You never forget your "first"

Tracking – When it counts

You can never forget your “first”… first love, first car, first solo adventure. These “firsts” usually include places, events or people that stick in your mind; often having a significant impact on future interests. During a “debrief” in a local pub after a tracker training event, a fellow tracker asked me about my first real tracking mission.

Three o’clock Sunday afternoon - the radio squawked...”Bart, this is Command, report to SAR base immediately”. Recognizing a tense edge in search and rescue manager Mike’s voice, I hurried to the mobile command truck. So far, as best that I could tell, the weekend exercise for our search and rescue team seemed to be going well...except we hadn’t met our objective of finding the three lost hikers...yet.

On entering the command van, Mike wasted no time in explaining the situation. The three person team that was sent out to act as lost hikers for our search teams to find, were two hours overdue. The exercise was supposed to end one way or the other at 1pm. The “lost” team was supposed to have either been found by then or to return to base on their own. It was now 3pm and the SAR management team was about to declare a “no duff” emergency. The primary problem being that the people who would be tasked with finding the lost hikers in this real emergency would be the same SAR teams who had been unsuccessfully searching for them since Saturday morning when the exercise started.

Mike summarized that as well as being two hours over-due...all communication was lost with no area cell phone coverage and the team not answering their radio. Further...they had missed their last three scheduled “check in” radio calls.

Remarkably, while setting up the search scenario, Mike had not anticipated any problems with the search teams finding the lost threesome. He had dropped them off at the side of a logging road with the instructions to “get lost” and if not found by 1pm on Sunday – to return to the road for pick up. Mike had no idea where they were.

 

Back at the command van, I couldn’t help but wonder why Mike had called me in. Just what did Mike want me to do about the missing members that our trained search and rescue teams hadn’t already done?

About six months earlier Mike and I had attended a weekend “tracking” course put on by Universal Tracking Services. Although we both enjoyed the experience, it just wasn’t Mike’s thing. However, I was hooked. I had attended one other weekend course in the interim and was looking forward to my third tracking course in the coming months. With this in mind, Mike asked me, “ Bart, do you think if I showed you where I dropped the team off, you might be able to track them?”... I really didn’t have an answer. I know that with just two tracking courses under my belt and some dismal practices, I certainly didn’t feel confident, but all I could say was "let’s go take a look.”

The relatively short trip up the logging road was made in silence. The concern for the well being of the lost team was palpable. On arrival at the drop off, Mike simply said “good luck” as I exited the truck.

Once on the ground, I cut for sign along the loose dirt on the road side. Surprising myself, I almost immediately found three sets of tracks and disturbances where the team had unloaded their packs. Frankly, I was excited about just how quickly I was able to confirm the “point last seen.” 

Continuing with basic tracking protocol, I searched for (and found) three distinct signature prints in the roadside dust, then took the time to draw the details of each print on footprint cards. Although this maybe only took ten minutes in total – the emergency responder bias for taking immediate action, made it seem to take an eternity. My tracking instructors’ voice kept repeating in my head...”always take whatever time is required to draw accurate footprints."

Once on the trail, I finally fully understood the importance of accurately drawing the footprint cards. It is all about building up patterns in the brain so when you observe partial prints, the details are recognizable. I was finding just enough patterns in some of the disturbances to prove to myself that I was on the right track. If I hadn’t taken the time to draw the tracks I would not be confident that I was following the lost team members.

As much as I would like to tell a story about an incredibly brilliant chase...once on the trail, the reality is that except for a short moment of indecision where the game trail forked and I found myself having to figure out which route the team took, I was generally able to track at a fairly fast walking pace. The whole tracking segment probably took less than twenty minutes. It was almost anticlimactic when I found the team.

I actually heard them before a saw them...the three team members were just finishing packing and preparing to hike out. Remarkably, not a timepiece amongst them and with their radio battery long dead, they had guesstimated that it was probably about time to call the exercise quits.

 

With my radio, I called into the greatly relieved SAR management team that I had found our lost group and requested a pick up vehicle to meet us at the road.

During the exercise debrief, it was not lost on the SAR team that a single, very inexperienced tracker was able to locate the lost group in about a half hour where numerous, well trained search teams working hard all weekend were unable to find the group. This realization was a game changer for future search operations.

Spurred on by the success of this first real use of tracking, I couldn’t get enough training and experience. Through the subsequent years there has been many successes where tracking played a part in a positive outcome. But there has also been enough failures to keep me honest. One thing is for sure, “by using teams of trained trackers early in a search greatly improves the chances of a successful outcome.”

See you on the trail

Bart