Lost dogs, found dogs
Everyone loves a happy ending. What an incredible week we've had!
Shortly after the above photo, I let the dogs off leash to run in an alpine meadow at 8200 feet elevation. Nancy is sometimes hard to get back when she's off-leash, but she had done fine the last two times we tried this, so I thought it would be fine. I was wrong.
After running past Megan, Nancy led the dogs over a hill and into a forest. Isaac came back out 15-20 minutes later, but we didn't see Nancy and George again for five days. There were two sightings of them by other people in the area over the first couple of hours, and after that they weren't seen until late Friday.
This was the last sighting of Nancy and George, at a cabin a couple of miles down the road from where Megan and I had last seen them.
Communication is clumsy in that area because of the total lack of cell coverage for many miles around. We heard of the above sighting 45 minutes later, when the woman who took that photo of them got to the nearest cell coverage, and when we got to the cabin the dogs were gone.
We searched that night until after dark, then I drove Megan and Isaac back to Butte and returned and searched alone until 2AM. I was the only human in the area that night, and drove all around the area honking and calling for the dogs, but never found them.
The next five days were more of the same. I headed out early every morning, while Megan stayed home and in cell coverage to coordinate a growing army of people who helped in the search. More people were searching each day as the week wore on, in part because we were offering a large cash reward. I drove roads rougher than anywhere I've ever driven before, and others used ATVs to search areas I couldn't get to.
A few photos from the 5-day search. Isaac was often with me, because he can hear and sense things that humans can't. He clearly knew we were searching for Nancy and George.
By Thursday, I and several others had searched every ATV track and trail within miles, and I had driven the length of Quartz Hill Road (the only road in the area) dozens of times calling for them. At the same time, awareness of the search had spread greatly due to word of mouth in the area and many people helping out on various social media, which brought more resources and expertise to the search.
A man from Helena drove down Thursday with his experienced tracking dogs, and they searched the area around the cabin where Nancy and George were last spotted. They found places the dogs had been, but the direction they had departed in wasn't clear.
Thursday evening, a drone operator from Bozeman (about 120 miles away) came over, and he and I were up in the area around the alpine meadows searching with his infrared sensing drone in the darkness and high winds. Eric from Sky-Hound had amazing equipment and expertise, and although we didn't find the dogs that night, we could see that there were many elk inside the trees where they had first disappeared, which is likely why they ran in there.
Eric searching for the dogs with his powerful thermal drone. The photo on the left is a regular camera view, and the photo on the right is infrared view of the same spot. In daylight or total darkness, the infrared heat-sensing view shows any animals within the trees as bright white outlines, with enough detail that you can tell what type of animal and see how it's moving.
By Friday, I was starting to feel desperate. It had been five days, there was storm warning for the area that could dump several inches of snow on Saturday night, and nobody had seen the dogs or their tracks since Sunday. I looked into hiring a pilot for plane or helicopter searching, but there wasn't a good option in our area. I looked into how quickly I could buy or rent an ATV, so that I could search more areas myself.
And then, while I was waiting by the side of I-15 for Eric the drone operator to drive over from Bozeman for another evening of searching, a message appeared on the Garmin InReach Explorer+ satellite communicator that had been my lifeline to Megan all week long: SOMEBODY FOUND THEM!!
Friday morning, a man named Frank was camping up at Vipond with his daughter Jess and her husband Sam, and he spotted some dog tracks near a pond. They knew about Nancy and George, because I had talked to Sam and Jess late Wednesday when they were headed up to go camping for two nights.
They searched the area thoroughly, but didn't find them, and by late afternoon they needed to leave the area because they had plans at Jackson Hot Springs that night to celebrate Frank's 70th birthday, which happened to be that same day. As they were driving away, Frank spotted Nancy and George along the road. They were skittish at first, but he managed to patiently lure them into his truck with some food.
I was providing updates on our dog blog all week long, so there's a lot of detailed information and photos over there, although it's pretty chaotic because those were real-time updates during the days when we didn't know how the drama would unfold. If you'd like to see those updates, click here for the story of Nancy and George's wilderness walkabout.
We had them thoroughly checked out by the vet this weekend, and they're fine. They apparently lived on elk droppings and vegetation, and they were smart enough to stay near the only pond in the area for a water source. They don't seem the least bit traumatized by the experience; I'd dare say they seem to have had a great time.
Megan and I, on the other hand ... good grief. What an experience. We are SO grateful for all the help from too many people to name. Thank you! And FYI, Nancy will never be off-leash near a wilderness area again, and all three dogs will soon have state of the art GPS tracking collars that they'll wear whenever we're in the mountains, even on leash. We are going to make damn sure that this will never happen again!