Wow! I’m impressed. Grand Teton National Park returned my lost Garmin 62s via overnight FedEx on their nickel. That’s great service. Because its recorded tracks were intact I can (I think) reconstruct what happened. Here’s the deal.
Karen and I had completed a nice 5.5 mile hike to Taggert Lake. As I took off my day pack, I removed the GPS and placed it on the Ridgeline’s bed rail, and then forgot about it. According to the track log, we returned to the truck at 1:25. At 1:32:16 we had changed shoes, placed everything but the forgotten GPS inside the truck, and backed out of the parking space. At 1:32:50 we exited the parking lot and accelerated onto the highway. The track ends here, so presumably this is where the GPS fell off onto the road, and the impact switched it off.
The track returns at 1:37:07 a little ways down the road from the parking lot exit. In other words, it lay in the road for 4 minutes (or it took 4 minutes for someone to find it and turn it back on). Three minutes later, at 1:40:04 the track begins to move down the road toward Moose—the visitor center and ranger station. At 1:44 the track ends, until 1:55.
At that time the track locates the GPS at the Moose ranger Headquarters, where it stays on for 5 minutes, maybe while a ranger was checking for an ID and address (which it did not have, alas, but will before I use it again). So, in less than 30 minutes the GPS had been found and turned in at Headquarters.
Now, I estimate that we arrived back at the Moose visitor center (just across the street from ranger headquarters) at 1:42 and realized the GPS was missing. We immediately headed back to search for it and obviously passed the car carrying it. At around 1:55 we were searching in the trailhead parking lot (and at the same time the GPS was being turned in at the ranger headquarters). By around 2:15 we were back at the visitor center filing a missing GPS report, while just across the street at ranger headquarters, a found GPS report had just been filled out.
This all happened on September 15. A month later (which seems a bit long), the two pieces of paper got matched up and I got a call from the park lost and found department, and the next day FedEx delivered my GPS.
