Yesterday at training, we had a really interesting day. Heath decided to “expand our comfort zones” and sent us out on a litter-carry to start. Then we worked area problems. BB had a nice sector up part of the Sugarloaf Mountain range. We worked for a couple hours while I became increasingly worried since I had no solid alerts other than a couple of headlifts. It turned out the subject was not in our sector. On our last pass, he hit a track really hard taking us into the next sector. Having lost it at the cliff face, we climbed to the top of the hill back toward our sector… where we ran into our subject.
Heath had all sorts of great exercise inputs. When we got to our sector, we were directed that solar flares had knocked out all of our GPS devices (Drat that Heath!). 10 minutes later, our batteries died, unless we had spare batteries. Also, Cindy’s compass was non-functional, unless she had another. We sent proof back to base via a camera cellphone.
After finding Tricia a couple hours later, we were told she had a knee and ankle injury, storms were coming, and we had to hunker down in a shelter to wait for ground crews. Then we were directed to take a written test to include showing fire-starting materials and kindling, as well as some knots. I sent back pictures to base. We cleverly used our written tests as kindling and showed some great knots using Tricia’s handy knot reference. This pleased us all immensely.
After heading back to base, we worked other dogs. It’s great when one dog gets a long problem, but that generally means others do not.
Pictures were geo-referenced using a cool little Sony GPS-CS1 that allowed me to geo-reference photos from both my Nikon and cellphone cameras after returning home.
Below is a Flickr map showing photos from our journey.
Here’s a post-surgery movie of BB at about the 4 months point. He looks pretty good and flies through the woods at his usual speed, but still needs a lot of strengthening and conditioning. I won’t work him at night until the Spring since it’s not worth risking injury at this point. Now at the 6 month point, he tires at about 2 hours of strenuous activity. No where near the 4-6 hours from before. But yesterday he scaled up-and-down a 6-foot vertical drop into a stream bed — so I continue to see progress.
I cut this movie down to eliminate long boring parts of me tromping through the woods. The whole thing took about 8 minutes. The subject was about 500 feet from where the dog blasted off to make the find. We had a really nice breeze so it was an easy problem. So I didn’t see much until about his 3rd re-find (a re-find is where the dog attempts to unite the handler with the subject, the dog often goes back and forth between the handler and subject until they are together).
This was the first problem where anyone ever said that "BB sneaked up". A 90 pound shepherd running through crinkly leaves rarely sneaks up on anyone. :-)
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