Kim Rasbeck lost her high school class ring somewhere in Great Sacandaga Lake nearly three decades ago, on a day out on the water with friends. She had long since given up on ever seeing it again. Then, this month, two strangers with metal detectors found it lying under a rock along the shoreline — and simply gave it back.
Michael Siegle and Dylan LaPort, hobbyist metal detectorists, were sweeping the exposed shoreline of the lake in New York's Adirondack foothills during a stretch of low water when their detector sounded off. "We heard the tone on the metal detector and then just flipped over a rock, and it was just sitting there," LaPort told local station WRGB. The gold ring was engraved with the name of Red Creek High School and the Class of 1988.
Tracking Down the Owner
Rather than keep or sell the ring, the pair tried to find its owner. A post on Facebook turned up nothing, so they called Red Creek High School directly. A school secretary recognized the class year and the name inscribed inside the band well enough to identify the owner as Kim Rasbeck, who had graduated decades earlier and now lives in Rochester.
Rasbeck confirmed she'd lost the ring on Great Sacandaga Lake 28 years ago and, according to UPI's account of the reunion, offered to pay the men for their trouble. They turned her down. "Glad I could get it back to her," Siegle said. "That's what we do out here. Find rings, give them back."
For Rasbeck, the gesture landed as more than just the return of an old piece of jewelry. "There's actually people out in the world that are still doing decent things," she said.
Great Sacandaga Lake, a roughly 42-mile-long reservoir built in the 1930s for flood control on the Hudson River, has quietly become a hot spot for metal-detecting hobbyists, whose finds tend to spike whenever water levels drop and stretches of shoreline that are normally submerged reappear. Siegle and LaPort's haul this time was, by their own account, one of the more satisfying: not a coin or a relic, but a piece of someone's history handed back nearly three decades late.
