The goal was capture a spectacular view of the Grand Canyon and as their YouTube video shows, mission accomplished.

The balloon’s payload was a GoPro HERO3, a Sony Camcorder, and a Samsung Galaxy Note II phone.

A group of friends who launched balloon-mounted cameras from the Grand Canyon in Arizona said the cameras turned up two years later with their footage intact.

Over on Reddit, team member Bryan Chan writes that the smartphone was also used for tracking the location on the memory card: “We were all moping around, making bets on when (if ever) it would be found for a while when just a couple months ago, a woman contacts us about finding a weird box with our name on it!”

“The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it”, writes Chan. According to the account on Reddit, the footage was stranded in the desert for two years until a hiker happened upon the phone in the desert and after some help from the AT&T store, the phone and GoPro footage made it to their rightful owner two years later.

According to Digital Trends, the GoPro went as high as 98,664 feet and hovered for 98 minutes before coming back down 5o miles from where it had been launched. She took the device to an AT&T where the SIM card was analyzed and then returned to Chan’s friend. They then launched the balloon into the air, hoping to get some incredible footage, but were disappointed when it never came back down.

Chan says the experiment took four months to plan, and the group was upset when they thought they’d lost their camera for good.

The camera box landed about 50 miles away from the launch point, in an area largely devoid of public roads.