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Against all odds, Mass. man who lost wedding ring on N.H. mountain gets it back

“I instantly thought, ‘There’s no way. It’s a 10-mile loop trail. The odds of finding it are pretty dismal.’”

Tom Gately displays the gold wedding band he found by using a metal detector on snow covered on Mount Hancock New Hampshire's White Mountains. Brendan Cheever via AP

North Andover man Bill Giguere decided to hike New Hampshire’s Mount Hancock one day last week. But after the hike, he noticed something was missing: his wedding ring.

Giguere told WCVB-5 he realized the ring was gone as he got back to his car. He didn’t have time to re-hike the trail and didn’t know what to do.

So he shared his story with a Facebook group of hikers and hoped for the best.

Framingham men Brendan Cheever and Tom Gately belonged to the Facebook group, and they had plans to hike Mount Hancock a few days later anyway.

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“I instantly thought, ‘There’s no way. It’s a 10-mile loop trail. The odds of finding it are pretty dismal,’” Gately told WCVB-5.

Instead of losing hope of finding the stranger’s ring, Gately decided to bring a metal detector along on the hike.

Despite those 10 miles of trail, they actually found Giguere’s ring.

Cheever says that “it beeped and he’s, like, ‘I think I found it,’ and everybody’s, like, ‘What?’ and he just started scratching in the snow. There it was!”

“Everybody just started clapping,” Cheever told WCVB-5. “You couldn’t believe it.”

Giguere told the station he’s learned his lesson the hard way: Don’t take your wedding ring on a hike.

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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