Wallet lost 48 years ago on mountain found & returned — incl. the money
Published: January 11, 2007
He lost the billfold more than four decades ago, several thousand feet up the side of a Colorado mountain.
Paul Thiel, 69, only vaguely remembers what happened on the side of Mount Sheridan, a 13,748-foot peak near Leadville, Colo.
It was September 1958, and Thiel — then a 20-year-old geology student at Washington University — was climbing the summit with fellow counselors at the Big Spring Ranch, a children’s summer camp.
Thiel shrugged at the loss and moved on with his life.
But this week, more than 48 years after he lost the wallet, the Kirkwood resident was counting the $12 still in it and staring at his old drivers license — delivered after a climber found it poking out of a snowbank.
Thiel’s memory of the missing wallet might be foggy now, but he distinctly remembers “sledding” down a steep snowbank on Mount Sheridan — only he used his rear end in lieu of a sled.
He suspects that stunt — the last hijinks of what he considers “the happiest summer in my life” — probably knocked the wallet from his pocket. He didn’t notice that it was missing until he was down the mountain and, as a skinny kid who never quite got used to the thin air of a mountaintop, he had no intention of retracing his steps.
In 2002, physics professor Scott Robertson was climbing the same mountain with a group of his students from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“There was a snowbank, and it was melting back. And you could see half of a wallet peeking out,” Robertson said. “It was soaking wet. We opened it, or peeled it apart, and found the old licenses and money.”
Robertson could read Thiel’s name on the paper drivers license and Social Security card, so he tried to track him down on the Internet but couldn’t find a match.
Last week, Robertson came across the wallet again while cleaning out his desk. He tried a computer search again, and he found Thiel’s phone number.
Robertson told Thiel that he thought the wallet and its contents were from the 1940s.
“I thought it was my dad’s, and it wasn’t until I got it in the mail that I realized it was mine,” said Thiel, a real-estate agent and writer.
Animals have chewed on the brown leather wallet, and it has split into a few pieces. But many of the contents are remarkably well-preserved, considering how long they were exposed to the elements.
Inside was Thiel’s draft card; fishing permit; some business cards of his father’s; a Missouri-Pacific train ticket; his drivers license; and another license to drive state vehicles in Montana, where he spent a previous summer interning for the Bureau of Reclamation.
And there’s a $10 bill and two $1 silver certificates
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