Lost Memory Card on PCT in the Sierra

Please, if by any chance you found the card, contact me at hike@yourownhike.com or via the contact form on this site.

My dear wife and I went on a weeklong backpack from Pine Creek, doing a mostly cross-country route via Italy Pass, briefly touching the PCT between Senger Pass and the Piute Canyon bridge.

When we were walking past the MTR connector trail, my memory card reached capacity and I switched to a new one. The full one I put in the small compartment of my chest carrier, but I didn’t see it’s not closed all the way. I could blame it on being distracted and tired, but it was totally my fault, I’m an idiot.

We continued to the bridge, turned off the PCT (before crossing the bridge), camped a bit up the canyon. Next day, after we already hiked 3 miles up into Piute Canyon, I realized the card was gone. We hiked back to the campsite, checked everything. A bit later, we walked all the way to the connector trail to the exact spot where I switched them, but of course, no card. Then a small hailstorm hit, and it was actually the most fun part of the day.

The card is a 64-gigabyte Sandisk, like the one pictured here, but it was in a translucent white sleeve. It has approximately 2,400 files on it, all with .CR2 extension (Cannon’s raw format). If you found the card and look at the pictures, the first few will be of some worn Leki hiking pole tips, the rest from this trip. At the beginning, you should see a small red car with CA plates starting and ending in the number 8.

I’m almost sure the card was lost right after I switched them, somewhere around mile 858 of the PCT, between the two MTR connector trails.

Thank you so much for reading this!

Steven