Woman Reunited With Treasured Photographs 13 Years After Dropping Her Camera In Colorado River

The owner of a missing camera was reunited with it thanks to a miraculous discovery. After sinking to the bottom of the Colorado River in 2005, a digital camera that had been missing for 13 years was finally found.

In 2010, not long after her best friend's wedding, Coral Amayi was tubing down the Animas River when she lost her camera.

"I had gotten tossed from my tube at Smelter Rapid," she said, as per a report in Fox News. "And I returned, got my tube, and my camera was missing."

Amayi was devastated since she knew many photographs on her camera hadn't been transferred to her computer.

"I remember getting back to my boyfriend¡¯s house and uncontrollably crying and upset," she said.

She had given up hope of ever seeing the camera again because of the depth and speed of the water.

Until this week, that is, when a fisherman discovered something odd protruding from the ground in waist-deep water.

"I was walking along and saw it sticking out of the sand," Spencer Greiner said.

"It was in rough shape, so I really didn¡¯t have any hopes of getting anything off of it; I was just planning to throw it away, and then curiosity got the best of me, and I had to see what was on it."

(Credit: Coral Amayi

Greiner pried open the memory card's lid with a screwdriver, releasing a rush of water.

"I was like, ¡®Yeah, this is probably not going to work at all,'" Greiner said.

"But I plugged it into the computer, and it read immediately, and I was like, ¡®Oh cool, let¡¯s see what sort of treasures we¡¯re going to find on this memory card.'"

Photos from a tubing trip, bachelorette party, and wedding were among the first things Greiner saw, and he realized he had to track down the rightful owner promptly.

To get some input, he posted some of the images to a Facebook group for people in Durango and posed the question:

"Did you get married on June 12th, 2010, in the Durango area? Did you have an ugly brown stretch station wagon at your bachelorette party? Do you recognize any of these people? If so, please get in touch with me."

Greiner said people began seeing themselves in the pictures after just one hour.

"It was less than an hour after I made the post, and the groom from the wedding was like, ¡®That¡¯s my wife and me!¡¯" Greiner said. "So I was shocked that it happened so quickly."

The couple immediately located Amayi, who was away at a business conference and notified her of the exciting news.

"I was just totally dumbfounded," Amayi said.

"And I got up and was like dancing in the bathroom, and I was like, ¡®Who am I going to tell?! I need to tell this to somebody like right now.¡¯"

In the next week, Greiner will email all the photographs to Amayi.

He estimates it floated downstream from where she lost it for around 1.2 miles.

"For it to have been in the river for 13 years, I thought that was just astounding really," he said.

"It just blows my mind that an SD card still worked after all that time," Amayi said.

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