A message in a bottle that was thrown into Alberta's Bow River in 1970 came to rest in Canmore, where it was found more than four decades later.
At the end of August, Jean-Francois Ciani was picking up garbage along the river in Canmore when he found the bottle stuffed with a short note scrawled in pencil.
"I saw the message right inside and I saw the date, July 7, 1970, so I was like, 'Wow, that's pretty amazing,'" Ciani told CTV Calgary, explaining that the message included its sender's address in Manitoba.
Ciani took to the Internet to track down its author: Darilyn Yates.
On his second try, he found her despite now going by the name Darilyn Keene.
Keene, who is a hairdresser on Vancouver Island, wrote the note when she was 14 and on vacation with her family. She remembers the camping trip, but isn't sure exactly where the bottle was tossed in the river. She said she's just happy someone found her note.
"How many kids throw things in rivers and don't expect that anyone's going to find something? It just blows me away that they would find it after all of those years," she said.
Keene said the note Ciani found wasn't the only one she left in the mountains. Some are likely still out there, waiting to be found, she said.
"Probably some of them said, 'I'm going to be an actress or a veterinarian when I grow up."
Ciani said he plans to return the note and bottle to Keene.
With files from CTV Calgary's Scott McLean
