A wedding ring that was lost in Wells Gray Park has apparently been found - with help from a letter in the Times.
Belgian journalist Nele Vermoesen sent the Times a letter last September. She and her husband had been married the previous month and were spending their honeymoon in British Columbia and Alberta.
On Saturday, Sept. 17, while visiting the Ray Farm in Wells Gray Park she suddenly became aware that she had lost her wedding ring. She had a photo of herself taken at Dawson Falls a short time earlier and it showed she had the ring on then. She felt she must have lost it at Dawson Falls, Helmcken Falls or the Ray Farm.
“We had the best journey so far with beautiful weather but today in Wells Gray, along with the first rain in our vacation came the first bad experience, sadly....” she wrote.
We posted Vermoesen’s letter on clearwatertimes.com right away, and printed it in the Sept. 26 issue of the Times.
Last week we heard from Ray Hawkins, a plumber who lives in Logan Lake and works in Merritt. He said he found the missing ring at the Ray Farm while hunting in Wells Gray Park the weekend before last.
His hunting partner had secured a place in the limited entry moose hunt in the park.
They had to postpone their trip several times and only just made it in for the last weekend of the hunt.
After spending a day hunting in the Clearwater River Valley, they stopped in at the Ray Farm to look at the old buildings.
While there, Hawkins spotted what looked like a key ring stuck in the ground next to a garbage container. He picked it up, cleaned it off a bit, and saw it was in fact a wedding ring.
“I was going to leave on a post, thinking whoever had lost it would come back and find it, but my buddy said I should keep it and try to find out whom it belongs to,” he said.
Hawkins thought Vermoesen likely caught her ring on the garbage container as she put something in.
When he got the chance he searched on the Internet for “wedding ring” and “Wells Gray Park” and up popped the new bride’s letter that ran in the Times.
“Wow! When I saw that, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It just seemed so unlikely.”
The newspaper didn’t include Vermoesen’s contact information with her letter but instead asked people to contact the Times.
“Thank you so much for contacting me!” said Vermoesen in an email to the Times. “I had already given up hope that I would see my wedding ring again, but this sounds like really good news! I can hardly believe that somebody actually found it after all those weeks and on top of that has taken the effort to find out who it belongs to. Canadians definitely are nice people! I surely will contact the man who found the ring and I will keep you informed what happens next.”
