Don't give up yet. Lost things in the Sierras have a way of finding their way home. Someone will find it and it will get back to its owner. Trust me it will happen.
which reminds me of something that happened to me in the 90s - back in 1988, I climbed Half Dome with a home made daypack hanging over my shoulder, and two nice Nikon lenses popped out of the poorly designed opening, bouncing down from the middle of the cables, one apparently down to Yosemite Valley, the other down to Nevada Fall. Big bummer.
4 years later, in the early internet days, I met a hiker who I had been talking to on the rec.backcountry newsgroup (about the only place you could chat about the outdoors back then). I had told him the story about my lenses, and when we met in Tuolumne Meadows at the store parking lot, he spotted my Wisconsin license plate to ID me and walked up asking me "Sir, does this belong to you?" He was holding one of my lens caps (easily ID'd by the cap having marks I rememebred), found at the foot of the cables on a rock ledge a few years earlier. Now what are the chances that you meet that guy on the internet at a time only 0.5% of the population even knew what email was? OK, so I didn't get my lenses back - those will be going back into the earth's crust anbd become the silicon they were created from at some point in the distant future, but it proves that sometimes absolutely unlikely things will happen to you.
Like meeting the same people you don't even know the names of at almost the same spot on the Muir Trail two years in a row? And then have that happen twice with two different hikers? It happened to us in '09 and '10 - although that may only be proof that some folks go there a lot ;-)
