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.
Motionbased is a web service where I upload my GPS tracks for fitness and SAR workouts. They have a nice track playback feature using googlemaps. Here’s a short track we ran last night. It was only in the low 80’s, compared to the track we ran in the early afternoon where the heat index was around 100.
Click to go to the map and play. I remembered to turn my GPS on during the backtrack while laying the track. It’s also interesting to see that the speed laying the track was 2-3 mph, while running it was about 4-5, except where foliage was thick.
Here are the stats that motionbased gives you:
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