LAUREL HIGHLANDS, Pennsylvania — Andrea Rodi began Saturday morning with her boyfriend enjoying a mini-vacation in Stoystown; it was the final day of their weekend getaway spent traversing the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail.
“We rented a cute little cabin near the Route 30 entrance to the trail and brought our snowshoes and cross-country skis and all of that, just to get outside and get away,” she said of the popular trail located four hours from her Chester County home.
Despite the dense snow on the trail and the 20-degree temperature outside, Saturday was a rare winter sunny day in Western Pennsylvania, Rodi said, and they were pumped to enjoy it: “We were out the day before when it was gray and a lot colder. So, because of the sun, 22 degrees felt like 80 degrees.”
She placed her cellphone in her vest pocket, and she then put her backpack on, and they started hiking.
“About a mile into the hike, I asked my boyfriend to open up my backpack because I wanted to take a couple pictures,” she said.
He then unzipped everything and pulled out her vest. But there was no cellphone.
“It had vanished,” she said. She started questioning whether she’d even put it in there and wondered whether perhaps she had left it in her car after all.
They continued hiking another mile and a half, turned around, and walked back to the car. They still could not find it.
“At this point, I really felt like it’s just somewhere in this car, and I can’t locate it. And it was four o’clock, and we didn’t have the Airbnb anymore, so we had a three-and-a-half-hour drive home,” she said.
As luck would have it, her boyfriend’s cellphone wasn’t working. That left her with no options to log into her Apple account and use the Find My iPhone service to locate the device.
Four hours later, she arrived home and logged into her iPad to start the search: “I thought for sure it was going to find it right outside my door in my car. And then, all of a sudden, the app starts moving all the way across the state to Route 30 in Somerset County.
“My boyfriend and I looked at the map really hard. And there it was, right by the creek where we had been rummaging through my pack. We debated on driving back out there, but the snowstorm was coming, and it was like 9:30 at night, so we decided we were going to drive out in the morning,” she said.
Rodi said that had this been a personal cellphone, she would have probably chalked up the loss and ordered a new one: “This was my work phone, and I felt a responsibility to do what I could to locate it.”
She decided to take one last long-shot chance and posted on the Laurel Highland Trail Facebook group she belonged to about the phone:
Then, something magical happened.
Despite the late hour (10 at night) and despite the increasingly toxic and political nature of so many Facebook groups, grace found a way to show up just in time.
Michael Crowe was sitting at home, his wife and children already abed. The avid hiker and runner had just signed on to Facebook when he saw there were new notifications on the LHHT Facebook group.
He just checked in to see what was going on when he saw Rodi’s post. “I was like, man, we’ve been cooped up so much over the last 11 months, there’s no group activities or very little things going on, and my wife and I are both software engineers and have both been working from home the entire time,” said Crowe, explaining that he has spent his entire lifetime hiking, training, and running races along the LHHT.
For Crowe, Rodi’s predicament was a godsend.
“I was like, this just sounds like a fantastic idea. Fantastic reason to get outside. Go for a night hike, hopefully help someone find their phone,” he explained.
He walked into the bedroom to tell his wife, and her response was that she thought he was crazy.
He didn’t deny it; she laughed, acknowledged night hiking wasn’t out of the norm for him, and gave her blessing.
Crowe looked at the map that Rodi had put on her LHHT Facebook post that came from her iPhone tracking device posted on the page. He was leaving his home, and he would be there in 45 minutes and set off on the 35-plus-mile adventure to the trailhead to find her phone.
Meanwhile, members of the group cheered him on in real-time after he said that he was heading out.
When he posted, “I am at the trailhead wish me luck,” the group cheered him on.
Aside from the cold, the conditions were ideal: no wind, several inches of snow, and not a cloud in the sky.
“It was beautiful.”
Crowe said that Rodi gave pretty solid directions in her post, and with the attached map, “She thought it was right at mile 47 because there is a creek at mile marker 47. But it turns out her phone was a quarter-mile further up the trail at a different creek,” he said.
“That creek is really at mile 47 and a quarter. But, I was able to track myself on Google Maps and resize Google Maps on my phone so it just about matched her map. And I was able to switch between the two and track by location in relation to where her map said her phone was,” he said.
It was something only a software engineer, or perhaps a teenager, would do.
“The only way I found where they stopped was they were using trekking poles, and I could see along the trail as I hiked in that there was very well-spaced-out pole marks as they hiked along,” he explained.
Evidently, after they dropped the phone, they put one of their poles down right on top of the phone and pushed it down into the snow as they walked away.
“The only reason I stopped and looked around at that spot was the very suspicious looking, long, skinny hole underneath, so I dug my hand down in, and sure enough, there was a phone buried in the deep snow,” he said.
And it was still on.
He immediately posted a photo of the phone in the snow on the LHHT Facebook group.
Most of the comments said his adventure had restored their faith in humanity, some said they cried, and some were sad that the adventure that they had all rallied around was over.
“I know a lot of people in that group,” said Crowe. “I hike with a lot of people or trail run with a lot of people that are on that group. I would argue my rescue mission was not a solo effort.”
“I may have gone out into the woods by myself. But I think the community, being what it is, was with me,” he said.
Log on anytime on the LHHT, and you will see people often offering each other rides from trailhead to trailhead or picking up and driving through-hikers; it is a pretty tightknit community of pretty active people.
“So, I think there’s a lot of motivation there when you see others helping others, when you see people helping people, to want to be part of that, to want to give something back,” Crowe said.
“I know everybody views, especially on Facebook, there’s so much division and craziness, and I just don’t think it’s really representative of people as a whole,” he said. “I think there are more people that are kind and helpful. We just don’t seem to talk about them enough,” he said.
Crowe made contact with Andrea on Sunday morning — she was asleep when he found it after midnight — and sent off her phone that afternoon.
“I offered him the reward, but that was not his motivation,” she said.
This story isn’t really about a lost cellphone. Rather, it’s about how these hikers, who so enjoy a trail that runs 70 miles along Laurel Mountain near Johnstown, showed a wholesome side of America that we rarely discuss in daily life.
