Lost gold engagement ring with beautiful diamond in Longview, WA. – FOUND!
Early Sunday morning, I got a call from Connor in Longview, Washington. His wife had lost her wedding ring, and he was hoping I could help track it down.
A couple of days earlier, the two of them had been tossing a football in their front yard when, mid-throw, his wife saw her diamond ring slip off her finger. She watched it catch the light as it sailed through the air before disappearing somewhere in the lawn. Over the next few days, Connor, his wife, and a group of friends searched tirelessly—on their hands and knees, combing through the grass. They even sectioned off the area they believed it landed in and carefully cut the lawn down to the dirt with scissors. When that didn’t work, they bought a metal detector, only to discover it wasn’t as straightforward as they’d hoped.
The yard presented a unique challenge. The ring had been lost near pad-mounted electrical transformer boxes, and the property sat beneath overhead power lines. Between the underground conduit and the electrical interference from above, the detector constantly gave false signals. Thinking the issue might be the equipment, they upgraded to a better model—but the results were the same.
That’s when they found me on RingFinders.
We scheduled a visit for later that day, and my wife, my 10-year-old daughter, and I made the trip out. We began by gridding off the front yard and doing a careful sweep. I adjusted my detector settings several times to compensate for the electrica
l interference. After covering the most likely areas, I noticed an old project pickup truck sitting near where they had been playing. It had no engine and looked like it hadn’t moved in quite some time.
I asked Connor if we could shift it. He hooked up some tow straps and pulled it forward about 15 feet, giving us access to the ground beneath. Earlier, my wife had tried reaching under it with a pinpointer, but the truck’s metal frame had made it impossible to get a clear signal.
Once the truck was out of the way, I made a few passes over the patch of overgrown grass where it had been sitting. Then—BOOM. A strong, clean signal, shallow and right in the gold range. I bent down, lifted a clump of dried grass—likely tossed there when they had hand cut the lawn with scissors—and there it was. The ring, nestled at the bottom.
I handed it to my wife, who presented it to Connor just as he was finishing parking the truck. The look on his face said everything—pure relief and joy. He was incredibly generous and later left us a kind review that we’ve since added to our testimonials.
As we drove home, I thought about something my daughter had done before we left for Longview on our ring find—she had prayed that we’d find the ring. Well, prayer answered! 🙏
Yes unfortunately another lost ring? Thought she had lost it at her brother-in-laws house at a birthday party. After covering that location we then went to her home and recreated her morning that day. Worked a few areas around her house then she remembered she took a walk into the woods so off we went. Swinging the metal detector along a wooded trail to a beautiful location turned up nothing. Of course I kept swinging on the way back and actually spotted it on the ground a bit off the trail and made the find. It is interesting how a ring ends up where it is eventually found. Every time I make a find I learn something new about how and where to look. It is not as simple as it seems, and why we get calls from people who have spent days searching. So yes we can usually help and often its is not always with the metal detector or in the location believed to be.
Got a call for a lost ring in Ferndale Washington. He was doing yard work and throwing all his debris over a fence into a field spreading it out as he went along. So of course he thought it flew off his finger while flinging plant cuttings. Often a lost item isn’t where you think its is. Unfortunately the only way to rule out the idea is to search. It was a straight forward area of search that turned up nothing. I then will try to recreate the scene and take the client back in time to relive the moment before the obvious to after. Help them walk through it and usually some other locations or ideas will turn up. Unfortunately in this case that did not help either. I kept swinging back to my car and found it in the parking area. Another location where people often lose items.
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