After the Aspen Acres Fire: The House is Still Here, So Is the Blog

 

Having driven out of the hills and onto the prairie, 
we stopped for a short break before going on to Pueblo.

Where did this blog go? No, I have not quit blogging, but I was a little distracted during the month of July. 

At around 6 a.m. on June 29, a tree (it is believed) was blown into a power line near the little resort community of San Isabel, on the Custer-Pueblo county line. (Local residents had already put out a couple of little fires previously in that general area.)

That spot is in the Rye Fire Protection District. Chief Gallegos and his volunteers got the call. It's uphill and twisty all the way—maybe 15-minutes plus in a car, but longer in a fire truck with a full tank of water.;

The weather had been hot, dry, and breezy. The fire was spreading in conifers and aspens. The Rye crew called for "mutual aid" from the nearest department  — the even-smaller Beulah fire department (about 20 volunteers) came to their aid. 

Beulah responded. The big guns of what would become the Aspen Acres Fire of 2026 (102,000 acres) were pointed right at their faces.

 

The Beulah Valley in winter.

"The Aspen Acres Fire experienced explosive growth due to record‑low fuel moisture levels and persistent red flag conditions during the week preceding and the days following ignition. The fire was driven by sustained winds over 40 mph, with gusts estimated up to 100 mph. It initially impacted the community of Beulah, Colorado, and later affected additional communities and areas across Custer, Pueblo, Fremont, and Huerfano counties."

Between the little town and the fire, a couple were car-camping off CO 78 (a.k.a. Twelve-Mile Road) on national forest land. The wife later commented on Facebook that had they not heard Beulah's sirens out on that road, they would have had no idea (at 6:30 a.m.) that the fire was burning and coming right at them.

A home on Pine Drive in Beulah. 
I do not know if it survived. (Redfin.)

Beulah is "nestled in the pines," as a real-estate agent would say. For more than a century it has been a community of summer homes and parks for those fleeing prairie heat, a retirement community, and a home to people who commute down to Pueblo for their jobs. The elementary school focuses on the natural sciences.  Every December there is a community Yule Log hunt which is actually fun to watch.

M. and I go there occasionally for a change of scene, and I would look at the comfortable, even fancy, homes under the tall ponderosa pines, and think, "This is lovely and gracious and oh gawd, if it ever burns. It's the textbook example of 'wildland-urban interface." (WUI, pronounced "whooie.")

The outnumbered fire fighters were trying to be in six places at once. My even smaller department had not been summoned, but help was streaming in from the city and county of Pueblo. I kept the radio on though, eavesdropping as they called for more water, ordered evacuations, and dashed from place to place. I heard someone say, "Down power lines. Venting propane tanks, Everything they taught you in WUI class — and more."

We thought we were safe, but the wind had other ideas,  By July 1, we were on "pre-evac" in the morning. "Maybe I should air up the tires on the pop-up trailer," I thought. By late afternoon, it was "GO!" 

 This was Evacuation Number 4? Or 5? But the others were always for a night or two or three. This one was for two weeks. For some people in Rye, it was three weeks.  

If you watch this Facebook video, it's Beulah firefighters discussing how they prepared for such a fire and what they did when it hit. Yes, some lost their own homes.

Since Facebook is not always fun, here are some local TV videos from the beginning of the fire:

 

 

After the fire, there was monsoonal flooding, of course. CO 78 re-opened only two days ago (Aug. 7). Some time I will go have a look, but I hate to be a disaster tourist, even though I am a "local" in the broader sense. Could go patronize the coffeehouse and/or the little restaurant; they survived.

European Bison versus Wolves

It's a long way from the Southern Rockies, but this video fits the June 20 theme of "predators and fawns/calves." 

A friend in Poland sent the video's link to the news site Notes from Poland. The European bison, sometimes called "wisent" (similar to ours but taller and slimmer) was extirpated by over-hunting. Its population has recovered in a few places due to re-introduction from captive herds. 

The largest population is in Poland's Białowieża Forest, one of the last examples of Eastern European old-growth forest. It was saved over the centuries mainly by being a royal hunting preserve. It is known for wildlife but is also the site of disputes over logging vs. preservation.

You can see wolves harassing the bison — they mainly are interested in the two calves, which they keep trying to cut off from the adults. As wolves do.

Hungry Bears and Fawns

The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance.

 

My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor, but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars.

Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over wheelie bins (that should have been indoors), got into some smelly fertilizer, and committed other mischief.

We are in a drought. Spring fruit like wild plums and chokecherries basically did not happen.  The days are hot with a series of Red Flag fire warnings. (My volunteer department rolled out on one small wildlife fire on the 17th.) 

No doubt the little bear is hungry. 

He appeared behind our house during when I was away on the fire. His scent must have drifted in, because M. said that Marco the Chesapeake Bay retriever jumped up barking and ran for the back door, where she looked out and saw the bear up on the trees.

Another neighbor posted said the bear checked out his propane grill. Elsewhere, the yearling broke into a shed where some livestock feed was stored. The shed's owner has now added an electric fence and placed an elected "unwelcome mat" at the door. 

I  got up  Friday to find that someone had dug up up soil in an outdoor planter, knocking two tomato cages and the Walls o' Water that they support onto the ground. Luckily the plants survived. 

The local game warden came around and gave another neighbor a bag of the non-lethal rubber-ball 12 gauge shotgun shells. They pass those out like candy.

The recipient rode around on his side-by-side distributing them, so I have a couple placed at hand. It's never come to that in the past, probably won't this time either, but there they are.

All this past winter, a mule deer doe (last seen visibly pregnant) and her yearling offspring hung out in the oak brush close to our house. 

All around, fawns should be dropping now.  And although black bears do not hunt prey the way that mountain lions do, they like fresh fawn.

There used to be a buffalo ranch about ten miles from here, and the owner once told me that during calving, black bears would come off the mountain to hunt the calves. You would think that Mama Buffalo would be a formidable opponent but apparently the bears get though some times.

(In Yellowstone, a grizzly bear recently nabbed an elk calf in front of an assembly of tourists. 

[Wildlife researcher John Winnie, Jr.] wasn’t there when the grizzly first found that calf, but said one of his students witnessed the moment. The bear’s head suddenly snapped in the calf’s direction right before she moved in and found the helpless young elk.

That probably means Storm [the grizzly] heard the calf rustling in the grass, or caught a glimpse of it moving, Winnie said.

Once Storm started eating, it was hard to watch, he said.

The calf cried out as it was being devoured, but no other elk heard it.

“The nearest cow elk we saw were probably out of earshot, 400 to 500 yards away,” Winnie said.

In Yellowstone, spring calving produces about 80 calves per 100 cow elk, he said. but “by the time the first of the next year rolls around in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, we’re down to around 20 to 25 calves per 100 cows. And most of the calves that were lost were lost to predation."

 Deer and Deer Hunting magazine, which is devoted to whitetail deer-hunting, posted on X (formerly Twitter) a scout camera video from John Lockburner Jr. (Sussex County, N.J.) of a black bear taking a whitetail fawn. The post said, " According to scientific research by John J. Ozoga in Michigan, yearling black bears can reduce fawn survival by as much as 22% annually."

You can hear the fawn bawling. 

 So in this drought year, will this yearling bear get a taste for fawn?

Can a Bull Snake Be a Show Snake?

A week ago, Marco the Chessie and I were walking up a pedestrian-bike trail that goes trough "open space" by the Walking Stock golf course in northeast Pueblo.

Suddenly he jumped sideways. I looked down and back — this bull snake was artistically coiled next to the wall that separates one of the adjacent upscale houses from the public path.

Not a bad homestead for a snake—a secure den under the masonry wall, just a short slither away from rodent-hunting grounds. 

The snake tired of being photographed and false-struck at me. No danger; it was just annoyed. "OK, buddy," I said, "I'll leave you be."

What was interesting that this particular bull snake did not vibrate its tail to mimic a rattlesnake. A lot of them do that, and then humans start grabbing guns and shovels: "It's a rattlesnake! Kill it!" 

Is the gene pool changing? Marco started out to be a show dog, but washed out. He still strikes poses. So did this snake. Very artistic fellow.

Low Flows Threaten Arkansas River Rafting. Guess Who Benefits

Paddleboarders on the Arkansas (Colorado Parks & Wildlife)

Today's Colorado Sun reports that the low snowpack -- 24 percent for the Arkansas River basin -- means low runoff and a shorter season for the rafting companies:

There are about 45 river outfitters in the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area between Leadville and Cañon City who host as many as 250,000  commercial rafting visitors every year, almost 75% of them coming from out of state. Those vacationers riding the most rafted river in the country direct anywhere from $50 million to $75 million into the local communities every year. 

The Arkansas River rafting season will happen. It will just be a bit different. There will be fewer paddlers on smaller boats. If guests are ready, they will captain their own stand-up paddleboards or inflatable kayaks, which are called duckies. Trips could take longer. Paddlers in rafts are going to play a larger role, helping guides navigate more technical lines through rapids. Lower sections of the river with more water — like the Royal Gorge — will see more traffic. 

The calls from vacationers are coming in. Demand is there. And outfitters are ready. 

Let's face it: When flows are down around 500 cfs, it's hard for guides to give clients the high-excitement pinballing riiver rides that some will tip extra for. (Guides call this trade-off "bash for cash.") 

But there's a bright side too. Anglers won't be sitting out the "rubber hatch" in June and waiting for flows to drop. It should be a great summer for river fishing.

Snakes on Your Screen!

I read once about this Appalachian doctor who told a patient to take a certain medicine in the winter and to keep taking it "until snakes crawl" -- in other words, until warm spring weather. Tying the directions to the natural world was simpler and easier to remember than setting a calendar date. 

 Now I have my reasons for avoiding rattlesnakes, so maybe I could just be a tech-user and watch the Colorado RattleCam.

You are watching a livestream of a Prairie Rattlesnake rookery (MegaDen) at an undisclosed location in Colorado. At this rookery, hundreds of snakes overwinter, shed their skins, and bask in the sun. Dozens of pregnant snakes spend the summer here preparing to give birth and care for their babies. 

ProjectRattleCam also has a camera in California and in some zoos and museums. 

Antero Reservoir Closing; Fish Salvage Underway

Antero Reservoir (Colorado Parks & Wildlife

Antero Reservoir, one of the two "saucer" reservoirs in South Park, as I like to think of them, is being drained to save water in the current drought. (The other is Spinney Mountain Res.)

Denver Water announced Monday it will drain and close South Park’s Antero Reservoir fishing and camping spot to avoid critical evaporation losses in a tinder-dry season. 

The agency serving 1.5 million Front Range customers will send Antero’s reserve down the South Platte River to Cheesman Reservoir and close the recreation area to the public for the first time since the severe 2002 drought.

The move will keep 5,000 acre-feet of water from evaporating in summer heat about one-quarter of the reservoir’s capacity. In a normal runoff year, that 5,000 acre-feet would easily be made up by snowmelt, but Denver has declared this year’s snowpack the lowest in recorded history in its resource areas. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has announced a "no limits" fish-salvage operation.

All . . . regulations, including a valid Colorado fishing license and legal methods of take, will be enforced. Motorized boating and commercialized fishing will not be allowed. Hand-launched vessels and shoreline angling are permitted.  

After May 13, no public access for camping or anything.

Two Buttes Res. in SE Colorado was recently drained too. Maybe the El Niño winter that is supposed to be coming will refill it.  

That's Cotton in the Blog Stew -- Don't Eat It

Marco checks out a muddy arroyo in Huerfano County.

I let March go by without posting. That's bad. I was deep into the most annoying book-edit of my life. Kind of like "Who's on first?" but with different drafts and different sets of corrections from different proof-readers.

That said, I did get out in the weirdly warm and dry weather to investigate some public hunting lands-mostly Colorado state trust lands that are also grazed, but opened during hunting seasons. 

I may live in the foothills and love mountains, but the High Plains, mesas, and canyons call me too, Chad Love, who lives in Woodward, Oklahoma (touched by one of the big prairie fires this spring) says it well. He talks about autumn here, but early spring as upland seasons end is just the other side:

If you really want to hear the world creak and groan and slip from one epoch into the next, walk out into the prairie in early September. Find a hill to sit on, turn your face up to the sky, let that ancient celestial light strike your eyes, and listen to the ancient gods whispering in your soul’s ear; old thoughts, old yearnings, old fears, old hopes, all welling back up from within on the tendrils of that first softly keening fall breeze that marks the trembling of the seasons and the dimming of the summer light. 

And it's dry, so dry. What can farmers do? Some people suggest that the future is less corn and more cotton, even here in Colorado. 

For decades, the Wertz family focused on corn and alfalfa in the Arkansas Valley. But in recent years, the economics became harder to ignore. Water supplies dwindled, and production costs climbed. They needed a crop that used less water but still offered a solid return.

Even though cotton had never been grown successfully in Colorado, Wertz believed it could be the right fit for their operation.

“Finding a crop that cash flowed better and something that conserved water, we decided cotton was the way to go,” he said. “Cotton does all of those things. It just fit a niche that we were looking for.”
Cotton brings in similar revenue per acre as corn, but requires far less fertilizer and water. That makes it a natural choice for hot, dry areas and more sustainable in drought conditions. 

 Maybe parts of Eastern Colorado will start resembling West Texas—wisps of cotton blowing in the wind. 

Who Has Been Digging Up the Wasps' Nests?

Something there is that does not like a yellowjacket -- 
but loves to tear up the nests and eat fat larvae. 

* * *  

This was a rough autumn in Wasp World. The tenant in our rental cabin, about 150 yards from the main house, reported being attacked by yellowjackets when stepping out on the back stoop. And he is sensitive to them, although not full anaphylactic-shock-death-sensitive.

The wasps got me too when I went over there.  They were coming out of a warp in the cedar siding. Time for action! There I went, gloved and jacketed, wearing a loose head-net over a plastic hard hat, climbing a ladder with wasp spray in hand.

After chemical warfare came expanding foam and calking compound. Eventually the buzzing stopped. 

Wasp traps lure with scent

But there were still some around, so we hung conical wasp traps (they fly in but can't fly out) front and rear. The number of yellowjackets in the air was considerably reduced, although not totally down to zero.

At the main house, we had paper wasps in the greenhouse, but they are not nearly as aggressive as yellowjackets , though they will sting -- particularly dogs, for some reason. I found their nest and dropped it in a bucket of water. They'll be back though, I'm sure

Someone else was hunting wasps too. I found the scene at the top about fifty yards from the cabin. Something had torn into an underground yellowjacket nest, torn out the chambers with tasty larvae in them, and departed. 

Then M. went walking and found another similar pillaged nest a quarter mile up the county road, as shown below. My first thought was "bear," but the damage was rather . . . dainty compared to what bears do. So maybe a skunk? They are always around. 

If you want to see how a bear approaches yellow jacket nests, watch this video from the Wilson Forest Lands YouTube channel

 

Now that's bear style!

For more on bees and wasps -- but mostly bees -- in Colorado, listen to this episode of the Colorado Outdoors podcast, "Pollinate Your Mind: Colorado's Native Bees."  

Cruising El Cuartelejo

 
I'm using the broad definition, not the Kansas-centric one.

And it's the Colorado Otero County, not the New Mexican Otero. But both counties are named for the same man, Miguel Antonio Otero (1829–1882). Now you know.

Endless sky.

Big Cat News from Northern and Southern Colorado

A couple of days ago, I checked the trail camera nearest the house, located about 80 yards up  the ridge in back. With apologies for the infrared flash on the ten-year-old camera, this is one photo of a sequence.

Photo taken about 9:30 p.m. on December 13, 2025.

 M. was out for a walk as I was checking the photos on my laptop. "Guess what I got," I said when she same in. "A mountain lion," she answered. "Steve [our neighbor] showed me a video from his camera."

And here it is, five nights after the photo above.

Not the same cat thought. This one is wearing a collar and tracking device. I checked with the district wildlife manager, who said a study was underway in western Pueblo County and adjacent areas involving a number of collared cats.

Then came the report of a woman killed by a lion while hiking on New Year's Day in western Larimer County, as first announced by Colorado Parks & Wildlife that same afternoon. This Colorado Sun report from January 2 has a little more detail, including an attempted attack on the same trail in November 2025:

Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina pulled out his phone and snapped a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.

Messina said he threw his phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.

“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.

Both reports say the last known mountain lion killing of a human happened in 1999. That refers to the death of Jaryd Atadero, 3, in the Poudre River canyon west of Fort Collins.

To me from a couple hundred miles away, his unwitnessed death like a lion attack. Some people, including his father, at least initially, wanted to believe it was an abduction and murder. His parents wrote a book about the experience. 

The High Plains and the Englishmen

A straight road in the Pawnee Nat. Gransslands. Not CO 71.

Some years back I was flying from London (Gatwick) to Denver, across the Atlantic at night, then over the frozen wastes of Labrador, moving on and on southwesterly towards Colorado.

It was December, and the aircraft was only about half full in coach. Behind me were two twenty-something English guys, who had purchased a ski package tour to Breckenridge, their first trip to the US.

We entered Colorado airspace,somewhere near Sterling, and I could feel the plane beginning to descend. The captain announced that we were now over Colorado and XX minutes from Denver International Airport.

Notes of nervousness entered the two Brits' conversation. We were on the right (starboard) side, so the northwesterly view was northern Colorado, into the Nebraska panhandle. All High Plains all the way to the horizon.

They were worried. They had bought a ski trip to Colorado, they were in Colorado, supposedly, and there was not a mountain in sight. Was this some kind of fraud perpetrated on foreign tourists? 

I leaned over the seat and explained that eastern 40 percent of Colorado was not-mountains. and not to worry. 

Then one said to his seatmate, "Look at that!" I looked out too. What was he seeing? No mountains yet, for sure. 

It was Colorado 71, a two-lane highway running ruler-straight miles and miles north toward Nebraska. To someone from a land of winding lanes, it must have seen almost sculptural. 

And then we turned more to the south, bringing at least the Medicine Bow Range and the Rawahs into view and dropped toward DIA. 

I hope they had a good ski trip once they got to Breck and experienced mountains. 

Red Sky at Night Gives Me a Fright

The Northern Lights seen in eastern Colorado (Colorado Parks and Wildlife).

 This past week has seen the Northern Lights visible as far south as Texas Here in southern Colorado they were photographed in the San Luis Valley, at a latitude of 37° -- pretty far south,

I live surrounded by hills and ridges, with no view of a horizon anywhere except a hint to the northwest. On Wednesday, November 12,  maybe the peak night, I walked Marco the dog after dark and saw nothing but stars. The following night, M. and I drove out to a place with a good view to the east and north, slightly interrupted by the distant lights of Pueblo -- and saw no aurora. Apparently we should have been much farther east, in say Otero or Bent counties, to get the full effect.

But that's OK. I had my "red sky at night" experience back in the Reagan Era, and it was a Cold War Baby's meltdown.

M. and I had been married a short time and were living in a converted summer cottage in Manitou Springs (740 sq. ft.!). Manitou is in a canyon as well, on the western edge of Colorado Springs. It's where the real mineral springs are flowing; the "Springs" in "Colorado Springs" is just real estate developer slop, circa 1875.

I had walked to a friend's house on Ruxton Avenue -- that is the side canyon that goes up to the Pikes Peak Cog Railway station.  I came out well after dark, and the sky to the north was red!

I knew what it meant: Soviet missiles had hit Denver, and more were coming to Colorado Springs, which has lots of military targets. They would impact in seconds. I could never get home to see M. again. 

If we were not all vaporized in the initial blast, we'd be stumbling through a nighttime hell of fire and radiation. This was the end. 

Meanwhile, my rational mind was pounding on the door with both fists: "Dude! It's OK! Those are the Northern Lights! Dude! You're not about to die!" 

After a second or two, the panic drained away. Yes, that was the Aurora borealis, and when I came home, she had been watching it too.

Down at the Colorado Spring Sun office, someone one had re-built the front-page layout to include a color (still rare then) photo of the lights in time to put it on the the presses for distribution the next morning.

I have seen many aurora photos on social media this week. No one has mentioned ICBMs or Mutual Assured Destruction. So that's an improvement.

The Last Bobcat

The last bobcat, ready to be sent to his new temporary home.

 

The half-grown bobcat hissed and snarled as Tom Sanders of Wet Mountain Wildlife grabbed him with a noose pole and lowered him into the carrier that I held open. Unlike the other bobcats we had released last July, he was bound for another facility. Wet Mountain is winding down, and today's wildife transport might have been the last I will do there, unless something major changes.

Back on Friday, October 3, M. and I were riding Amtrak's Floridian through the forested valley of the Youghiogheny River in western Pennsylvania, the most scenic stretch of railroad between Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. My volunteer fire department iPhone app started its high-low beeping. Someone was needed at the fire house to help the ambulance crew load a patient into a Flight for Life helicopter at our helipad.

I marked myself as Unavailable. Then I looked at the incident address, where a 78-year-old woman had suffered "a fall." Oh shit. Oh no.

Cec (short for Cecilia) and Tom Sanders began working as wildlife rehabilitators at their home in Pueblo, where they both taught in D-60 schools. In the 1980s they bought a house on a small acreage farther west, still in commuting distance, later adding more land that they put under a conservation easement. Every year they cared for multiple orphaned deer (mule deer, whitetails, and even elk). Fawns eventually wandered from their enclosure into the hills.

Sitting by a tranquilized bear, Cec Sanders chats with district wildlife managers
Kim Woodruff and Justin Krall, who will be releasing it into the mountains. (June 2018)

Other enclosures and structures held bear cubs, plus beavers, mountain lions, bobcats, porcupines,  raccoons, and one time a Sulcata tortoise, which eventually went to the Denver Zoo Cec and Tom also for years housed cockatoos and other tropical birds seized from illegal traders, birds that could not legally be sold. (Those went to a bird sanctuary a couple of years ago.) And I am probably forgetting other species.

That day, Oct. 3, Cec awoke feeling dizzy and "off." Tom was preparing to drive her to a hospital when she collapsed, so he called for an ambulance. Seeing that she had suffered a major stroke, the paramedics summoned a helicopter, but it was all too late. She never regained full consciousness and died two days later. 

While Tom worked in the background, hauling, building, fixing, photographing, Cec was the chief animal-attendant, publicist, and fundraiser. Her book about their first years, If You Talk to Animals: The Life of a Wildlife Rehabilitator, is available on Amazon.

Without her, there is no facility, and no one is waiting in the wings. And what happens to the orphan bear cub in southeast Colorado? A much longer drive— or else a bullet.

Luckily, there were no young bears over-wintering. The district wildlife manager (game warden) took a porcupine and a raccoon to some state land in the Wet Mountains. That left the bobcat — the fawns would hang out with other deer and fend for themselves. Another rehabber up in Douglas County had two cubs and agreed to take this one too. Then they could all be hateful together, which is good preparation for adult life as a bobcat.

I slid the carrier into my Jeep, covered it with a sheet to reduce outside stimuli, and started home to pick up M. for the trip. It's a good thing that I know that road well, because I was not paying much attention to it.

Or You Could Just Believe the Dog?

Search dog and handler (Front Range Rescue Dogs) 

A recent article in the online Colorado Sun by Jason Blevins describes how Vail Mountain Rescue Group member Erika German used twenty-year old maps and reports to develop a new search strategy for the remains of hiker Michelle Vanek. Vanket disappeared in 2015 on Mount Holy Cross in central Colorado. 

German's work was intelligent and "outside the box." 

The searches . ..  and German’s maps pointed to a vast alpine swath of ponds and boulder fields known as the Bowl of Tears. German spent 20 hours entering coordinates of previous searches into SARTopo, a digital mapping tool created by CalTopo for search teams across the country. Her map includes air, ground, dog and horse searches, all color coded. She deployed drones to help her craft new search maps.

The mapping showed the 2005 searches had been largely focused on areas where previously hikers had lost their way on Mount of the Holy Cross. But Vanek had not summited the peak, so her direction of travel was different than most hikers. In the compiled reports and maps, German saw that leads may have been lost in the long, mostly handwritten reports filed by search teams. She called it “information overload.”

 But this part jumped out at me:

[On the fourth day] there were even more searchers, and one dog, Buster, from Front Range Rescue Dogs, signaled there may be something in the cliffs on the northeastern side of the peak, but weather forced the handlers to keep moving down the mountain. 

They said they had to drag Buster along because he wouldn’t move. 

 And then -- wait for it:

[After German's mapping efforts] searchers with a forensic dog team found the remains of Vanek in an alcove of a rocky chute. Vanek was less than a half-mile from where she was last seen in the saddle below the summit. Buster, the dog who signaled in the days after Vanek went missing, had shown interest in that exact area. 

Twenty years later, we learn that Buster was right all along. But his handlers knew better.

This reminded me of another tale of a missing man and search dogs. In June 1996, National Park Service backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson, 54, left his "ranger station" (a tent at 10,800 feet) for a multi-day patrol of the King's Canyon National Park higher elevations. 

His story is told in Eric Blehm's book The Last Season, which I recommend. 

Blehm was quoted elsewhere as saying,

Randy may have wanted to appear to have died on the job to make sure Judi, his wife at the time, got her $100,000 benefit from the government, a policy not honored in the case of suicide. "If he wanted to throw off the dogs or sucker people into believing something happened, he did a great job," Blehm says. "After so many years, with the bones gnawed, there's no way to say exactly what happened." 

Note, that quote comes from a site called Strange Outdoors, so you can expect a certain slant.  People obsessed over the strangeness of his disappearance and floated various theories: murdered by a psycho backpacker (we've all met those) or a poacher, ran away to Mexico, you know the drill. Here is a YouTube video on all that.  

An article in Backpacker magazine described how it began:  

When Morgenson failed to check in by radio, a search began, "one of the most intense and emotionally draining search-and-rescue operations in National Park Service history, in large part because the rangers were searching for one of their own. Thirteen days later, the official search, which included helicopters, dog teams, and dozens upon dozens of volunteers, was called off. Not a single trace of Randy had been found, not even a footprint." 

The search area was thousands of acres.  Eventually his remains were found -- in 2001 -- by a member of a trail crew.  

But on the second day of the search, an independent dog handler brought a bloodhound named Cowboy to join the efforts. (All following quotations are from Blehm's The Last Season.) 

Nose to the ground, Cowboy trotted down the difficult terrain of the northern slope of the pass—right past the first track Lyness and Durkee had marked the day before. About a quarter of the way into the basin—more than a mile past the track and near the outlet of the first big lake—Cowboy “alerted,” jumped up with his paws on Bardone’s chest. “A good sign,” according to Bardone’s report of the day’s events. With his harness back on, however, “Cowboy kind of bird-dogged all over the place,” says Durkee, “not really seeming to follow any one track.”

Other searchers were skeptical:  

On the same form, each searcher was also asked to describe “any search difficulties or gaps in coverage.” Durkee voiced his (and Lyness’s) skepticism regarding the search dog: “Hard to tell if dog was tracking scent; handler thinks high probability dog was on scent.” Lyness wrote in her logbook that night, “Dog went in circles for 2–3 hours, not heading anywhere we thought Randy might go.

Later, Seeker, a cadaver dog, suddenly jumped into a partly frozen lake: 

Seeker bolting off like that was completely uncharacteristic for her while in a search pattern,” says [her handler]. “She did not alert traditionally . . . . I interpreted her behavior, certain that she’d caught scent of something human, and wanted to mark the location.”

In the end, Morgensen was determined to have died by accident, apparently breaking through a snow bridge while crossing a narrow, freezing-cold stream, and dying of hypothermia and/or drowning. But there was this:  

[Several reports] presented an unsettling detail about the SAR that might have saved Judi [his wife] all those years of anguish. One of“the search dogs had “reportedly alerted on a spot where the Ranger’s remains were ultimately located [one report noted]. The dog was injured at the time and was taken out of the area.” That dog, of course, was Seeker, Linda Lowry’s giant schnauzer, which had fallen through the ice and nearly drowned just upstream from where Randy’s remains were found. For whatever reason, no official inquiry was ordered to determine why Seeker’s alert had not led to the discovery of Randy’s body five years before. The question remains—like so many things about this incident—unanswered.

Seeker's handler herself recommended that a fresh search dog be taken to that spot to re-check Seeker's response. That recommendation was ignored by the incident command team. “Randy’s remains were found approximately 150 feet downstream from where Lowry had recommended the incident command team follow up." But why believe a dog?