About three weeks ago Brandy and Dave Van Gelder were heading to their remote cottage in Algonquin Park, which is only accessible by snowshoe at this time of year. Upon arrival Dave noticed the tailgate on his truck had fallen down and his pack was missing. Everything else had remained in place.
The pack has been with the couple on many adventures and holds more emotional value than the items that were in it.
“The backpack itself was very special because it went with us to base camp in Mount Everest,” said Dave. “It had some badges inside that I wanted to sew on the outside that I hadn’t gotten to yet. It was the backpack I was planning on keeping forever. It’s gone on many portage trips in the park and it was to have many more adventures.”
Their Mount Everest experience was to celebrate “five years of me being cancer-free,” added Brandy.
“We did a humanitarian trip when we were in Nepal as well,” said Dave, where they helped rebuild some rural schools after an earthquake using that pack to get to the location.
After realizing the pack was missing, the two got in the truck and back-tracked their steps. Not seeing it along the Hwy. 60 corridor they ended up back in Huntsville looking in parking lots. They even called the OPP to see if anyone had turned the pack in.
Some of the items in the pack were brand new, never-been-used specialty items with a monetary value of $800, not including the pack itself.
“We did as much as we could to find out if it was out there and someone found it and handed it in,” said Dave. “A friend at the OPP said it’s probably gone at this point and don’t count on it coming back.”
But being a glass-half-full thinker, Brandy was still hopeful.
“I said you have to have faith in humanity, it’s going to find its way back to us,” she said.
The two asked a friend if she could share the missing pack on Facebook as she has a lot of friends and followers on the social media platform. Dave sent her some photos and the post was shared over 300 times.
“Just over two weeks later she texted and said someone found it,” said Dave. “It was very surprising that it came back because I didn’t have any identification in it with a name or anything.”
A Good Samaritan found it just past Oxtongue and dropped it off at the Algonquin Outfitters store there. An employee went through the bag and found a Tamakwa guest pass.
“We have a cottage in the park on Tea Lake and Camp Tamakwa is where we park,” said Dave. “So we have a season pass but if a visitor comes then there’s a box you check for a guest pass. I had one and left it in my pack instead of putting it in the box.”
The employee called a maintenance employee for the camp, who picked up the pack thinking she knew who it belonged to as someone was visiting the camp that works there in the summer. She dropped the pack off at Home Hardware in Huntsville as that’s where the person camping currently works.
Realizing it wasn’t their employee’s pack, the store called the head office for Camp Tamakwa to ask if they might know, but as no one did it went back to the camp employee.
“Somehow they tracked down the Facebook post and it tracked back to me,” said Dave. “It was awesome. It’s like it was a mission to get back and no one knew how important it was. It was a nice story to make us feel happy during all the crappy times with this pandemic. Huntsville is a very caring town. Doing something small can mean a lot to an individual that you may not know and being honest and doing the right thing can go a long way.”
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Nice to share happy stories at this time.
I was born in Muskoka and know about kindness.
Enjoy your cabin in the woods♥️♥️
Such a feel good story and so welcomed during these challenging times. It’s important to celebrate each win. Thanks for sharing Brandy and Dave
What a great story and a real example of Muskoka kindness!!