Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board Of cameras and granite

Might be a good excuse for him to get over to this side of the Sierra again.

Submerged camera holds functional memory card two years after accident

Good story.

The last sentence made me laugh:

I was just about to drag this thread back anyway.

Before Steve C's trip, I'd gone to the base of HD to look for the camera and cleanup trash. Both efforts failed - apparently I walked right by the memory card without seeing it, and I had to abandon my two teeming trash bags in the middle of the woods when I was unable to carry them further and they were threatening to split open and dump their contents all over the forest. At some point, I will have to return with some heavier-duty bags and finish hauling them out.

Unfortunately for Steve I managed to make quite the booty call when I was out there, leaving him to scour a field of moldy water bottles for part of a camera and a sleeping bag. The stuff's been sitting in a bag ever since, but I finally got around to taking some pictures:

The intact cell phone and one of the FRS radios was recovered from the ledge below the cables; everything else came from the base.



Bigger files & a few more closeups are available in my gallery and Steve also copied them to his Smugmug account so that I could post a few inline w/ my message (the [img] tag requires images to end in .jpg or some such for this site).

Although all 3 cameras (and the lens from camera #4) were all within a 30-foot radius of eachother, I couldn't find a single memory card or camera battery. My best guess is that they separated on impact and took flight. The camera phone I recovered from below the cables did have a memorystick in it, and while I was hoping for spy photos of bikini models, no such luck.

The acute observer will note that while a fishing reel and several cameras were recovered, the reel reported missing by markskor and CaT's camera are both at large. Also, while I don't have any photos (my evidence is somewhere in the hills above LYV), I discovered that while Nalgene bottles are mostly indestructible, the softer plastic caps are subject to a ~50% failure rate when dropped 1000 feet.

One last thing: based on the amount of crap down there, I would recommend wearing a helmet at all times. Personally, I wouldn't get close to the base on a busy summer weekend.

Made the local paper. Great story!

http://www.fresnobee.com/263/story/222385.html

THAT is too cool!

That is a GREAT story! Wonderfully written.

How did it come to be?

One of the last lines I found particularly moving, and emblematic of the wonders of this internet:

"The two men have never met, never even spoken on the phone. But thanks to the Internet and some incredibly good fortune, they share a bond that won't be erased anytime soon."

Unknown to me at first, Steve had called the Fresno paper, and as it turned out, this reporter decided to run a story on the lost camera and found chip. I just now read his story, and thought he captured it all very well. It was also the first time I had seen the picture of Steve by his computer monitor with the picture of me on HD on the monitor. Very nice picture, Steve! I thought that picture summed it up as well as any picture could have.

As we speak, I'm still working on uploading and captioning the recovered pictures onto Flickr in such a way that the various groups of people I know can conveniently view only those portions of my overall trip that they are interested in, probably in the form of a TR that will have links to the various subsections of the overall trip.

CaT

The day after I found the chip, I was so stoked, I called the local paper's outdoor writer. He has written several articles on Yosemite and Half Dome, and wrote a good article about a friend, Carolyn, who has lost lots of weight and now leads Sierra Club hikes. I just thought he might have fun with the article.

He told me the article was coming out last Wednesday in the paper's Outdoor section, then called to say, "Somebody with a bigger paycheck than mine decided it was going to go on the Sunday front page."

I am sorry the article link only shows the silly mug shot picture. The actual article shows the dead tree/cliff shot filling a quarter of the front page. Then on the continuation page, David's shot down the cables is almost as large:



I have copied the paper's front page pdf and stored it here (2.6 MB).

Here are two shots of the two pages in the paper. (Click on them for a full-size image):
 


Edit: Just for cross-reference, California-Trailwalker posted a parallel thread in the "Yosemite News and Discussion Forum". The thread is here: Of Cameras and Granite

Steve - Thanks for providing the links to the PDFs of these two print version pages! Definitely more pictures than in the online version!

CaT

WAClimber - I wanted to close one final open issue from this thread, namely, how the camera replacement insurance worked out in my case.

Unhappily, it didn't! The above quote from your earlier post also turned out to be true of my situation, despite the camera salesman at the store knowing me, believing my story, and typing it up in great detail in the online claim he made to the ins. co. on my behalf. The ins. co. still strictly held to their "return an identifiable piece of the camera" policy.

But just like with the camera and the chip, I'm not giving up on this just yet. The couple I assisted from Half Dome all the way back to Yosemite Valley during the 5 hours immediately after I dropped my camera both saw me drop it and saw it tumble down the south face of HD. First, I'm going to try personally writing the contact person at the ins. co., and if necessary, submit sworn affidavits from the couple I helped regarding what they witnessed, along with an affidavit of my own indicating that the circumstances of the disappearance of the camera are clearly not "mysterious", but that trying to get to where the camera (or its component pieces) may be located (on one of the ledges on the way down the south face) would be too dangerous, even if I knew for certain that it/they were there.

I'm also going to take a look at the Exif data from the pictures on my returned chip to see if any of that data would possibly identify the camera in some specific way.

We'll see how it goes. I'm not giving up on the ins. front without exhausting all my options.

CaT

Update - Exif data doesn't include a serial number or anything specific...

Send them a copy of the newspaper article too..and tell them you are going to write a letter to the editor about the crappy camera insurance company as a follow-up..

Interesting thought...

CaT