocery store for payment every week or two.

^^^^^^

Figures Chamonix, France .gov would put their mitts on it. The French in many ways are like a Banana Republic.

Read up on what Florida does to salvagers who spend millions searching for sunken ships only to have it taken from them by the state. And FL isn't the only one.

There is a world of difference between salvaging a ship wreck and walking off with a metal box. You cannot salvage a shipwreck without anybody knowing about it, too much equipment involved. While I don't condone what FL does it would be very difficult if not impossible to take the loot out of a shipwreck without anybody knowing about. Heck if a boat was anchored in the same spot day after day with divers in the water the USCG would wander over to see what is going on.

Pretty sure Clive Cussler wrote a book along these lines - the Romanov Ransom.