Chris Wong lost his iPhone in the snow while skiing at Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont. Instead of writing it off, he came back a week later with his friend Lane, a cheap metal detector and a GoPro, and filmed the search. The video, Ski Slope iPhone Found with Metal Detector & GoPro, turned a common skier’s mishap into a small winter treasure hunt with a happy ending.
How the phone was lost on a mogul run
According to Wong’s account, he fell on a mogul run with his jacket pocket not fully zipped, and the phone slipped out somewhere in the bumps. The battery had died, so Find My iPhone could not locate it. His search by hand the next day went nowhere: a phone-sized object sinks easily into soft snow, he did not know the exact spot, and the piles and troughs of a mogul field all look alike.
After buying a replacement phone, he ordered an inexpensive metal detector from Amazon and returned the following weekend with Lane to sweep the slope where he had fallen, recording the hunt on a GoPro. He posted the film on YouTube on 24 February 2014.
Why a metal detector works in snow
A metal detector sends a changing magnetic field from the coil in its search head. When that field passes over a metal object, it induces small electrical currents in the metal, and the detector picks up the disturbance as a signal. Snow is just frozen water and air, so it barely affects the field, which lets the detector “see” a phone through a layer of snow that would hide it completely from the eye.
The search head only covers a narrow strip at a time, so knowing roughly where the fall happened made all the difference. For Wong and Lane, that meant sweeping the area around his fall, and the video’s title gives away the ending: the iPhone was found, about two and a half minutes into the film. It had been in a Mophie battery case, which kept snow out of the ports, and the case still worked afterwards.
About Stratton Mountain Resort
Stratton stands in the town of Stratton in Windham County, southern Vermont, east of Manchester. The resort opened in 1961 with three double chairlifts and today has 99 trails, a summit at 3,875 feet (1,181 m) and a vertical drop of 2,003 feet (611 m). It holds a special place in snowboarding history: it was the first ski area to allow snowboarding and had the first snowboard school, and it hosted the Burton U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships from 1985 to 2012. Stratton is part of Alterra Mountain Company.
Explore more: music and attention on the slopes; what a resort snow-depth report measures.
Video: Ski Slope iPhone Found with Metal Detector & GoPro (published by Chris Wong).
Tips for not losing your phone while skiing
- Use a zipped inner chest pocket, not an outer hip pocket that opens in a fall.
- Check every zip before you push off, especially before mogul and tree runs.
- A phone kept close to your body also stays warmer, and cold drains batteries fast.
- If you lose something, note the run and the spot straight away, then tell ski patrol and the resort’s lost and found; staff can help and will know when a search is safe.
Search a closed or quiet slope only with the resort’s permission, and stay out of the way of skiers coming down.
Sources
- Video and photo: Chris Wong, Ski Slope iPhone Found with Metal Detector & GoPro
- Stratton Mountain Resort – Wikipedia
- Le Tribunal du Net: the phone found a week later (French)
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