GARDINER -- If you visited Yellowstone National Park in June and are now hobbling around on a single tan loafer, Virginia Morris may be able to help you out.

She might help, too, if you left behind your pillow or book or sweater or wedding ring.

Morris has those items along with thousands of others in a dimly lit, overstuffed corner of a warehouse that serves as the lost and found for millions of visitors who pass through Yellowstone each year.

"It's just a little bit of everything," Morris, manager of support services for Xanterra Parks and Resorts, said on a recent tour of the warehouse.

This is the place where the misplaced, mislaid and perhaps unwanted items sit in limbo -- and where Morris and her small crew conduct the strange and sometimes fruitless business of reuniting visitors with their things.

Consider the box of found items collected from Canyon on June 20. Alongside that single tan loafer is a stuffed octopus, a book on midwives, a salmon-colored turtleneck, an earth science textbook and a "Cadillac Jack" T-shirt.

Nearby, there's a stroller, a teapot, a single glove, numbers of pillows, cameras and cell phones, and a worn novel called "Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death."

Most items are inadvertently left in park hotels, stores and restaurants -- wedding rings tend to turn up near bathroom sinks -- but the backstory on a few found items raises suspicion.

"Sometimes I think people leave things behind on purpose," Morris said. "And some people we call didn't even think their things were missing, like wallets."

No matter. All of them are boxed and meticulously itemized by date and location in a warehouse just outside the North Entrance. The items fill eight huge shelves, each with five levels, in a locked area known at "The Cage."

The Park Service handled lost and found for years but passed the duty to Xanterra in the latest contract for Yellowstone's largest concessions company. Xanterra took over the job in December, collecting 513 items over the winter before the floodgates opened this summer.

With about 3,000 pieces collected during the first half of the summer from regular visits to the park's hubs like Canyon and Old Faithful, Xanterra officials are already talking about expanding their storage area.

"We didn't know quite what to expect," Morris said.

They hold onto the items for several months. Those that aren't claimed are donated to charity or given over to the federal government for auction.

In the meantime, Morris and her co-workers chase down leads, use reservation records to match up found items with departed tourists, and field phone calls from anxious visitors looking for their left-behind items.

When they've made a positive connection, Xanterra foots the bill to box and mail the item.

As Morris scans a list of found items on her computer, a stream of highlighted notations indicates those that have been successfully returned. There are cameras, binoculars, phones and even overseas driver's licenses.

"We've done quite a few," she said.

Earlier this year, Xanterra was able to return a money belt, contents intact, to a man from Argentina who thought it had been stolen. He had left it at Mammoth, where someone picked it up and turned it in.

"He was very grateful," Morris said with a grin.

The job is rewarding and, in some ways, offers an enlightening view of national park visitors based on the belongings they bring, lose and find.

"I've gotten a really good feel for the kind of people that come to Yellowstone," she said.

In her office there waited a stack of boxes ready to go out in the mail to their owners.

At the back of the warehouse, that single tan loafer remained unclaimed.