So on March 13, 2009, my friend Jake and I went snowboarding up at Alpental. We were doing the runs on Chair 2, which reaches the summit of the mountain at over 5400 feet elevation and quite steep. We had been doing runs on Upper International and dropping over to Snake Dance and into the Elevator backcountry gate all day. At some point, I must have unzipped my jacket to grab a camera or something and forgot to re-zip it and my phone dropped out.
After going back to the lodge and reporting it missing and hearing that no one had returned any phones that fit my description, I basically just gave up. I mean, who would have found my phone in any of the places that I would have gone that day. My friend and I don’t typically stay on groomed trails for that long, and those areas aren’t exactly groomers – all double black diamond runs. So I just got home, went to the store, and purchased a replacement G1, which I still use today.
Out of the blue, on Monday (June 21, 2010), I got an instant message from a man who happens to work at Boeing like I do. He said he found a phone and he thinks it could be mine. At first I thought, I didn’t lose any work-cell phone, and not even thinking it could be my G1 I lost a while back. And then he said, it was a T-Mobile phone, and I was like… “i did lose a personal phone a year ago. But it was while snowboarding at Alpental.” He then said something along the lines of “ya this must be yours. I found it while hiking in the mountains. It was on the Upper International trail!”
All I had to say was “wow.”
I had no idea that this phone would be found, and even if it was found, that it could be turned on and usable! He said he would send me the phone back if I told him how to play Alien Blood Bath, one of the first games for Android. 
I got the phone back today, and to my surprise, it was barely scratched. In fact, it looks in much better condition, externally, than the G1 I am using now. The screen has a single small barely visible scratch on it, and there’s a minimal amount of pits in the soft rubberized casing, which may have been there before the day it was lost.
My co-worker and I turned the phone on and it booted up just like normal! We did notice that there was water damage to the LCD screen with some streaking and watermarks that are visible with white background, shown in the photo below. However, in colored backgrounds, its barely noticeable. Pretty amazing!
The touch screen is fully working, and it seems like the only other thing that doesnt work is external speaker — so no speaker phone or using my phone as a jambox. Using a headset or headphones works just fine. The handset still can make and receive calls, and it was running Android 1.1 pre-Cupcake at the time! Phone runs faster and smoother than my rooted, overclocked, eclair 2.1 rom.
I’m quite impressed how the phone survived this conditioning. Think about it, I lost in March 2009 at Alpental. It was DUMPING snow that month — I have a lot of videos of us snowboarding as reminder. It was probably stuck, buried in snow, and then had to go through a melt cycle, where it was sitting in running water and then buried in mud. In the late Spring and Summer it would have been subjected to very hot temperatures at that elevation and then rained upon in the fall and again snowed and frozen in the winter, and with the winter we saw in Seattle, it would have been rained upon heavily and then frozen at night over and over until being melted and buried in mud again, until being subjected to sun and warmth and to be found by a random stranger…. crazy.
update: so my last text message sent was to my buddy Bjorn: “Meeting at eidelweiss around noon!” (as you may know, eidelweiss is the name of Chair 2)
The lost and found G1 is the one on the left in the photo of 3 phones. The middle is my current phone.
