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 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?