Girl reunited with lost teddy bear thanks to eagle-eyed ranger

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — A little girl has a special piece of her heart back, thanks to the kindness of park rangers at Glacier National Park.

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Naomi Pascal was hiking with her family on the Hidden Lake Trail on October 9, 2020, according to the national park’s Facebook post.

They were almost done with their outing when Naomi realized Teddy was missing.

But the stuffed bear was irreplaceable to the girl.

She received the toy from her parents before she was adopted from an orphanage in Ethiopia in 2016.

According to park rangers, the bear accompanied Naomi on her travels around the world.

But eagle-eyed ranger Tom Mazzarisi found Teddy when he was on patrol during a postseason clean-up, rangers said on Facebook.

“On our way up, I noticed this little Teddy Bear kind of with still snow melting off it, [a] little bit off the trail,” Mazzarisi told KTVQ.

Normally the bear would have been thrown away because of the condition it was in, but according to the Facebook post, Mazzarisis couldn’t let that happen.

“Bears are my passion. I just didn’t have the heart to throw it away. There was something special about the teddy bear, so I adopted him and named him Ceasar,” he shared in the Facebook post.

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He rescued the bear, keeping it on his patrol car’s dashboard as his unofficial mascot.

A family friend recently visited Glacier National Park and noticed the familiar bear on the dashboard.

“They just happened upon this ranger truck randomly and her niece saw Teddy in the dashboard, and they texted a picture of Teddy to my wife Addie and said ‘Is this the bear?’ and she’s like ‘Yeah!’,” Naomi’s dad Ben Pascal told KTVQ.

A few days later, Teddy was back in the arms of Naomi.

Glacier National Park is renowned for its grizzly and black bears and now teddy bears as well. On October 9, 2020,...

Posted by Glacier National Park on Thursday, October 7, 2021

Mazzarisi said he hopes that he and Naomi can meet face to face at the park one day.

“But it would be great to just talk to her and her family and just kind of tell them some stories from our travels together last year,” Mazzarisi told KTVQ.

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