Lost and Found on Programmer's Peak

Prologue

On July 14, 1789 the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, freed the prisoners and precipitated the French Revolution, one of the great turning points in human history. This has essentially nothing to do with our story except that it was exactly 190 years later when my wife and I were married. And a few days after that, on our honeymoon, we camped at Little Molas Lake, a little known but beautiful spot near Molas Pass between Durango and Silverton in southwestern Colorado. Behind the lake is an obscure unnamed peak which we, as software engineers, decided to call "Programmer's Peak" to go along with nearby Engineer Mountain. We climbed it that day. And several times since then on our anniversaries we've attempted to climb it again (with varying success).

Act One

So on July 9 2009, in celebration of our 30th anniversary, we decided to give it a try again. There is a trail off the trail

leading from Little Molas Lake up in the general direction of our Peak but to we had to leave the trail less than 1/2 way up and hike over the meadows. It's a very nice hike, albeit a little steep for our aging legs. Our strategy was to take it slow with lots of stops, "photo stops" as we euphemistically call them.

To document our adventure, I brought along two cameras: my "real" camera (a Canon 5D Mk II) and a brand new iPhone 3GS. My plan was to use the iPhone with its GPS to document the locations of the shots taken with the 5D. So as we climbed the iPhone was constantly in and out of the pocket of my backpack. And each time I was careful to power it down completely, not just leave it in screen locked mode, in order to save the battery.

Act Two

When we reached to top (hurray!) of course I took a off the trail

bunch of shots with the Canon and then reached for the iPhone to document the location. And it wasn't in my pocket! Or any of my other pockets. Or anywhere on the ground nearby. (And I noticed that the pocket that I kept it in was unzipped :-( I still had some hope that we might find it by retracing our steps on the way back down but that was very difficult since there is no trail and we had not paid much attention to our route on the way up. We tried but no luck. I was resigned that it was lost. And lost for good. If it had been lost on the trail or in a town maybe someone would find it. But here? No way. I started thinking about how much hassle it would be to buy a replacement iPhone when we returned home.

Intermission

Now as it turns out, Apple has built a neat into the iPhone a

nifty feature called "Find My iPhone". It works by sending a special message to the iPhone and receiving its GPS coordinates in the reply. You can also give it a short bit of text to display on the screen. In more ordinary circumstances it might have been just the thing. But as I explained to my wife as she tried to cheer me up, Find My iPhone only works if the iPhone is powered up and in range of the cell phone network. In this case it was certainly neither. I knew it was hopeless. By now I was thinking about what a few million years sitting out in the rain and snow would do to my shiny new toy.

Act Three

A few days later on July 12 for some reason I decided to give Find My iPhone a try anyway. Mostly just out of curiosity, I guess, to see what it would say when the iPhone was not reachable. But after a few seconds of "please wait"ing lo and behold! my iPhone was located!! And it was just a few miles away, in Durango. I could hardly believe it. But what the heck, I sent a (polite) message with my wife's cell phone number hoping that someone might see it. At this point, I thought it was probably in a Lost & Found bin somewhere. But then I saw that it was moving. And after a few more updates I could see that it was on the highway and moving toward me! I sent another message to please call my wife's cell. But I figured I was in for a long cat and mouse game trying to catch up to it and an unpleasant encounter if I was lucky enough to actually nail the guy.

And then the real miracle: her phone rang! The guy on the other end said, "I guess you and I both like the same sorts of high places" and we started to negotiate a rendezvous. I could hardly believe my good fortune. Not only did he find my iPhone in the most unlikely of places but he was, contrary to all my expectations, actually Mr. Nice Guy. He was actually eager to hook up and return it to me. We agreed to meet at Coal Bank Pass where he intended to hike for the day, just a few minutes away for me, too. I said we would be in a red Prius but then the call was dropped. With this much good luck already I figured we would just head for the rendezvous and hope for the best. But then a minute or so later my wife's phone beeped and displayed an SMS: "grey hyundai". We were all set!

Second Intermission

Rewind one day. Mr. Nice Guy (aka Joe Wallender) is hiking on our mountain. He sees a shiny new iPhone out in the middle of nowhere, picks it up and takes it back to his hotel. He plugs it in and recharges it. Despite the fact that it sat out in the rain and cold for a couple of days it works just fine. True to his Mr. Nice Guy moniker, he checks the iPhone's Favorites list and tries to call each of them in hopes of getting in touch with the real owner. But Murphy's Law intervenes again. First he calls my business partner, who also has an iPhone. But he's on vacation too, and so Joe gets his voice mail. He leaves a message. But Murphy has arranged for this to fall into a bug in AT&T's implementation of voice mail such that my partner doesn't get the message for several days, long after it's no longer relevant. Joe then calls my wife's office. Of course, she's on vacation, too, so he gets the security office. But they claim no such person works there (she's only been there for 20 years; what were they thinking?) So Joe's out of luck (I have a short Favorites list). He goes about his business hoping that the voice mail to my partner will eventually pan out.

Act Four

There's one more little twist in our little saga. It turns out that there are two separate parking lots at Coal Bank Pass. Joe was waiting at one while I was waiting at the other; neither of us knowing about the existence of the other lot. But my wife had noticed as we drove up there there were a few extra cars parked on the other side of the road. So after a few minutes she decided to walk over an check it out. Contact! My iPhone is back in my hand. Smiles all around!

All's well that ends well? I guess my wife was right when she said, "Most people are honest". In this case, it seems to me, it goes way beyond honest. Joe went way out of his way to help a perfect stranger. Maybe most people are not only honest but basically good. There's at least one for sure! This may not be a great turning point in history but it has restored my faith in the essential goodness of Man (and Apple's engineers smiley ).

Bill Arnett; last updated: 2009 Jul 30