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Lost Rings Found on Starr
King Trail Editor's note: the following interesting story appeared in the Coös County Democrat and is reprinted by permission. For nine months Barbara Rosendahl of Bristol has missed wearing the wedding band and diamond engagement ring given her by her husband Eric, whom she married in 1996. The two rings fell out of her pants pocket on Sept. 13, 2003, when she was peak-bagging on Mt. Waumbek, one of the 48 4,000-foot White Mountain summits required to be climbed for those aiming to be members of the Four Thousand Footer Club. Distraught at losing her rings, she said in a telephone interview on Friday evening, that she had returned that weekend to climb halfway up the Starr King Trail in the rain with her husband. And on another day had lugged a metal detector up the three-and-a-half-mile mountain trail, scanning both sides of the pathway in a desperate search for her sentimentally valuable rings. Ms. Rosendahl said she had tucked her rings in her pocket when she was making piecrusts and found that the dough was sticking into the curved crevasses that make up the setting of her Marquis-cut diamond ring. Apparently, she said, her rings and her trail map were tucked in the same pocket. When her own efforts at finding her two rings failed, Ms. Rosendahl turned to the Internet and posted news of her loss on hiking club websites, including that of the Randolph Mountain Club whicht maintains the Starr King Trail, north of the Waumbek Golf Course on Route 2 in Jefferson Village. Once the colorful leaves of autumn had fallen from the maples and beeches on the south-facing slopes, Ms. Rosendahl said she gave up any hope that her rings would ever be found.
“I felt awfully guilty — and, yes, stupid,” she recalled. But on Sunday, June 20, Julie George of Fryeburg, Me., who works in the accounting department at Settlers’ Green in North Conway, and her sister Joyce Layne of Osterville, Mass., hiked the Starr King Trail. Although Ms. George and another sister have already earned membership in the coveted Four Thousand Footer Club, Ms. Layne has not yet achieved this goal. “We were hiking on the Starr King Trail on Sunday,” Ms. George posted to the RMC message board. “My sister, watching where she steps, found a wedding band and diamond lying in the trail (between the 3,900-foot summit of Mount Starr King and the wooded summit of Mount Waumbek). It is obvious they slipped off someone’s finger.” Alerted by RMC trails chair Doug Mayer of Randolph that this message had been posted on Monday morning, June 21, this reporter telephoned Ms. George on Friday morning, shortly after she arrived at work. It turned out she had not yet looked at the site. Later that day Ms. George finally reached Ms. Rosendahl. “I just got off the phone with a very excited Barbara Rosendahl,” she e-mailed. “They are definitely her rings, and she is going to connect with my sister and meet her somewhere to get them back. It is unbelievable that they sat in the trail for nine months! Leave it to my sister who loves flowers and scat and is always on the lookout for both!” Meanwhile, the two sisters, both in their 40s, are already planning another hike, up Mount Cabot, which tops out at 4,170 feet, via The Horn in the Kilkenny. Ms. Rosendahl was profuse in
her appreciation of the honesty within the hiking community as
well as its close-knit and helpful nature. Members of hiking
clubs other than the RMC, she said, suggested additional sites
where she could post the news of her losing her rings, with some
forwarding on her pleas for assistance without even being asked
to.
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And,
with the demands of both a two-and-a-half-year-old son and a
banking career, she had little time to devote to fretting over
the winter months when snow piled up on the two mountains and
then later melted, washing down the treadway and spilling over
water bars.