While tubing down Colorado’s Animas River in July 2010, Coral Amayi flipped off her tube at Smelter Rapids. After climbing back on her tube, she realized the lanyard that had held her camera was broken. Amayi, now 35, had a good cry, figuring the camera and the photos on it were lost forever.
But 13 years later, and more than a mile down river, Spencer Greiner, 34, of Durango Colorado, was fly fishing last week, when he spotted possible “river booty,” that is, the occasional treasure found washed on shore.
On previous fishing days, Greiner has found boat paddles, an entire inflatable kayak and fly fishing lures. Like many anglers, he often picks up trash and discards it at home. As the snow melts, more litter is surfacing now, he said.
“I was just walking along the bank of the river, going from one fishing spot to the next. I was just staring at the ground and came across that camera sticking out of the dirt,” Greiner told The Epoch Times.
“I assumed it was another piece of trash initially, but after I picked it up, I could tell it was a camera. I put it in my fishing pack with all the other trash that I picked up that day, and when I got home I decided, hey, what the heck, let’s try to see if there’s anything on this,” Greiner said. “It turns out there was.”
The door to the memory card was stuck so he pried it open with a screwdriver.
Owner Found through Facebook
He dried it off, put it in a card reader and right away, photos of strangers came up on his computer. A girl playing guitar, the same girl wearing graduation garb, and then wearing a silly hat. There was a bachelorette party and snapshots from a wedding.“If someone had long lost photos of my wedding, I‘d hoped that they’d at least try to reach out and get a hold of me,” Greiner said. The largest audience he could think of was a local Facebook page where people in Durango buy and sell items. He posted some photos there and explained how he found the camera.
“It took less than an hour to find somebody that was in the pictures. It was the groom from the wedding. He reached out and said ‘Hey, that’s me and my wife’,” Greiner said.
The next day, Greiner was connected with Amayi, the camera owner from Cochise, Arizona.
The camera had photos of her dog after it had puppies that had all been given away by the time the camera was lost. She is still friends with the women in the wedding party and they speak frequently. She was thrilled that her camera had been found.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to get people reunited with their stuff,” Amayi told The Epoch Times. She has worked lost and found booths at music festivals, and once helped a guy get his cell phone back by going on a double black diamond ski run.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t take the time to try to reunite people,” Amayi said. “Even if it’s something as small as a scarf or somebody’s pen or a hat, it may seem insignificant, but it could be really significant to somebody else. So just taking the time to step out and help people reunite, I feel as kind of my karma coming back to me. And it’s a good, hilarious story that got me back in touch with a couple other friends from college.”
“I am really thankful that Spencer took the time to find us. People who take the time to locate the owners of a lost item make the world a better place.”
