DENVER -- On a normal day, losing a canister of film would be a bummer for Denverite and hobby photographer Ashley Bauer. But after a stretch of misfortunes earlier this summer, the missing film roll was absolutely crushing.

Bauer had been dealing with the stresses of work and moving apartments. She’d dropped her keys down an elevator shaft and gotten into a fender bender in a grocery store parking lot. Bauer’s dog was experiencing some health issues — and then she discovered she’d lost a roll of film shot on her 1973 Olympus OM-1 camera during a late-July backpacking trip to the Blue Lakes on Colorado’s Western Slope.

“When I was going through my fanny pack and I realized I lost this film, I just totally broke down. I was so upset about it,” Bauer said in a recent interview.

She remembers telling her boyfriend that she hoped someone would find the canister and somehow get it back to her. And she may have just spoken the future into existence, because that’s exactly what happened.

In late July — just a couple of days after Bauer left the Western Slope — Sandy Lindh was hiking the Blue Lakes Trail with a friend from Grand Junction. This hike was something of a warm-up for subsequent adventures summiting Redcloud and Sunshine peaks, two 14ers located in the San Juan Mountains.

When the duo reached the Upper Blue Lake, they were alone and ventured up a slope to the left of the lake to take in the views from a different vantage point, Lindh said. At one point, she looked down and saw a bright yellow object with the word “Kodak” on the label.

“I thought, I haven’t seen one of these in a lifetime,” Lindh told The Denver Post.

With no prospective owners of the film nearby, Lindh decided to keep it and have it developed once she returned home to White Plains, New York. “I just imagined if I lost a roll of film I would want it back,” Lindh said.

The only realistic way to find the smiling hikers in the photographs, she assumed, was online. Lindh thought it was a long shot, but one worth taking.

So last Thursday, Lindh posted a few of the images to the 14ers.com Facebook group and asked its members, “Is this you!?”

The images, which have a naturally faded look likely from water damage, immediately captured the imagination of the digital community members. Within hours, the post had dozens of comments from people hoping to help amplify the message and find the owner of the pictures.

Internet sleuths attempted to nail down the age of the film by searching the exact harness worn by the dog in the photos. (We now know the pooch is Bauer’s 6-year-old Australian cattle dog mix named Chloe.) Some built colorful true crime narratives around the mysterious roll of film, scouring each picture for small details that could unlock the truth about what happened to its owner. Others simply relished in the nostalgia of the bygone point-and-shoot era.

“I know this isn’t about the photos, but where did you get these developed?” one person asked.

The post was shared more than 100 times across multiple hiking and Western Slope-focused Facebook pages before it eventually crossed the feed of one of Bauer’s friends who attended the backpacking trip. By Friday, Lindh and Bauer had connected, and by Saturday, the pictures, along with the negatives, were in the mail headed from New York to Colorado.

Both women were shocked by the response and how quickly the internet hive-mind helped solve this case of lost and found. Perhaps it was the feel-good nature of the story or maybe the allure of hard copy photos with no metadata to trace. Either way, those invested in the weekend-long drama got a picture-perfect ending.

“It’s definitely the happy ending that I needed,” Bauer said.

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