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Kyle’s Perspective

Eagle Valley Search Dogs gets a call for K-9s to do a search by Ranger Sarah Gessler for the next day.  The subject had been missing for 4 days. He has walked off before and gotten as far as Ellenville, 18 miles away. The Incident Commander was Ranger Robert Dawson. He was very happy to have the dogs there to assist. Dawnson assigned Ripley to do a search of the trailer park. While we were deploying Ripley, we took K-9 Maya to the PLS to see if we could get a direction of travel. The weather had been perfect to allow scent to still be present, however, also perfect for it to have a lot of movement. At 9:00am, I scented Maya off some underwear at the bottom of the subject’s personal laundry bag and casted her around the subject’s home several times…. every time she committed herself to the same direction.

The subject lived in a trailer park…Maya led us along the western side of the trailer park. She then went down into the woods to a swamp. For the past 4 days wind had mostly been blowing northwest and west so the scent on these nice days kept moving southeast and eastward. Maya went with the flow of the scent and went southeast. The farther she went in that direction the weaker she got, in terms of scent available. She turned herself around and headed west down a hill at a faster tempo and then turned north with tremendous intensity! At this point, it’s raining for about 40 minutes fairly hard. Maya forcefully leads us back the direction we came.  At this point we had been searching for 75 minutes and I was trying to make sense of why she was so focused on the direction we originally came from. I discontinued my search there because this was the first 96 hour old trail that I had ever done and I felt that it was my responsibility to stop there and go back to base and report the dog’s behaviors through her trail. I was thinking that either there was a scent pool in that area….but we went through where we ended up before and she still wanted to charge ahead, or maybe a much hotter trail of the subject….like 24 hours younger or so? …… you never know where a subject goes or has been once they are missing.  In the afternoon, subject would be located by ground searchers about 500 feet north from where Maya brought us down to the swamp.

Back at home after the search, I looked at the track map, the subject’s location, and factoring in the weather and comparing it with the my aged trails of 24-48 hours old, Maya was behaving the same way that she did when she was new at the 24-48 hours old trails. Meaning she road out the entire scent picture and went until she had no more scent at all and then turned around and got more excited the closer she got to the subject’s actual tracks…… that’s my educated guess. So learn from this, always trust your dog and utilize what knowledge you have in parallel situations.

Rita’s Perspective

We deployed Ripley twice.  Firs we cleared the trailer park.  Ripley had a head-lift behind the subject’s home facing west and looking across a steep bank in the general direction of the river where the subject would be found later that day.  I noted it on my map but it wasn’t part of my assigned area, and Maya had already shown a great deal of interest toward the south.

My second assignment took me south of the trailer park. The picture below shows the route that I traveled.  The subject’s location in red and Ripley’s head pops in blue.  The ring lines each denote 1/10 of a mile from the subject’s home. 

About 1/2 mile from the subject’s location as we searched the edge of the river, Ripley gave a very clear head pop along the river heading north.  Most of the day there was very little wind but I noted a tiny breeze from the north just as she became more animated.  We worked the shore as best I could back to the trailer park.  The bank was quite steep and I wasn’t equipped for wadeing.  Except for that single head pop, Ripley showed no interest in the river.  If I had seen more interest, I might have continued working the river bank. No one would have objected. I’d been given a great deal of latitude by Ranger Dawson to work my assignment as I thought best.  But Ripley didn’t, so I completed my task and returned to base.  I was also influenced by Maya’s trail. I had an image of Maya’s route in my head and it framed all my thinking.

In my briefing, Ranger Dawson told me that the subject was known to take long walks, so when he assigned Ripley to search around the skiriting of all the trailers just in case he was underneath, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to deploy Maya.  We might get a direction of travel, even after all that time.  We didn’t understand Maya’s behavior as well as we do now and it led us to focus our efforts south of the PLS.  What I saw from Maya led me to belive that the subject walked south. As Kyle explains,  this was the first time Maya worked such an old trail and she was working out the entire scent picture, not focusing on the track.  If we had known how to read her better, we would have understood what she was doing when she led Kyle back toward the PLS.  Live and learn.  In this case, my mis-interpretation of Maya’s behavior led me to discount the meaning of Ripley’s behavior.

Another lesson I learned on this search is that the rangers’ search strategies are robust because they are systematic.   As long as resources are available, high probability areas including everything within 1/2 mile to a mile of the point last seen, are typically searched mutliple times.  Ranger Meade took out the Sullivan County Search Team and they grid searched along the river and found the subject.  In the end, what matters is the job got done–not which resource found the subject.