Barbara Wilson is hoping her wedding ring is trapped in about a foot of muck underneath the fountain at Point State Park.
She'll have to wait until spring to find out, however.
"We could get lucky. Good things do happen," said John Samosky, 65, maintenance foreman at the park. "We've found stuff before -- a wristwatch, and a pendant that was given to a woman by her grandmother."
Wilson, 50, of Cincinnati visited Pittsburgh in August with her husband, Randy, 48, and two of their four children. They were walking to the park from their hotel, the Doubletree Inn in Uptown, when her hands started to swell. She took off the wedding ring she has had for 18 years and put it in her pocket.
Wilson realized that evening that the ring was missing -- setting off a frenzied search of the hotel room, the park and the route the family took to and from the Point.
Since then, she calls city police regularly to see if anyone has turned in the ring or sold it to a pawn shop.
The fountain represents her last hope.
"We climbed on the fountain to take in the view, took tons of pictures," Wilson said.
The ring has a 3/4-carat diamond in the center, surrounded by four diamonds that represent the Wilsons' children. Its value is estimated at $10,000.
"There's no replacing it. We are not people with a lot of means," Wilson said.
Her husband returned to Pittsburgh several times to search for the ring -- even renting a metal detector and combing the streets for six hours one day.
Wilson, a wedding planner, said the people of Pittsburgh have helped get her through the ordeal.
"The heart and kindness of the people at the Point and so many others ... was unbelievable. Thank you for working so hard on your city to make it its best in so many ways. It serves as an example to other cities," she said.
Samosky said his crews will work like archaeologists when they go through the muck, which will get loaded into 5-gallon buckets as part of an extensive cleaning of the fountain in spring.
"I really hope we find it," Samosky said. "Let's hope this has a happy ending."
