Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board What have you lost or found in the Sierra?

Lost - One small camera (down south face of Half Dome) Sept 2007.

Found (by Steve C.) - One even smaller memory chip (with all pictures intact) all by its loneseome self at the bottom of that cliff on top of a boulder ~6 weeks later.

Also found - Friendships.

CaT

Now I suppose you're going to tell me that dropping a camera off of Half Dome, having it vaporize, having a complete stranger look for it and find it's memory card, then get the whole story onto the front page of the Fresno Bee is more impressive than finding a pair of misplaced sunglasses after a couple of days, right where I left them.

OK, you'd be right, of course. Amazing story and well worth reviving.

I don't remember seeing it in the Bee. Cool. I read about it somewhere online though.

A few years ago I lost a small digital camera while camping on some lease property we have up there. 2 years later I found the camera, still in the plastic baggie, it had fallen under a wooden platform we used to sleep on. Batteries were dead, but I got the pictures off of it, and continued to use it. It was stolen from my car about a month later.

Newspaper image
Online discussion

Nah...
Both are equally amazing in their own way. Same for finding the socks after one year! The big difference is that socks and sunglasses don't have 500+ irreplaceable pictures on them. snaps10's lost camera for two years with the pictures still intact is pretty incredible!

I almost didn't revive the matter, but thought it might be worth it for anyone new to the MB since the story faded from the top of the board.

This "lost and found" thread is proving to be very interesting.

CaT

PS to the camera story - After having finally backed up the 545 pictures that were on the memory chip Steve found and then running the chip in a digital frame in our house for a couple more months, I finally got a new (very similar) camera last week, into which the same chip will fit. So with a sentimental sigh, I finally deleted all those pictures from the original chip, and am now reusing that "miracle chip" in my new camera. It still works just fine.

The most interesting thing we found was a backpack, loaded with gear, on the south slabs below Lower Boy Scout Lake....May of 2005

http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1360060849061435028knpNUR

Latter that summer, we retrieved most of it and the forest service carried the rest of it down off the mountain.

http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1465871941061435028OPaBKd

LOL... Scott L

Awww... someone lost their boo-bear!

My camera is somewhere around Hamilton Lake, that is, if it was that pesky marmot that ran off with it, instead of one of the day hikers cruising thru my camp.

Found: Me.

-L

A few years ago I let my son Matthew take my original external frame back pack up to Northern Yosemite backpacking with the scouts. One night a bear picked up my backpack with his teeth on the metal bar on the top of the backpack....and absconded with my backpack into the woods. The next day they found it abandoned a few hundred feet away.

So I guess on that trip they lost and found my backpack. Other then some scratch marks, one can't even tell it was carried off by a bear.

Hi,
I believe is was July of 2001. I found a trash can! We were camped near upper Rock Creek. We have a favorite campsite there that we use as a base camp for dayhikes up the Mitre Basin. We went on an after-dinner stroll up the trail towards Army Pass. Eventually we wandered off trail, going north, found a meadow and a boulder field. I was intrigued by a odd shaped boulder and went to look closer. As I was standing on this boulder I could see the trash can, nestled into the base of 3 small pine trees.
It was obviously very old and a smaller size than what is made today. We took off the lid and found empty boxes of things like rolled oats, rice, crackers and rodent droppings. There was also an unopened one pound can of butter made by the Wesson Oil Co. (I didn't even know that butter ever came in a can!) We put the lid back on and went back to camp. The next evening, we came across back country ranger Dario. We had had a bear encounter the night after we found the trash can and related the incident to him. After he was finished with his notes, we told him about finding this trash can. He immediately said it sounded like one of Bartholomew's caches. We took him back to it and he was very excited. He confirmed that this had to be one of the two that had get to be found in the back country. He arranged to have packers take it out, and had it delivered to the museum on the west side of the Sierra's. I read High Odyssey by Gene Rose. This would have been the Langley cache placed there during the summer of 1928!
This is a favorite memory for us!
Betsy, wife of WTNY N1

Bartholomew's cache sure beats the pair of socks.

I once found a good quality cotton sweat shirt near the top of Giant Kaweah (hiked in from Mineral King via Little Five Lakes, and missed booger's dirty socks hanging on the bush). It was in good condition -- only smelly, so I packed it all the way out. At home, I ran it through the wash, but I could NOT get the smell out. It ended up in the trash. (Don't know why, but I have found that old cotton clothes get a bad smell -- not from wearing them, but from age or something.)

If only CaT could have dropped his camera off of Half Dome into Bartholomew's cache. Admittedly a long throw!

Betsy - Wow! Incredible find!

Alan - 1928-2008 (80 years) ... wonder if someone will find my camera 80 years from now (2088)?

CaT