Fisherman finds old camera in Colorado river with an incredible story behind it
Colorado - While Spencer Greiner was fishing in the Animas River in Colorado a few weeks ago, he spotted something unusual in the water.
"I was walking along and saw it sticking out of the sand," Greiner told Fox 31.
Greiner took the object out of the water, removed all the sand, and saw that it was an old Olympus camera.
"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," the avid fisherman explained.
But Greiner's curiosity got the better of him, and he gave the old camera another chance. He used a screwdriver to open the device, releasing a lot of water. Then he plugged the Olympus' memory card into his computer, and sure enough, there were still photos on the camera!
There were images of a tubing trip, wedding pictures, and snapshots from a bachelorette party.
Greiner posted his spectacular find on Facebook in an effort to find the camera's owner.
Olympus camera's original owner found through Facebook!
Within a few hours, several people contacted the finder, including the groom in the pictures.
"That's me and my wife!" the man wrote.
"I was shocked that it happened so quickly," Greiner recounted.
But it turns out the camera belonged to someone else. During the conversation, it came out that the owner's name was Coral Amayi. She had lost the Olympus 13 years prior while tubing in the Animas River in 2010 shortly after her best friend's wedding.
"I remember getting back to my boyfriend's house and uncontrollably crying and upset," Amayi said after the camera was discovered. Many of the pictures hadn't yet been uploaded to her computer when the device was lost.
"It just blows my mind that an SD card still worked after all that time," she gushed.
"For it to have been in the river for 13 years, I thought that was just astounding, really," Greiner added.
Cover photo: Screenshot/Facebook/Coral Elise Amayi