Mystery of Lost Camera With Nepal Earthquake Pictures Solved Using Facebook
A hiker in Washington found the camera on Mount St. Helens.
— -- A hiker who found a camera that had been lost on a remote trail on a Washington state mountain embarked on a new journey to find its owner.
Part of the urgency in returning the camera to the rightful owner was that it contained photos showing the rubble on the streets of Nepal after one of the recent earthquakes.
Greg Lentsch reportedly found the camera on Mount St. Helens May 3 and started looking through the photos in hopes of identifying an owner because there was no name or contact information in the case.
"What's their story? What were they doing in Nepal? Why were they on St. Helens?" he told ABC affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle.
From there, he posted a message in a local hikers Facebook group, but didn't have any leads.
In a second post, he wrote that while he "was initially reluctant," he decided to share photos from the camera hoping that someone would recognize the woman in the pictures. He shared five, including one of the rubble in Nepal and the woman in hiking gear and at what appears to be a wedding.
The wife of an employee at KOMO news shared the photos and the employee recognized the woman from a story they had published about a local woman who had just returned from Nepal after the 7.8-magnitude quake.
"I was amazed," Lentsch told ABC News. "It actually restored my faith in social media."
The mystery woman was identified as Kerry Sheils, a winemaker at her family's vineyard. "I thought the camera was long gone," she told ABC News, saying that the chances were "incredibly slim" that someone would find the camera considering where exactly she was when she lost it.
"We weren't even on the trail, we were both hiking back to the trail on the same place," she said.
She said she had photos not only from Nepal and her recent hike on Mount St. Helens, but also from trips to South America, Spain and Portugal.
Shiels and Lentsch were connected via Skype and they'll be meeting in person to return the camera, perhaps over a joint hike in a few months, well after Shiels travels to Seattle to get the camera from the reporter this afternoon.
"It was so out of the blue and so unexpected," Shiels said. "It's such a bizarre, small-world situation."
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