Pictures, memories from lost camera going home

After three years, pictures recovered from a lost and wrecked camera in Glacier National Park are ready to make a 1,200-mile journey home to Lincoln.

Columbia Falls photographer Chris Peterson last month discovered the camera near Avalanche Creek. Pictures he recovered from its memory card indicated the owner might be a Lincoln, Nebraska, woman. On Saturday, he found her.

After seeing one of the pictures in Saturday’s Journal Star, Caroline Rezac called the newspaper to say the camera was hers. She and family members recognized themselves and a former car in the picture.

“To see that was totally shocking,” Rezac said.

She and her husband, John, were vacationing in Glacier three years ago, she said. John was taking pictures with a different camera, leaning over, when the other camera fell from his pocket and into a stream. The current swept it away before they could recover it.

Rezac now eagerly awaits its return, not to take pictures — the camera is beyond repair — but to see the images on its memory card.

She isn’t sure how old some might be. Peterson, a photographer for the Hungry Horse News, said some date to well before the Rezacs’ Montana vacation.

“It’s the lady’s life for the past seven years,” Peterson said last week.

Rezac is particularly excited to see a picture of her family and Homer — a 1954 Ford Crestliner convertible.

It was taken a few years ago in front of her mother’s Lincoln home.

Homer meant a lot to her family, Rezac said. Her late father, Harold Thies, a mechanic who restored Model Ts and Model A’s when Caroline was a little girl, had restored the Crestliner using parts from three cars.

Her father absolutely loved Homer, Rezac said.

“He told my mom once that he dreamt that when he died, he was buried with it or something like that,” she said.

Rezac’s mom later sold Homer to Lincoln car collector Harold Kurtzer.

Peterson said he was looking to photograph harlequin ducks when he noticed the wrecked camera resting in gravel near a creek. It likely traveled three-quarters of a mile downstream from where it fell, he said.

Examining the mud-encrusted point-and-shoot, he wondered if its memory card might yet function. Plugging it into a card reader, he was “pretty surprised” when it did.

“It wasn’t even a good card,” he said, but a “cheap, department store card” and it also had mud on it.

By searching through the photos, Peterson determined the woman who owned the card likely lived in Lincoln, so Peterson contacted the Lincoln Journal Star, which ran a story about the camera on its front page.

The camera’s owner and finder are still working out how to get the pictures to Lincoln. Peterson might ship the card here or burn its images onto a CD to mail.

Rezac just wants them back, for herself and for the memory of her father.

“His great-grandkids were in that car, getting their picture taken. He would’ve loved that,” she said. “He would’ve loved that.”

Reprinted with permission of Lincoln Journal Star. Reach the writer at 402-473-7223 or mshoro@journalstar.com. On Twitter @mike_shoro.