It was a message in a bottle that led avid geocacher Jean Francois Cianci from Canmore to a small village in British Columbia.
Geocaching is a virtual hide and seek game that is played in the great outdoors using GPS coordinates as a guide to a hidden cache, usually consisting of trinkets and a log book.
Cianci was out on a geocache hunt when he unearthed an unexpected surprise.
“I saw there was a note and the first thing I could see was a date,” he explains. “July 7 1970, from that moment I knew I had something special there.”
The note washed up on the shore near Lac Des Arcs, likely carried by the flood waters.
Along with the date, the note included a message which read “Anyone finding this bottle please contact: Darilyn Yates and Georgia Love,” it also had an address for Dauphin, Manitoba.
Cianci immediately set out on a pursuit to track down the author of the note.
“It’s very unique, this is a once in a lifetime find and I was determined to find out who it was,” he said.
His discovery led him on a journey from near Canmore, to a small town hair salon in Cumberland, BC where he found Darilyn Keene.
He was able to track her down by her maiden name, Yates, then through the Dauphine Herald.
“Using her dad’s name and following that trail I was able to see that he had moved to Comox,” said Cianci.
Darilyn Keene was astounded.
“The guy did his homework,” Keene said. “He worked hard and he found pictures of myself and my older sister in community theatre when we were young, later he found my father’s obituary.”
Cianci tracked down her email and sent her the photo of the note to trigger her memory.
In the summer of 1970 she would have been 13 years old.
Keene says she used to camp in the Canmore area with her family, she thinks she tossed it somewhere in the Bow River.
And Cianci plans to do just that.
He said he will venture to return it to Keene on July 7 of next year, 45 years after she originally wrote the note.
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