A Bellevue resident has been reunited with a camera he lost on Mount St. Helens after nearly 70,000 Facebook users helped the man who found it locate the owner.

Jan Roelof Falkena, a Microsoft engineering manager, and some friends from his native Netherlands were climbing the mountain on Sept. 29 when he realized he had lost his camera somewhere in a boulder field. Given that it had fallen deep between two rocks, he wasn’t able to find it and figured it was lost forever.

The next day, Dennis Westlind was hiking the same trail and saw the glint of metal coming from between some boulders. It was Falkena’s Canon PowerShot, filled with 700 vacation, wedding and 50th birthday photos. After dislodging the camera from the rocks, Westlind set out to find the owner and wrote a inquiring Facebook post.

The Facebook post, which featured a photo of Falkena and his wife Eugenia Salvo, took off, garnering 7,500 shares in the first couple of days.

It was eventually shared nearly 70,000 times.

“We were actually a bit overwhelmed by the amount of news around it. In some sense, its fine the picture that was shared, but it’s weird to have your face everywhere,” said Falkena.

Before long, one of Salvo’s friends emailed her about the post after recognizing her in the photo, which was doubly surprising to her because Falkena hadn’t told Solvo he had lost the camera.

As much as his story is about the power of social media, it is also about the effort that Westlind went through to return the camera, Falkena said.

For me, it’s as much about somebody going all the way and trying to find you, it’s about the effort,” he said. “(Westlind) deserves all of the credit.”