WHITING – The family friend who discovered the remains of a 79-year-old man missing more than a year is a keen woodsman who knows the area well.

But Bob Wright, also 79, of East Machias was not among the hundreds of searchers who fanned out for five days in September 2004 to look for Lewis Gardner of Kittery.

A Whiting native and longtime summer resident, Gardner had traveled to his house at Halls Mills with Mona Cole, his 74-year-old companion, to close up for the season last fall.

Wardens suspected Gardner had taken the wrong logging road, gotten lost, then left Cole in the car as he went to seek help. Cole’s body was found in the car, but wardens called off the search for Gardner after five days and hundreds of people failed to find anybody else.

Wright decided Monday he would search for the missing man – after he had been out hunting in the brilliant fall weather. No deer came his way, and he didn’t move around much, he said.

That caused him to decide to use Tuesday’s good weather for a different purpose. He called his son in Ohio on Monday night and said he was setting out on a search for Gardner – and he believed he could find him.

On Tuesday morning, Wright started looking.

Within 90 minutes of parking his Jeep in the area where all the law enforcement and volunteers had searched, Wright came upon the body.

Apparently, Gardner had found a place to rest about 4,000 feet from the car.

“I found him near two stumps close to the road. He had laid down. He had found his own little woods cane, and that was next to him.”

Wright surmised that Gardner was looking for Indian Lake, but found himself near Josh Lake instead.

“It’s not psychic, and it’s not intuition,” Wright said Wednesday. “I’m just a person of the woods, and I know those logging roads real well.

“I can’t explain it. To me, it was just a planned exercise and having knowledge of the area.”

Wright said he found Gardner not far beyond the limits of the search area.

“He ended up mixed up on a pretty rocky, tough woods road,” Wright said.

Wright works as an appraiser, real estate broker and logger in Machias. He is a 1951 graduate of the University of Maine’s forestry school, and spent more than 50 years as a logger and woodsman.

His sense of the woods, and how Gardner might have gotten disoriented, led him to his discovery at 10 a.m. From there he went to visit with a nearby family member, then called in his news.

A family member said Wednesday that Gardner’s son, Lewis Jr., had been told of the discovery on Tuesday. The family has not yet decided if there will be a local service for Gardner, who lived many years in eastern Washington County before moving to southern Maine.

“This is closure for the family,” Wright said.