During the summers in Grand Canyon National Park, lost and found coordinator Rose Lowe fields about 20 voicemails and receives 35 written reports a day from visitors who’ve misplaced items. Over her 27 years working in the lost and found departments at national parks, Lowe recalls some memorable finds, including a large stroller (“My first thought was, Where’s the baby?”) and a briefcase full of cash (“I didn’t even want to touch it”).

Lowe’s one-woman office is in a former two-car garage (“Model T cars, that is”) once belonging to a former park superintendent. The shelves are lined with 31 green milk crates (one for each day of the month) stuffed with lost items: wallets, hats, and cell phones that won’t stop ringing. In another room, there are 31 more crates, filled with the previous month’s losses, which will be donated or passed on to the National Park Service after 60 days. Lowe’s office is a revolving door of park staff running in with reports and objects and visitors looking for directions. It seems that one of the things people tend to lose in the Grand Canyon is their way.

My first communication from Lowe came as a voicemail. Last August, I’d left the Grand Canyon in a huff. It was my first time there, and my very first stop on a cross-country road trip. And in my less than 24 hours at the park, I managed to misplace my brand-new black Sony camera.

This road trip was as much practical as it was fun: I was moving the last five years of my life from Los Angeles to New York City. My 2015 Volkswagen Beetle was packed to the gills. In the parking lot of El Tovar Hotel, a historic lodge on the canyon’s South Rim, I emptied and repacked the car—twice. I scoured my room once more. I dug through tote bags and duffels. Then, deflated, I filled out a pencil-and-paper “Lost and Found” form at the front desk of the lodge and drove off with little faith.

A few days later, I heard from Lowe, who’d found a camera matching the description I’d written. She asked me for a bit of verification. In an email, I listed the camera’s make and model, sent a photo, and recounted the most recent video taken on the device, which was of me—speechless as I saw the canyon for the first time. “The first video is a beautiful long-haired brunette who seems unable to find her words,” she confirmed.

The camera was back in my hands later that month, after a misunderstanding with the shipping company in New York, a journey to a warehouse, and a heroic effort on Lowe’s part to amend it all.

But it was only after interviewing Lowe for this story that I fully appreciated the scale of her heroism.

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In the early to mid-2000s, Lowe was working as a lost and found coordinator at Yosemite National Park when a visitor brought a pair of heavy brown work boots into her office. When they explained where they’d found the shoes, Lowe felt a pang of recognition: Four days earlier, a ranger had gone missing near that very trail.

Lowe immediately alerted the park rangers, who rushed to her office and identified the boots as those belonging to the missing person. Using the location where the shoes were discovered, the National Park Service was able to find him. But it was too late; the ranger had taken a fatal fall onto a ledge below the trail. “It’s the one case that just stays with me,” Lowe says.

Lowe, who’s 69, got her start in national parks as a housekeeper at the Grand Canyon in 1992. She moved to Yosemite seven years later, working closely with security personnel as an assistant housekeeping manager. When the security supervisor noticed the knack Lowe had for recovering lost items, they asked if she’d interview for the lost and found coordinator position, a role that would fall under the security department. After working in the position at Yosemite for nearly 20 years, she returned to the Grand Canyon in 2019—this time as a seasoned lost and found coordinator.

While Lowe works closely with other park staff, she is technically the only person in her department. The scale of her work is formidable: Employed by the Grand Canyon’s largest concessionaire, Lowe is responsible for all lost items found around its South Rim properties, which include three lodges, four restaurants, and six gift shops. The 1.2 million-acre park receives almost five million visitors a year, and the South Rim is its most highly trafficked area.

Lowe lives in Grand Canyon Village—the in-park community with its own medical clinic, postal code, and school. She walks to her office almost every day. Her family—an adult son, his wife, and their three children—live an hour’s drive away. “I love being up here,” Lowe says. “I love working with people and being part of this big system.”

According to Lowe, many park visitors lose items in the lodges’ guest rooms. Ironically, it’s the very act of trying to keep something safe that often gets it lost: Travelers store precious items in out-of-sight spots that they cannot locate when it’s time to leave. Frequently, the housekeeping staff find the objects and turn them in to Lowe.

But the items themselves are not what stand out to Lowe about her work. “What makes this job so interesting for me is that I care about people,” she says.

There was the woman who came to the park with her husband every year for their wedding anniversary. In 2023, after he’d died of cancer, she returned to the park alone to carry on the tradition. Overcome by emotion on that first trip without him, she ended up misplacing her passport. When Lowe returned it to her, the woman told the story of her husband, and by the end of the conversation, both she and Lowe were crying. “I think I wind up with a lot of sentimental stories like that,” Lowe says.

In addition to many stories, Lowe has amassed piles of thank-you cards over the years. “This is what keeps me going,” she says. “The majority of people are responsible. They’re respectable. They’re grateful.”

Recently, the front desk staff at a lodge turned in one of the smallest objects Lowe’s ever safeguarded: a tiny silver button. While she doesn’t anticipate anybody calling about it, she’s keeping it anyway. It’s taped up hopefully on the corkboard above her desk: “You never know.”

When I thank her once more for my camera, she’s humble as ever: “It wasn’t just me,” she says. “It was everybody else who helped find it too. I was just the lucky one who got to send it back to you.”•