Thar Gold in Thar Hills! Finding Stuff On The Slopes.
Carl Pelletier
During the winter it’s all about the hunt for deepest, softest and whitest treasure we can find. Then, as temperatures rise and snow levels fall, other treasures are unveiled.
Treasure is there for the picking.
I was in Jackson last weekend and decided to get a quick run in on the 4th of July. I’d describe the backcountry skiing as “novel,” but I was still amazed at the amount of snow on Edelweiss, the popular shot off Teton Pass. I was also amazed at the amount of booty I found as I hiked and skinned towards the top. At the end of the day my pack was a bit heavier. I now had a working digital camera, one doggie paw mitten, a pair of sunglasses and a glove. And “they” said that there was only dog poop in the boot pack!
My personal history involving finding ski booty goes back to my early days when I worked at Ski Snowstar in Andalusia, Illinois. (Have you not heard of Ski Snowstar before? Shame!) With runs called The Comet, Shooting Star, The Big Dipper and The North Star it is where a majority of my formative years were spent. Being a ski area in the Mid-West it’s no coincidence that the amount of treasure on this hill in the spring was plentiful…as skiing treasure is directly related to ski carnage….and believe me there was a good deal of carnage taking place at Ski Snowstar. Tangled blurs of denim, camo and Carharts were a common occurrence.
In spring I’d drive to the ski area and troll the lift’s drop zone looking for change. I’m not ashamed about this… I used the money to put me through college. It was a state school. One day I actually found a pair of ski poles crossed in the proverbial “X” and directly underneath was a watch – still ticking.
Over the years I have found cameras, poles, hats, gloves and even a ski in the backcountry.
So here are the questions for you loyal WildSnowers:
1. What is the best backcountry treasure that you’ve found while skiing or trolling after the season?
2. What’s the protocol on finding this stuff? Morally and Ethically?
Ideally I’d like to get items back to their rightful owners. If you know who these belong to…let me know.
Happy Hunting!
(WildSnow guest blogger Carl Pelletier has done everything from boiler fitting to school teaching. He’s presently working with Liberty Mountain and specializes in Pieps beacons. Jackson was his backcountry skiing support system for a while, now it’s the Wasatch. He has lots of gear, and not all of it was purchased.)
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29 Responses to “Thar Gold in Thar Hills! Finding Stuff On The Slopes.”
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Definitely return the camera. The other stuff is booty.
My brother and I, on our first day ever on Aspen Mountain, in February of 1988, found a crisp C-note. I invested my half wisely and am still here, while my brother, who squandered his half, had to return home. $100 was really worth something back then.
Then, as now, cash is king – finders keepers – all other booty, unless immediately needed and used should probably go to lost and found.
Unfortunately , there was no name to be found on the camera. I didn’t reconize any of the people in the photos. I’ve called and left “Found” info at local ski shops in Jackson, Wilson and Driggs.
A little lesson….put your name and phone number on things. The ink adds very little in weight, but Lou might contend that.
My best find was a camera. While I was intrigued by the contents, I felt guilt and turned it in. My strange finds were a pair of men’s briefs inside the leg of a pair of shorts. Both of which were – ummm – soiled.
My favorite was a badly damaged $20 bill. I looked up the U.S. Treasury rules, and decided I might just barely have the requisite >50% intact. I mailed it in, and a few months later received a $20 check!
Picked up a $100 bill under the lift at WP last year. Serious groundscore.
While working summer trail crew on Vail Mountain, my crew and I found $700 in $100 bills. We found $200 more the next day. The bills were pretty beat up, but all had enough left to trade in. My share paid for my part of that month’s rent, no small thing in pricey Vail.
I found a wallet with over $300 in it. I tried to contact the guy with no response. I found my wedding ring, a tiffany and co platinum ring, we turned it in and gave it to the cops for 90 days to see if anyone claimed it… nada! you can make cash out there if you are into walking around a little.
nice find(s)!
this winter i was lucky to find 2 bd traverse poles where the lowers and baskets were still perfect. convenient since i ski with the same poles. interestingly enough, i found them melting up out of the snow where a skier got caught in a big avalanche right where i had been caught and fought my way out of one just weeks before his incident. whooo, lucky.
rog
The strangest “find” I ever heard of was by the trail crew at RL mountain during summer work. They found a dead mouse and a vibrator inside a glass jar under the chairlifts when the snow melted out. I always wondered what the story behind that one was.
Best picking?
While hiking down under chair Two at Mount Sutton QC. I caught a glimmer in the grass. I wore the Tag Heuer for maybe ten years seeing no one reported it lost & the company couldn’t/wouldn’t trace the owner by the serial number.
My best score? I found a big diamond ring in the dirt of Camp 4 in Yosemite, when I was a climbing bum in the 1970s. A few weeks before, I’d seen a note on the bulletin board offering a $2,000 reward for a lost ring. Alas, the note had disappeared and the Park rangers didn’t know anything about it. I took the jewelry to San Francisco, where a gem buyer told me it looked much like a ring stolen during a murder. He said he or other gem buyers in the city wouldn’t buy it till I took it to the homicide department at SFPD and had a detective make sure it wasn’t the ring from the crime. So I met with a detective, who said no, it wasn’t the same ring and he had no reports of any rings being lost in Yosemite. I then took the ring to a couple of gem buyers in San Fran and got the best price I could, something around $2,000. Back then, that money financed nearly a whole summer of climbing. But I’ve always wondered what the story was behind the lost ring near the bathrooms at Camp 4.
probably a long shot, but you can post some of the photos from the camera to http://www.ifoundyourcamera.net/
Jim, that looks like a cool website. Weird how all the example photos are such high quality, but perhaps the site admins process everything rather than just posting as-is. Wouldn’t hurt anything for Carl to put some photos up there. Better, we could just put a couple on this post, that is unless they’re ex rated or something… Carl?
Your choice of ski terrain was the novel part. June 21 was the last day edelweiss skied great…………………next time you visit I would encourage a visit to one of our national parks . Skiing on slopes >30degrees has minimal suncups down to 8500′
Lou – good news! The owners of the camera tracked me down thanks to your website! They are from Canada and lost the camera in March. It’s being shipped back today.
@wyomingowen – thanks for the suggestion! I actually met some friends that very morning in Moose. We had planned to ski the East face of Static, but we were greeted by dark clouds and lightning to the South. We bagged those plans. I was still itching for a ski … and on the way out of town I was passing over the Pass … I was lured by the possibility of a really quick, impromptu ski.
sack of weed. swag though (must have been a midwestern tourist)
I usually post a message on popular local web forums. I’ve returned a few items via mail at my expense including hiking boots, an ice axe, and helmet. If no one claims it after two weeks then it’s mine I guess. Found a brand new pair of snowshoes at a TH a few years ago. Couldn’t locate the owner. So I sold them and bought some rock skis. I speculate that after one day of snowshoeing the owner decided to cut bait and go buy skis themselves.
It’s interesting Caleb, my fiance found a Tag Hauer watch one time in the backcountry….she turned it into the Jackson police department. Apparently there were no takers, but the police couldn’t / wouldn’t release it to her….apparently there is no law dealing with disposition so according to her, the Jackson police have rooms filled with bikes, watches, cameras, etc….. after x number of years they have a sale. She said that she’s not 100% sure on the technical details but she said that is what the town attorney told her. Maybe we should have a Wyoming attorney post….I wonder if any read this blog?
The law and ethics with this stuff are actually pretty interesting. (Who knew?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost,_mislaid,_and_abandoned_property
For example, the finder of “mislaid” property has a duty to find the rightful owner as the owner possibly knows where they left the property and are in the process of returning to retrieve it, or having someone else do so. For example, a wallet you found on a store counter, or car keys at a mountain hut.
But “lost” property on the other hand is unknown to the owner as to location. “At common law, the finder of a lost item could claim the right to possess the item against any person except the true owner or any previous possessors.” In other words, the ethics seem to be that if you find something that was lost, you can keep it unless the owner claims it, and you have no duty to try and find the owner, though doing so is the ethical alternative, as Carl did with the camera.
The main thing with Carl is that he makes extraordinary effort to get that glove back to the rightful owner. From what I hear that glove is actually a one-of prototype from Black Diamond of a solar powered heated glove made with a new fiber that is nearly indestructible as well as insulating to the equivalent of 3 inches of foam. The one-of proto cost BD at least $190,000 and is irreplaceable. Hence the black helicopter that’s been hovering over Carl’s house, and the obvious efforts to hack his cell phone.
I always knew Kinco was a front! I mean, why else would thousands of resort slaves be wearing them? The reason- hand/ mind control. The truly disturbing part of this conspiracy is B.D.s role in accepting the lucrative government contract…
Yeah, it’s the corporations! Root of all evil, especially when they’re in cahoots with the government, the other root of all evil!
Lou, I knew you were coming around. I’m sending you one, red, “I’m a closet Anarchist” t-shirt. These are printed on fabric liberated (at great peril) from the secret Nike sweatshop in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Brian, is that the same location where PETA says they’re doing the live animal testing of new shoe sole rubber? If so, I’ll send my 1% for the planet money to PETA, so they can pay the travel expenses for some protestors to head over there.
Actually, PETA is another secret government entity who’s mission is to subvert our food supply and replace it with a gmo substance that contains (again) mind control drugs. Wait a minute, some ones knocking on my door…
LOL
last season riding the chair I spotted a seasons pass on the snow so I skied down, picked it up, called the name out loud and a guy riding on the chair above me yells ” its mine ! “
I have found a few pipes over the years, including one bag of OK weed. One spring i found a ziplock bag of quarters, which financed a burger and a Bloody Mary at the base area when I was done with my session on the hill.
Of course the most meaningful ‘find’ was going into the BC one summer to retrive the backpack of a dear friend / ski parter who perished in a slide that previous winter…..that one was important.
We were hiking up to a summit when all of a sudden I noticed something out of the ordinary among the rocks under my feet. I took a closer look, and it turned out to be a $100 multitool in decent condition. It had a lot of surface rust, so I think it must have been there since the previous season, but once I got home that was easy to scrape off.
Since the area is fairly well travelled and it’d probably been a while since it was dropped, I never made any serious effort to return it, but I did keep an eye out in a couple of internet forums in case someone posted about “hey, I lost my mulittool at ___”, but that never happened.
As for returning stuff, I say that if you know (or can easily find out) who the owner is, give it back. If it’s marked for later retrieval (like the crossed ski poles marking the watch), leave it until it’s obvious that no one is coming for it. If it was lost/abandoned due to an accident or rescue effort, make a serious effort in getting the stuff back to the owners.