People trying to enjoy an Easter Sunday of skiing in the Austrian Alps ended up off the mountain after a worker and skiers reported that a man had placed a suspicious object at a cable-car station, police in the state of Vorarlberg reported on Monday.
The police were called and discovered a pipe-like object about 15 centimetres long on a ski rack.
They then evacuated the Kanzelwandbahn cable-car mountain station and the neighbouring Zwerenalpbahn ski lift and then closed the Kanzelwand ski area completely.
Specialists arrived to defuse a potentially dangerous object, but it turned out to be a container for a game of geocaching, a scavenger hunt-type game first developed in 2000 in the north-west US state of Oregon.
The game is a high-tech scavenger hunt in which GPS coordinates are given on a website associated with the game. Participants can view the coordinates there and then set off in search of the container. Once found, they sign the logbook, but leave the container in place for other geocachers.
The police did not say whether the man who left the container on the ski track at the Kanzelwand cable car was found or whether he might be in trouble.