Darcy finally got completely certified in August.
She’d finished all the big tests in May, but
we still had to jump through the rest of the hoops of obedience, agility and
temperament testing. I was dragging my
feet because once Darcy was certified, Finn would really be retired and I
wasn’t sure I could actually handle that.
Anyway, as Hurricane Irene was moving up the coast in August my team,
Blue and Gray SAR Dogs, were put on stand-by for possible deployment. I couldn’t go unless Darcy was certified;
that was all the incentive I needed. At
lunch, the Friday before Irene was scheduled to hit Virginia Beach, Darcy and I
were getting the last little check mark we needed to finish our obedience. The five minute stay. In the parking lot of Steven Toyota, in
Harrisonburg.
Darcy is not a patient dog.
Particularly not with cars buzzing here and there. People walking to and fro. And especially not with the bushes rustling
next to her. Thank God we didn’t have to
do the AKC sit stay. Because, she laid
down, sat up, laid down again. And sat
up again. But didn’t move from her
spot. The third time was the charm for
her (this was the third time we were trying to get that five minute stay check
mark), and she and I passed.
Then we waited and waited and waited for the word to get on
the road to the shore. Thankfully, Irene
was being the typical fickle woman, and only side swiped the Beach rather than
hitting it head on, so we weren’t needed.
So we waited more for that first call out.
On October 2nd, Deacon and his mom Cora where
with me at Hone Quarry doing some water training.
While we were training that Sunday, an unlucky private plane
was flying close by on a course from southern Virginia over the Allegheny
Mountains to its final stop in Pennsylvania.
It was raining that day and the trees in the higher elevations of the
mountains that ringed the quarry lake were rimmed in ice. Quite pretty to look. Deadly for the plane. It disappeared from the radar around the time
we were finishing up and loading the boat on to its trailer.
We got the call Tuesday evening to meet with the rest of the
team and other dogs and handlers from several other Virginia SAR teams at 7AM
Wednesday morning in the northwest corner of Rockingham County. There was only a skeleton crew available for
planning, and none of them were dog savy.
Then the head guy got a bright idea and snagged a few dog handlers from
each team, told us what we were going to be searching, then left it up to us to
plan the dog tasks.
Our search area was the entire Gobblebark Mountain. We split the mountain we were to search into
smaller areas, 8 task areas in all. The
easy task I’d devised first, was snatched up quickly by another dog team and I
was left with the task at the very other end of Gobblebark Mountain. According to the map we had, there should
have been a two track we could drive on that would get us close to the start of
our task. This little piece of short
lived joy just reinforced the lesson we were taught as young orienteer’s- maps lie. Especially about man-made stuff. There wasn’t a road, let alone a two track in
the area; there was just a path. A
boulder strewn, tree blocked path that not even an ATV could get through.
Do you see a trail through here?
We had to hike to the end of this “path” to even start the
task. Darcy was overjoyed that she got
to run free for the whole time. She
found the teams that started before us several times. She ran up the side of the mountain to find a
team that was already in their sector.
And she kept stealing one of my team mates gloves out of his back pocket
when he wasn’t paying attention.
We had no radio communication, even with Civil Air Patrol in
the sky to relay for us. We did our radio
check at our trucks, had one short communication a short distance in and then
nothing until we got back to the trucks seven hours later. However, we could hear what was going on over
the radio at certain points. Actually,
we mostly heard what was going on in West Virginia and their search operations
near Peru (pronounced PEE-rou J
). We even could hear the Hardy County
sheriffs office. But nothing from our own base. Twice during trek to just get to
the start of the task, a Medi-vac helicopter was needed to extract two
searchers on the West Virginia search teams.
One was heart problems and I think the other was a broken leg. Thank goodness we didn’t have any injuries on
any of our teams.
Two and half hours later we finally got to the GPS way point
that showed us the drainage we needed to start up. And up and up and up we
went. All the way to the top. Then all the way down to the bottom into
Hardy County, in West by God Virginia.
The trip to the top was breath taking. Literally.
I had to stop about 5 times to catch my breath. Darcy on the other hand, probably ran up and
down the mountain 3 or 4 times in the time it took me and my team to reach the
top. I had two skinny country guys from
our local ground pounding team and one VA State Police officer with me. The skinny guys ran circles around me and the
police officer. The police officer
didn’t have to stop as much as I did, but he wasn’t running up the side of the
mountain either.
Darcy having fun "finding" my walkers
This guy could run circles around me, while climbing the mountain
Even out in the middle of nowhere, there was always evidence
of a human presence. There was a broken
down cart with bicycle wheels, the ubiquitous glass liquor bottles
and even this little trail marker up on top of the mountain:
We ended up sliding down Gobblebark into Hardy County,
WV.
It is not easy walking a contour
line in that kind of elevation. As much
as I wanted to skirt around the back of the mountain to the other side, my
aching ankles and knees told me it was going to be easier leaf skiing down into
the hollow and find the right drainage to go back over the mountain. Darcy was still bouncing between me and my
team mates, just out of her skin excited she got to be the only dog out with
three humans to watch her strut her stuff.
This search ended up being about 7 hours long. We travelled about 6-7 miles, had over 1000
foot changes in elevation, and only were active in our task area for about 2
hours.
The plane was eventually found near Peru, West Virginia. Ironically, the end of our sector was closer to the crash
site than it was to our trucks.
I was dead, but Darcy… she was ready for another 7 hours of
fun on the mountain. Not bad for her very
first search.
No comments:
Post a Comment