Anchorage Daily News

Tracy Dahl, a Seattle-based flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, was strolling along the Coastal Trail last month when she flipped her hand, accidentally launching her engagement ring -- a platinum band with a princess-cut diamond in the center-- into the air. She watched it sail over a fence onto the marsh grass.

Frantic, she climbed the fence and searched the weeds, but there was no ring. Her fiance said he'd buy her another one. It wasn't a person, he said. That just made her feel worse.

"I just thought it was gone forever," she said.

A series of phone calls led her to Dennis Lundine, one of the city's premiere experts in the finding of lost objects.

Lundine, 61, has been hunting the misplaced, submerged and buried for three decades, using a collection of metal detectors to ferret out drug dealer bullets in walls, fist-sized gold nuggets in creeks and, in a somewhat alarming incident during a Korean vacation, a 250-pound unexploded bomb buried in the dirt.

Engagements rings are his specialty.

After clearing it with the Alaska Railroad, Lundine headed down to the spot near Elderberry Park where Dahl lost her ring. She'd marked it with a ribbon on the fence. He split the area into a grid, took out his detector and waved it over the muddy grass, listening for a buzz that signals platinum. It wasn't long until he fished something blingy out of the mud.

A few weeks later he met with Dahl to return the ring. She wanted to pay him, but he wouldn't take any money. He enjoys a challenge, he said.

"When you find something, it's just the look on their face."

Lundine is president of Alaska Treasure Seekers, an Southcentral-based group of metal detection hobbyists that numbers around 115. The seekers canvass snow dumps and parks, digging up bottle caps and old coins, lost rings and keys, wads of aluminium foil and the occasional stolen purse. One in a while, the Anchorage Police Department enlists them to search for evidence. Lundine also has a business on the side doing searches for insurance companies and private clients.

"People perceive (metal detecting) is a kind of retirement thing," but that's not true, he said.

Lundine is, in fact, retired. He worked for the Air Force and the Transportation Security Administration. But there's people of all ages, even whole families, in the metal-detecting club.

With eight detectors, Lundine can uncover an array of metals at various depths and even underwater. On his frequent trips to Hawaii he's been known to wade out to his neck while on the hunt, looking for baubles lost by vacationing swimmers. Waikiki honeymooners supply a steady number of lost engagement rings. The weirdest thing he plucked from the ocean was a set of metal-capped false teeth lodged on an underwater reef.

The most valuable thing he's ever found was an heirloom diamond ring, stolen several years ago during a domestic violence assault outside a home on the Hillside. He was hired to find it by an insurance company. It was valued at $385,000 and had been dropped somewhere in a sprawling backyard. It took him hours, but eventually, he got the tell-tale buzzing in his ear phones. He reached into a puddle.

"As soon as I put my hand on it, you could tell the size of this diamond, it was like a big gold nugget," he said.

People load emotional weight on jewelry because often a ring or necklace is a symbol of connection to loved ones, he said. When people call, they almost always have a story of how something was made, or handed down, or given. That's part of what he likes about it.

On a recent weekday, Lundine headed out with his detector to Goose Lake. The day was brilliant. Children toddled in the shallow water. Geese paddled by. Earphones on, Lundine trudged over the sand, his detector murmuring staticky whee-ooohs. He stooped and scooped the sand, sifting out a rusty bullet for a .22. Not too unique, but he put it in his pocket anyway. He's been metal hunting since he came home from Vietnam, at least 30 years. The thrill never goes away.

"You just never know what you're gonna find."

Find Julia O'Malley online at adn.com/contact/jomalley or call 257-4591.

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