DEH GAH GOT'IE KOE/FORT PROVIDENCE - Diana Gargan made an unusual discovery earlier this month while picking cranberries -- a message in a bottle.

A crowd gathers around Diana Gargan as she opens a bottle she found near Fort Providence on Sept. 23. - photo courtesy of Antoinette Oberg

"I was ready to throw (the bottle) towards the bank where everybody was standing, but then I lifted it up and I saw there was a note in it," Gargan said. "So I just kept it."

The bottle contained a short letter that was placed inside nearly 20 years earlier. Former classmates from a Willingdon school in Alberta had decided to make a time capsule for their 25-year anniversary in 1992. The class had graduated in 1967.

Gargan, a kindergarten and Grade 1 immersion teacher at Deh Gah School, said she had been participating in a medicinal plant camp about five kilometres from Fort Providence when she found the bottle.

"We spent one week there with all the teachers and a couple of elders," she said. "We were identifying plants and the uses of the plants."

While looking for cranberries, Gargan stumbled upon what she thought was just trash along the bank of the river.

"We were looking for cranberries, low bush cranberries and I was walking a little bit higher, beside the treeline, and that's where I found the bottle," she said.

The others in the group were anxious for her to read the note inside, but Gargan said she wanted to wait until they were back at camp before she tried to open the bottle.

"I didn't open it up right away, I just told everybody that I had found it," she said. "They wanted to know right away, but I just kept them in suspense until we got back to the camp."

Once the group arrived at camp, Gargan cut open the 18-year-old plastic pop bottle.

"It was hard to open so I had to use a knife to cut open the bottle," she said. "I opened the bottle and took out the note."

The letter explained how the class of 1967 created a time capsule for their 25-year reunion and asked whoever found the note to respond.

Gargan said she mailed a letter, including a copy of the note she found, to the address right away. She included her phone number and email address.

"I got copy of this letter and sent it with a note that I wrote to them saying that I found this time capsule and I'm contacting them as they stated in their letter and asked if they could get back to me," she said. "So I'm just waiting for a response."

Gargan said she is interested to know exactly how the bottle ended up along the bank of the Mackenzie River outside of Fort Providence, though she's started to form a few theories of her own.

"I would like to know where this letter was dropped off, where it was launched," she said. "What I'm thinking is the ice, maybe it lifted it up against the banks and it just got stuck there."

No matter how the time capsule found its way to Gargan, she said she is excited to get in contact with the people who created it nearly two decades ago.

"I'm just waiting for them to contact me, I mailed out the letter already."

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