Episode 131 - Ken Lindbloom K9 Operational Medicine - TexSAR, Ranking AMC Huts, Belknaps, Kinsmans, Desolation

[00:00:03] Here is the latest Higher Summits forecast brought to you by our friends at the Mt. Washington Observatory. Weather above treeline in the White Mountains is often wildly different than at our trailheads. Before you hike, check the Higher Summits forecast at www.mtwashington.org.

[00:00:32] Weather observers working at the non-profit Mt. Washington Observatory write this elevation-based forecast every morning and afternoon. Search and Rescue teams, avalanche experts, and backcountry guides all rely on the Higher Summits forecast to anticipate weather conditions above treeline. You should too.

[00:00:54] Go to www.mtwashington.org or text FORECAST to 603-356-2137. And here's your forecast for Friday, December 1st and Saturday, December 2nd. Friday, mostly in the clouds under mostly cloudy skies. Isolated snow showers early, then afternoon mixed precipitation likely. Snow accumulations of trace to 2 inches.

[00:01:28] With a high in the upper 20s. Winds west at 50-70 mph early, 45-60 mph midday, and 35-50 mph later. Wind chill will be 5-15 above. Friday night, in the clouds with snow. Snow accumulations of trace to 2 inches. The low in the lower 20s.

[00:01:52] Winds west at 35-50 mph early, 45-60 mph with gusts up to 70 mph around midnight, and 25-40 mph later. Wind chill will be falling 5 below to 5 above. And then Saturday, in the clouds with snow. Mostly mixing with sleet and freezing rain during the afternoon.

[00:02:20] Additional snow accumulations of trace to 2 inches. Possible ice accumulation from freezing rain of a trace to a tenth of an inch. Highs will be in the upper 20s. Winds will be southwest at 25-40 mph, decreasing to 15-30 mph later. Wind chills rising to 5-15 above.

[00:02:52] Broadcasting from the Woodpecker Studio in the great state of New Hampshire, welcome to the Sounds Like a Search and Rescue podcast. Where we discuss all things related to hiking and search and rescue in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Here are your hosts, Mike and Stump.

[00:03:42] And here we go Stump, we are back from Thanksgiving. Yeah, happy Thanksgiving. Did you have your turkey? Yeah, we sure did. The folks came over and we stuffed ourselves, had a really nice lazy day watching that new Squid Games show on Netflix. It was fun.

[00:04:09] That game is fantastic. Yeah, you see the new show? I've been watching it, yeah. I just watched the newest episode. It's awesome. Yeah, it's wicked cool. Can't wait for the next season. Yeah, yeah, me too. All that weight I lost I think is back. Right.

[00:04:19] All right, so we've got Ken here. He's just working through some technical stuff. Are you all set, Ken? You want to say hi? Hi, glad to be here. All right, welcome, welcome from Texas, right? You in Texas right now? Yeah, Houston, Texas.

[00:04:27] All right, well, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good. What's your name? I'm Ken. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike. I'm Mike.

[00:04:46] You're talking, well, it's warmer down there than it is up here. I can guarantee you that. All right, stop. So quickly, before we do the intro, I just wanted to pick off a story that came by that I thought was interesting.

[00:04:58] I don't know if you can do this or not, Stomp, but when we're doing the edit, if you can put the Sopranos intro music on behind me, that would be great. But five men charged with murder.

[00:05:10] Apparently these are five New York City residents that apparently killed a guy and brought him up to Twin Mountain, New Hampshire and buried the body somewhere in the forest. Wow. That's crazy. So yeah, it's a wild indictment.

[00:05:25] So I'll include this in the show notes if people want to read. The thing I was looking for in the indictment, and this is a grand jury indictment, I wanted to get more details about exactly where they buried the body in Twin Mountain.

[00:05:37] Can you imagine going hiking and you see five gangsters burying a body somewhere? Yeah, I know. You just never know. New fear is unlocked. Yeah. So any interesting details in this indictment? So this happened on July 19th, 2023.

[00:05:57] It looks like it is a criminal enterprise out of Queens, New York. So Chinese nationals, it looks like they were doing a ketamine drug dealing ring. So ketamine I think is called Special K. It's like one of those drugs that they use at like raves and stuff.

[00:06:13] So you probably know all about that stuff, Ston. Right. Yeah, yeah, yes. That's your world. But I don't know. Apparently this guy owed money and they asked him to come to a restaurant. They met him out and then got him somewhere in New York.

[00:06:32] It's unclear when he actually was killed, but somehow they convened a grand jury and I guess the grand jury went from July 31st of this year for a couple days and then they've arrested five suspects. And one of the guys' nickname is Little Fatty.

[00:06:57] And then there's some other names that are really hard to pronounce, but I'll include it in the show notes. I just thought that was a new fear unlocked. Like you're just, you're minding your own business.

[00:07:05] You go on hiking, middle sugar bush or something like that and you've got these gangsters burying a body in the middle of the trail. Yeah, yeah. Well, it happens. It certainly does. Crazy. All right. Yep. All right, Stomp.

[00:07:19] So welcome to episode 131 of the Sounds Like a Search and Rescue podcast. This week we are joined by Ken Lindblom from Texas Search and Rescue. So Ken is a volunteer with TechSAR and has a background in emergency and disaster management.

[00:07:32] So his particular area of interest is medical care for working canine dogs. So Ken's done a couple of research projects on canine operational medicine and he's joining us tonight to explain the who, what, why, and how of developing a formal pre-hospital medical program for search and rescue canines.

[00:07:52] So to put this simply, basically when rescue dogs need medical help, how do SAR teams get enough medical training to make sure that the dogs are treated until they can get to a medical facility? Yeah.

[00:08:02] And there's a lot more to it, but this is what we're going to dive into. So in addition to the canine segment with Ken, we'll be ranking the AMC huts, recapping our recent live episode at Reckless.

[00:08:14] We have follow-ups on eye protection that we talked about, not getting your eyes sunburned, a story about spite houses, a story about a very loyal Jack Russell terrier, some recent hikes on the Belknaps, Kinsmans, and a bushwhack on Mount Deception.

[00:08:31] We'll talk about winter hiking plans and if we have time, we'll cover some recent search and rescue news. So I'm Mike. And I'm Stomp. Let's get started. This has been Peace from Hiking Buddies. We are a 501c3 nonprofit committed to reducing avoidable tragedies through education, impactful

[00:09:11] projects and fostering a community of support. You can find out more at hikingbuddies.org. We wanted to say thank you to those who have supported our mission, and most importantly, say thanks to those who speak up, who ask questions, and who are willing to provide

[00:09:24] guidance and assistance on the trails when needed. You embody what it means to be a hiking buddy. And now for all my newer hikers out there, here's this episode's Hiking Buddies quick tip. For every hike you plan, you should know your bailout routes before you go.

[00:09:47] Know where you can get down, where you will come out, and how you will get back to your vehicle. Preparing for a worst case scenario is excellent practice. All right Stomp, so I wanted to put pressure on you immediately. Uh oh. Uh oh. I'm ready.

[00:10:14] You need to rank the AMC huts in order of good to bad. Good to bad. Wow, interesting. So Ken, just so you know what we're talking about here, in New Hampshire where we focus on there's the Appalachian Mountain Club and the section of New Hampshire that the Appalachian

[00:10:32] Trail runs through, there's a series of mountain huts where hikers can basically stay in the wilderness. These huts usually, they have caretakers and there's usually like maybe 30 to 100 sleeping spots and then they offer food and stuff like that. And they're sort of like a staple for hiking.

[00:10:52] So what I'm asking Stomp to do is to rate his favorite to least favorite in order. Well, can I ask a question there? Yeah, go ahead. That sounds like the sort of thing that kind of makes me think of rest stops.

[00:11:05] Is that the sort of thing that invites drug use and crime? No, no, there's no drug use or crime. It's essentially if you're a purist in the wilderness you sort of feel like they shouldn't

[00:11:16] be there and people should be doing like back country camping and things like that. So it's a little bit of a luxury way for people to go outside and experience camping without having to bring a tent or anything like that.

[00:11:31] Like they have sleeping pads and things like that that you can, so it's sort of a halfway between camping and staying in a hotel. And it also serves for day hikers. You can get water there or you can step inside to get out of the cold weather.

[00:11:47] I mean, they're usually like a couple miles in so you have to hike to them. There's no easy access. So that avoids the riffraff for the most part. Although there was a case where somebody had taken a lot of acid a couple of years

[00:11:58] ago and climbed up on the roof and was screaming at people naked. Oh. So that does happen. Not the kind of nature you're probably looking for out there. Exactly. He had a rough time.

[00:12:12] But Stomp, first I wanted to know what's the criteria you're going to use and then what is your order? Sure. So, I mean, my criteria would be less crowds or less crowding, a feeling of spaciousness. Hospitality is never a question with the huts so I won't include that.

[00:12:31] Views and not necessarily above tree line views but just the surroundings themselves. And that feel of remoteness. I really look for that feeling that you're in the middle of nowhere. So those are a few of my criteria that I would judge these by.

[00:12:49] And I'm doing this off the cuff. So do you want number one my favorite? Yeah, yeah. Then we'll go from there. Okay, my favorite is Carter Notch Hut. Okay. That's number one. Number two would be Lonesome Lake. Okay. Number three is Lake of the Clouds. Okay.

[00:13:15] Number four would be Greenleaf. Okay. Then Madison Spring, Gale Head, Zealand and then Mitzpah. I've never been to Mitzpah so I really don't have an opinion on Mitzpah. Really? Yeah. Well, okay. Well that's interesting.

[00:13:34] I think that my criteria is similar to yours so I'm thinking views number one, remoteness number two and then sort of nearby landmarks is number three. So I would say for me, I would put Lonesome number one for me. Wow, okay.

[00:13:56] I just feel like that area is just so fantastic. It's right below Mount Washington. Then I would put Zealand as number two and the reason I put Zealand as number two is

[00:14:06] just because it's such a cool chill area in the nice weather because you can sort of put your hammock out, hang out by that water area there and it's pretty fun. Then I would say probably Madison Spring and I'm writing these down as we're talking just

[00:14:21] so that I can put them in the show notes. And then I would go with Greenleaf and so what do I got? Lonesome, Zealand, Madison, Greenleaf, Gale Head. Sure, yeah. Nispa and then I've got Lonesome and then Carter Notch is my bottom one so we're almost

[00:14:50] the exact opposite. That's interesting. So I don't like Carter Notch because it's just, I don't know, it's just like a very steep hike down to it and then a very steep hike up to it and then Carter Dome is just underwhelming to me.

[00:15:05] Okay, yeah, I see what you're saying but the notch itself is incredible. Yeah, yeah, it's nice. When you're coming down from Wildcats and you get that overlook view. But a lot of the consideration that I factored in here was in winter.

[00:15:23] I've been to most of these places in winter and of course as you know there are only a few that are open in winter and they're just so romantic and beautiful and just not crowded and those top three of mine definitely are just incredible. Okay, yeah.

[00:15:40] Yeah, well I do agree with that. I think that it is cool in the winter especially Lonesome Lake although when the Boy Scouts hit Lonesome Lake it's just a nightmare. Yeah, and of course Lake of the Clouds is not open in the winter but there is that dungeon

[00:15:52] underneath. I had some great memories there. All right, well I've got these written down Stomp so that we can put them on a little Instagram story so people can yell at us for getting them wrong. Right, all right.

[00:16:08] So next article that we have up here Stomp you pulled this. The auto road sets a fundraising record so this is related to the Northeast Delta Dental Mount Washington Road Race. So Ken for your education, so in the Northeast we have this high peak which is called Mount

[00:16:26] Washington it's like 6,288 feet high and it's like the highest mountain around and there's a 7.9 mile road that you actually can drive cars up and once a year they have a road race where you can run up so Stomp and I have participated in this race a number of

[00:16:44] years. Stomp actually did it this year, I couldn't do it because I broke my toe right before the race but they raised $62,000 for this race and it's going to support the oral health needs of North Country residents which is great. Absolutely cool, yeah amazing. Awesome.

[00:17:03] Yeah, Coahuas County Family Health Services. Super cool. Yeah, yeah and the road is 7.6 miles not 7.9. But that's good news so raising a lot of money and then Stomp next up and Ken I'd be curious

[00:17:20] to know if you have a lot of these issues but selfie taking is now considered a public health risk what is this all about? Yeah, it's a little bit of the obvious.

[00:17:31] I pulled this out of a Boston station and we all know that it's a problem we've seen some crazy things but there's been research that's been done recently out of the University of Sydney and they have found that this selfie taking is definitely a public health issue

[00:17:54] and I don't know what they're going to do about it but it's an interesting article and it does reference selfie related deaths. Now that is an interesting thing because if you do some digging you can find some horrible

[00:18:05] videos online about that and then of course we all know the benign ones where somebody walks into a pothole and things like that but it's starting to get noticed which is interesting. Yeah, and it says in this article here and I don't know maybe this isn't surprising I

[00:18:21] gotta warn my daughters but it says that the average age of deaths related to selfies was 22 and as they drilled down young females were implicated the most which I feel like that makes sense. Does it? Yeah, I feel like they're more likely to take selfies. I suppose so.

[00:18:41] Yeah, I mean I don't know I take selfies every once in a while but not very frequently. Yeah it's very interesting. You gotta get that dope meme. Yeah, I've read about a few of those. I haven't heard of anything any big public incidents like that here in Texas.

[00:18:57] You know we get some dementia walkaways occasionally calls from Big Bend when a hiker goes missing things of that nature a kid with autism wanders off but fortunately I haven't heard of too much self-inflicted accidents like that. That's good.

[00:19:15] I wonder a lot of times like if there's injury a lot of times when there's injuries around waterfalls or cliffs and things like that. We've covered a number of stories where it was indicated that people weren't paying attention

[00:19:30] close to those areas and you know you double click into that and you find out that like they you know they were taking photos or you know just weren't aware of their surroundings

[00:19:38] so I think the phone can be a distraction regardless of whether you're you know by a cliff or not it can be dangerous. Very good Stomp and then you've got an update here. We covered this before but I think there's more detail so the current administration

[00:19:59] I'm assuming this is like the Bureau of Land Management there's a plan for them to release seven grizzly bears near a rural community in where is this? This is in Washington. So this is an area that does not have grizzly bears right now and they're proposing that

[00:20:19] they're going to release seven of them and this is an apex predator obviously getting put in a new area and the locals as you can imagine are not too thrilled about it they're worried about their livestock and they're probably worried about themselves.

[00:20:33] Absolutely yeah it's an interesting thing so that the struggle goes on between the community members and the government agents and the plan is to release one every year or so into the rural region where these folks live and it could disrupt their cattle whatever you

[00:20:52] know their own personal well-being as well. So we'll see what happens with this one but it's an interesting story. Yeah and it looks like they've already introduced wolves to this area and it's had an impact

[00:21:07] on livestock so it's mostly ranchers I think that are pushing back on it but there's some data in here that says that grizzly bears are 20 times more dangerous than black bears and are well known for their aggressive fatal mauling. Government inaction.

[00:21:25] I will specifically avoid any national parks and doing backcountry camping if they have grizzlies in them so I won't be going there. That's awesome. Tomp and Ken have you guys ever heard of a spite house? Have you ever heard of that? No what is what's that? No.

[00:21:45] Is that anything like a trap house? No no it's like so spite means that you're looking to get revenge so the best example I can give you is like there's certain houses in cities like New York and Chicago where

[00:21:58] developers would like take these huge skyscrapers and then you'll see this like little tiny house that's never been sold in between these two skyscrapers because the owner refuses to sell it or sometimes there's situations where somebody will you know they'll have

[00:22:15] a property where somebody gives it to them but it's like really narrow and they can't build anything so they build like this super narrow house just to be a pain in the neck right?

[00:22:25] So where I live is it's in the north shore of Massachusetts so there's a town next to me called Newburyport that has what's called the spite house so it's known as the pink house and Stomp I wanted to pull this article just because I thought it was interesting

[00:22:42] because it ties with US Fish and Wildlife. So the story behind the spite house is that in the 1920s a husband and wife were married and they went through a divorce and as part of the divorce settlement the wife received

[00:23:03] the rights to have a house built that was the same specifications of the house that she had been living in in downtown Newburyport with her husband. There was no information or there's no stipulations around where that house would be built so the

[00:23:21] house was built on a salt marsh along the Parker River so this is essentially I think the best way to think about this Ken for you down in Texas would be this is sort of like

[00:23:32] the flats down in Galveston like stick it in the middle of like those salt flats down there. Essentially this house was built and prone for flooding and things like that and the wife was essentially stuck having to live in this house where it's like in the middle

[00:23:51] of nowhere out in the salt marshes you know surrounded by like a river and storms and things like that so that was the legend around it and it's been in existence for the last you know hundred years or so. It's been abandoned for like 50 years now.

[00:24:07] I know this place. You know it as you enter Plum Island. It's an iconic photo prop I guess is what you would call it so it's been there's been a preservation group that's been trying to like restore it and a couple of times it's

[00:24:26] been up for demolition surprisingly the there was an announcement by US Fish and Wildlife to demolish it and they gave it basically like a 30-day comment period for people to respond So the local preservationists are pushing to save this icon so it's a it's an interesting

[00:24:49] situation where the preservationists are scrambling to try to find like a piece of property that they can trade with Fish and Wildlife that would be equivalent so that they can take it over. So but they're pissed because Fish and Wildlife didn't indicate anything around looking to

[00:25:06] destroy it and it came out of nowhere so there's a lot of sort of political infighting around it but I thought it was interesting. Yeah that is interesting I've seen it all my life.

[00:25:19] The funny thing is is the whole story about the origin story about the husband and wife being divorced in him building her the house out of spite is actually not true. The truth behind it is that the husband had a mistress that lived in town he built the

[00:25:40] house outside of town where he him and his wife would live with their kid very quickly like he started to when they moved in it was only like a week or two when he moved in he

[00:25:52] started leaving to go work in town left the wife and the kid in the home by themselves she sort of figured like oh you know something's going on eventually she found out that he

[00:26:04] was having an affair and left to go move in with her family back down in Salem Mass and they went through a divorce and the husband and his new mistress got married and had a kid and they used the house as like a summer home.

[00:26:18] So the whole story about it being a spite house was like sort of true but not really. So gotcha. Interesting legend. Oh boy. So but I'll keep everyone updated on what happens. Yeah exactly.

[00:26:33] Yeah he just he just basically used it to make his wife so miserable that she'd leave him. So it's pretty awful. Yeah. So that's about spite houses. So all right Stomp what else you got. Well we have a heartwarming story that is about a little pup.

[00:26:51] Oh you want to cover this one. Yeah this is fantastic. It's really neat. This is a Jack Russell Terrier in the news and this pup is a hero. It's super cool.

[00:27:06] The dog after 72 days of loyal watch was let me see she bared her teeth and barked at the hunter who stumbled upon her owner's body. So apparently an individual passed but the dog stayed next to the body for that amount of time. It's absolutely amazing. Yeah yeah.

[00:27:27] So this happened in Colorado in the San Juan Mountains. So it was a 71 year old hiker went out hiking with his Jack Russell Terrier Finney and apparently the gentleman's name was Richard Moore.

[00:27:45] He passed away due to hypothermia and Finney stayed by the body for 72 days until a hunter stumbled upon the scene. And yeah I think the dog lost like half its body weight but it's stuck by its owner. Yeah unbelievable. Can you imagine? That's a long time.

[00:28:06] Yeah it's crazy. So if that happened to you Stomp and you had one of your cats with you what do you think the likelihood of the cat sticking around would be? Very very low. Very low. Well actually they'd be 10 pounds heavier actually. It probably would be.

[00:28:24] That's my thought too. Yeah. Crazy. Ken what's your take on this story? The dog story? Yeah. That's um I'm more of a fan of German Shepherds myself. That's funny. You gotta respect a little guy's loyalty though. Yeah yeah you do.

[00:28:51] Is that like actually let me ask you a question we're gonna get into this eventually but is there any value in small dogs for search and rescue to get into like smaller areas or is it always just these bigger dogs?

[00:29:03] So that's an interesting question because when you start sizing up the dog you could bring a small dog in there but you're not gonna see I've never seen it you're probably not gonna see like a Papillon or you know something super tiny like that.

[00:29:21] You can run larger dogs but you know the larger dogs they're going to they're gonna need more water they could potentially do differently in heat they can react differently to age injury and environmental factors so I've seen most of the dogs I've seen are on the smaller

[00:29:43] side I've seen a few people start with big dogs but the handlers that I've worked with or gotten to talk with they all seem to run like medium-sized dogs like I've got a we

[00:29:56] have a German Shepherd not a Sardog a pet that is like my wife says it's called a king size German Shepherd and I've seen German Shepherds on the team but they're not they're not massive German Shepherds like ours they're you know a couple sizes down.

[00:30:15] Yeah yeah interesting because I just figured like if you're if you're in an area where you have like thicker vegetation then I would think maybe like a smaller dog might be able

[00:30:25] to get their way in there but I'm so I've got a story about that okay yeah I was on this search we were looking for a prison inmate supposedly had knowledge of where a cold

[00:30:41] of a cold case where a child was murdered and buried and we were out searching this this dam and it was it was really thick brush and in this dam area not damn like concrete

[00:30:53] dam it's an earthen dam or like a reservoir and we're out there hiking through the woods and the handler that I was working with he had he had two dogs both black labs and one is smaller

[00:31:06] and female and the other her name is Alta and the other is larger his name is Orion and he you know he'd bring out two dogs so we could rotate them one gets worn out gets overheated he can put it

[00:31:18] back in the truck let it cool off he pulls out the other dog well Alta being small you know we'd come up across some heavy brush and she would you know just slide right under it but Orion being a big

[00:31:29] dog you would think he would have a problem with this but I I watched this dog as as we walked into this wall of thorns I see the handler you know like hackling and hacking and struggling his

[00:31:43] way through these thorns and there's a field over on the left hand side and I saw Orion look at the handler and then look over at the field and then look back over to the handler and you could see

[00:31:56] you could see the gears turning in the dog's head like screw this I'm not going through the thorns he knew where the handler was going but he just like walked out into the open field and went around

[00:32:07] to meet up with the handler so you know the the big dogs you know maybe it's not always a disadvantage you know they can be pretty pretty smart yeah well they can probably cover a lot

[00:32:17] more ground too I would think so well interesting well we'll do a deep dive into that stuff in a minute but um Scott you had a couple of reminders I guess people are communicating um to you um

[00:32:29] you're gonna warn them that we only respond to certain ways yeah just save your effort um I mean a lot of people are trying to get a hold of us through YouTube and it's just not a convenient

[00:32:39] way to communicate you know I would stick with uh Instagram or the Facebook pages for the podcast if you could um we do see them but don't expect a response so just a little note yeah and expect a

[00:32:54] slow response on Facebook because I'm horrible but stop you're so good at the like you're the best at social like I appreciate that you you cover that because you're always so good keeping

[00:33:02] in touch with everybody I think I do have to respond to one message on Instagram I'll get to that eventually so okay I'm so bad I'm so bad yeah it's all good anyway but um all right so then

[00:33:16] we had the last time the last show that we recorded was a live show at Reckless so Ken just for you we did like a live show which was a fundraiser for Search and Rescue um and we we we did a 5k race

[00:33:29] before that and it was a fun day but stop what do you think any any special memories any comments about the Reckless show oh I thought it was fantastic um they've always Reckless has always

[00:33:40] gone out of their way to support Search and Rescue and this event in particular was to support the New Hampshire Outdoor Council and um it was well attended it was a ticketed event which is the

[00:33:50] first for us and it sold out within like a day or two uh so that was pretty neat um all the guests were phenomenal and the word is that they raised uh fifteen hundred dollars by ticket sales um

[00:34:02] and as you know the a percentage of the full conditions brew that they formulated with Ty Gagne the author a percentage of that will also go to the New Hampshire Outdoor Council so

[00:34:14] all in all it was a really successful event and uh just wanted to thank everybody that came out yeah yeah everyone was great like you know Floki and Mel were great Darrell was great I could have

[00:34:25] talked to Wayne for another five hours we gotta get him on the show um Ty was great Ken was fantastic Reckless Steve yeah um Cindy everybody was fantastic yeah and and as compared to other

[00:34:38] shows or other guests um that we've had on there seemed to be a level of uh openness and uh depth to the conversation at this show that I've not experienced um that often on the podcast I was

[00:34:52] really floored by what people were talking about and what they were willing to reveal about certain events that have happened over the last few years in the region so it was a really neat show

[00:35:05] yeah yeah as nervous as I get about these shows like I definitely felt more comfortable once we hit record and we started talking but I do get you know it's a little freaky having people watch you

[00:35:17] I like this environment better where it's just like it feels like a work call to me so I don't think about it as much but it was fun yeah yeah yeah and this is the first show

[00:35:25] that you'll get to hear the actual applause from the audience and just wanted to thank Reckless Steve for the idea he he thought hey why don't you ditch the canned applause that you do after

[00:35:34] the show intro and use the actual crowd so that's what you heard tonight on this episode the actual crowd cheering so pretty neat are you ready for slashers gear review moving on here Stomp you've got a couple of gear review things yeah yeah just in time for christmas

[00:36:00] so we have two items the first one is a sasquatch call so if you're in the woods you buy this little digital 8-bit analog device that will send out sasquatch calls and uh you'll be all set you get that grainy picture on your camera and show everybody on

[00:36:18] instagram it's gonna be wicked cool does that come with a guarantee that i'll see sasquatch well ken that's what I wanted to ask you is do you do you have sasquatches in your house

[00:36:28] or do you have them in your house and then you can just go to the sasquatch store and ken that's what I wanted to ask you is do you do you have sasquatch in Texas

[00:36:38] I've never I've I've never I've never uh looked for sasquatch or hung out with anyone who uh has been looking for sasquatch my understanding is that Texas has their own like you guys have

[00:36:50] what's called the chupacabra have you heard of that before oh oh yeah the the blood sucking it sucks the bloods of uh the blood of goats yeah yeah exactly yeah you guys have that so have you

[00:37:03] seen one of those before yeah yeah no but I've seen a pretty ugly looking cat okay well we'll see but if if we um we'll check out the sasquatch whistle here and if it works out well we'll see

[00:37:19] if we can reach out to the owners to see if they can get a chupacabra call going for you that's just what we need exactly that's so great right about now ken's like what did I sign up for

[00:37:32] yeah yeah yeah so much my reputation that's great and uh this second one is great this is another stalking stuffer uh thanks mountain mike for this one uh he sent along a gear review that

[00:37:44] is pretty cool it's called the crap strap it's k-r-a-p-p and uh the crap strap is a sling that you wrap around a tree and put it around your waist and it lets you sort of lean back and

[00:37:56] hover to do your business and it uh comes at a staggering cost of 49.95 well I guess you if is that intended to convince the wife or girlfriend to go camping with you I don't know you know

[00:38:09] that's a good idea that's it could be a selling point actually you know what I'm thinking though stomp if something's I don't see that convincing my wife no no that's not gonna do it but you know

[00:38:20] what I'm thinking about guys is we're gonna talk about dogs tonight yeah I think that this crap strap could potentially double as a rescue sling for a dog so the rescue sling people should take

[00:38:31] a look at this and see if they can re-engineer their their um what is it what's the rescue sling called again that we have for dogs oh pack a paw pack a pack a paw group should see if they

[00:38:41] can like add an attachment so that you can use the pack of paw as a crap strap and then you have you know two products in one yeah multiple use that's super cool honestly like I would fall

[00:38:54] into the toilet paper in this thing I wouldn't be able to hold that position for more than five seconds oh come on you're a hiker you could handle this all right but it's awesome there's like a the

[00:39:05] picture of the crap strap it shows a mannequin it's a mannequin like in this position you gotta check it out it's great I feel like somebody should just set that up at a trailhead

[00:39:19] that'd be awesome oh man well too funny that's gonna be on the instagram story stomp i'll do that yeah oh boy so we'll get tagged for copyright for sopranos and then for this image

[00:39:34] yes okay uh hey what's that sound it must be time for the pop culture segment with mike and stomp pop culture we got a couple things to mention here and um I don't know if you looked at the

[00:40:07] instagram lately but the story is full of listeners that have been posting their Spotify wrapped uh images of their minutes that they've listened to the podcast and it's really flooring it's it's so

[00:40:21] uh it's so nice to see all these people listening to the podcast so much it's great so it's it's it is nice to see them listen to the podcast it's concerning that people have that like much free

[00:40:33] time on there yeah yeah yeah like some of the time is like 15 000 minutes and this and that it's it's hilarious but uh again thank you very much did you look at your wrapped i didn't even know about

[00:40:45] this thing until about a week ago i haven't looked where what is it is it um it's on Spotify and it's just like a yearly review of your listens your interests your highest most popular songs that

[00:40:57] you listen to in this and that so it's very cool no i haven't looked at it yet yeah yeah check it out it's good so again thanks everybody for for listening to the podcast as mike says we don't

[00:41:09] know why anybody listens at all but uh we appreciate it and uh moving on we uh i discovered a cool documentary and it's cool in the sense that it gives you uh it's a terrible story it's about

[00:41:21] the 1982 alpine meadows avalanche which is a ski resort that i think has been since renamed in the tahoe region of california um but it's interesting in the sense that they go into avalanche mitigation you know the daily efforts of the i don't know if they're the ski patrollers

[00:41:40] or whatnot but you know they use cannons and you know artillery basically and all these different methods to try to prevent avalanche but unfortunately um in 1982 there was one that struck the actual base and several people died there was one survivor that was buried for

[00:41:56] for days apparently so it's a really neat documentary worth checking out yeah i see this i've seen this on my recommended um shows to watch i'm just i'm too busy with squid games right

[00:42:08] now but i will check this out so i gotcha okay last but not least and then stop yeah our friend al sent in a link to us 15 minute podcast if anyone wants to check it out so we had talked

[00:42:22] about it we had covered a story i think two episodes ago about uh a dj that had used what were the lights that he used stop that caused eye uh eyeball sunburn i think they were just

[00:42:35] they were high powered leds but they yeah they were just yeah they were burning out people's uh retinas and whatnot yeah yeah so so definitely remind people and i i had to do this this weekend

[00:42:46] so the the higher summits are snow covered and the sun when the sun's out and it's reflecting off the snow like you do need to make sure that you keep you watch out for your eyes so make sure that

[00:42:56] you're wearing eye protection but al sent over a link to a podcast that talks about um it kind of does a deep dive into burning eyes in the outdoors and it's a um the podcast is called advanced

[00:43:10] wilderness life support and it's the university of utah school of medicine so they do a 15 minute podcast about burning eyes in the outdoors and um you know how to protect your eyes and what the

[00:43:20] right glasses are so if you want to geek out on that it's a it's a pretty interesting episode excellent excellent i hate i hate wearing goggles or any yeah glasses you got to do it though you

[00:43:33] gotta do it yeah that's so frustrating all right well yeah thank you al this al i'll have to meet this person sometime or another i keep on thinking it's a i thanks ai i know it's al it's all because

[00:43:45] i in the so he's asking that because in the script i always say thanks al but it looks like ai but thank you so moving on we have uh free stickers if anybody's interested at ski fanatics off of exit 28

[00:44:00] in campton new hampshire it's their new building just behind the post office or adjacent to the post office and dunkin donuts as you come off the exit or you can go to spinner's pizza parlor

[00:44:12] just minutes off of uh route 93 dascombe road in north andover it's the number one voted pizza in the area family-owned since 1994 so you can go visit dolls and pops and say hi and get your

[00:44:23] selfie but just watch out when you're taking that selfie let's see we want to give a shout out to reckless for all their uh support a special thanks to them uh you'll enjoy the best food craft beer

[00:44:35] and fun just 15 minutes from franconia notch many 4 000 footers in less than 10 minutes from the five corners and uh donation time we've had a couple donations over the last several days while we were

[00:44:46] off uh thank you john huck for donating eight coffees to us thank you paul donated 20 thank you very much paul it's great to see you at the show and stacy tardif donated five coffees as well

[00:45:01] thank you stacy and uh quick healing to you to get you back on the trail okay and uh that's all we got for donations great people great people hey stomper this is the part of the show where we

[00:45:13] talk about what beer we're drinking but before we do that i i'm gonna forget to do this so i just wanted to give you a heads up i'll put this in the show notes but our friend dave dylan from uh

[00:45:23] chase the summit you know he was on the show he's got his own podcast he's an ultra runner yeah um he is a tech guy he posted something on his own facebook page the other day so he does

[00:45:35] a video podcast he was able to use an ai system where he uploaded sample video of himself as well as um you know some voice samples and then he went into ai and had them uh created essentially

[00:45:50] like a two to three minute video talking about a particular subject and none of it is him it's completely ai generated from the backdrop to the um video of him with his arms moving to the content

[00:46:06] to the voice i mean literally like he just he's like this is like he's like i gotta raise the alarm on this because this is getting to be like to the point where you know if i can do this based

[00:46:17] on a two minute sample you know nothing anybody could fake anything with ai so it's long as we've been talking about this a lot it's like a two minute clip or so i'll put it on i'll send it

[00:46:29] over to you snob i don't know if he wants me to release it in the show notes but ai is getting to the point where it's it's crazy like we could literally just do a show

[00:46:38] on ai and i think it would be if we did it on video like i don't know if people would be able to tell the difference so yeah that's freaky like what is gonna happen here over the next few years

[00:46:51] it's crazy you know there's probably some um some application there in search and rescue that hasn't been thought of um if you use ai in conjunction with open source intelligence that could potentially

[00:47:02] be useful for certain kinds of searches well we did a story i think it was two shows ago ken where there's a startup company in i think hong kong and some researchers have um combined drone footage

[00:47:18] with ai to essentially you know how like they'll crowd source like looking at satellite photos this is basically putting up a drone and then taking photos of the area and then using ai to

[00:47:31] identify humans in that area there so they're there they are starting to to use that technology so we've done something like that a search where we were looking for human remains and some

[00:47:46] really really high res drone footage was taken and then fed to ai right and ai attempted to identify human remains um it generated a lot of false positives just a lot of shiny white things

[00:47:58] some of them were bones but they a lot of them were bones but they were animal bones and the other things were just you know oil derricks pieces of oil field equipment um so semi-successful there

[00:48:09] interesting but it's interesting like the thing about this this example of um and i'll email it to you ken too so you can check it out but um this example of the podcaster creating a video

[00:48:20] of himself like basically doing his podcast you know that the technology is so new and he was able to do it so that it's such high quality like i can only imagine like two three years from now

[00:48:31] like the the ai that you the exercise you just did will probably you know they'll be able to fix the false positives pretty significantly i would think pretty quickly i would think yeah i mean that's

[00:48:44] the whole idea with ai it's just learning and its ability to you know improve and everything else supposedly yeah it's an interesting world we're moving into here stop but anyway are you drinking

[00:48:56] anything tonight you need beers i am i i picked up one i went with your uh your theme motif here and i picked up a kinsman by resilience it's well it's by shilling but it's their resilience line it's a

[00:49:11] citra cryo cascade in idaho seven and uh seven percent alcohol into your pale ale it's really good it's very tasty i love shilling anyway nice yeah what you got i i have a treehouse very hazy

[00:49:25] so i went to treehouse about two months ago and it is a double ipa 8.6 alcohol so i'll be slobbering all over myself by the end of the night here

[00:49:36] so and can we didn't prep you i don't know if you drink it or if you just drink them water or whatever but i don't know if you're a beer drinker if you have a fever i'm more of a i'm

[00:49:46] more of a martini guy okay an aristocrat i like it hey i i yeah i'm fancy and i apologize if i'm stepping over you on my end there's a bit of an audio delay uh oh no when when i hear you start

[00:50:00] and stop talking it's all good yeah i'm martini guy and when i'm on keto i'll drink uh that you know low carb corona stuff oh there you go i like a corona yeah no and don't worry about the delay

[00:50:13] there um you know i can work it out you can edit stuff yep um all right stomp so uh recent hikes you've done two do you want to break down where you've been in the whites lately you sure sure

[00:50:25] i've got the fire again my friend so the first one i've got the fire for the new hampshire highest 500 and um the way i usually tackle these are to find you know clumps of them that i can tackle all

[00:50:37] at once so i looked south this was the thanksgiving weekend and i i honed in on the belt bell nap range not belknap range and i decided to go for it so that friday after thanksgiving i went out

[00:50:52] and tackled um three of them i had planned to do four and um my plan was to hit mount clem and this is off of the round pond area if i i provided a little map there mike i don't know

[00:51:06] if it'll help but uh it was interesting so started around like 7 54 in the morning and this is near gunstock if anybody has skied there just to give you a point of reference so original idea was to

[00:51:18] hit mount clem which is a short one and um it's part of a loop that comes next to round pond and uh for some reason man this is my biggest complaint with the bell nap range the the signage

[00:51:31] the blazing on the trees can be really confusing at times they use this color-coded rainbow spectrum and uh you know i get i understand blazing it for different colors for different trails and stuff

[00:51:43] but what's really freaky is they overlap them sometimes and then on top of that you have previous blazes from before the trail turned to a different color so it can be really confusing

[00:51:55] you so you got to do your homework i had a map on me in my phone didn't really reference and reference it too much and sure enough as i was heading to mount clem i diverted i diverted onto

[00:52:07] the uh what is it the uh old gilford trail east gilford trail and that was not my intention so i ended up going up to uh bell nap first mount bell nap and i you know at about 2 025 hundred feet i

[00:52:23] realized that i had taken a wrong turn but i'm like okay let's just get on with this and see what happens so i ended up going to bell nap uh following yellow and red blazes um mostly barefoot

[00:52:34] the way up it wasn't too bad early winter type of snow the fire tower at the top of bell nap is super cool but it's currently under construction so that was that was sort of a bummer from there

[00:52:47] another sort of blunder on mr stomps side here i ended up taking a red blaze trail down about a thousand feet thinking it was heading towards gunstock but it was actually a trail that

[00:52:59] was heading down to another trailhead so i uh turned back up and i found that behind this dilapidated shed was another trail that actually went over to gunstock proper so yeah i was totally

[00:53:13] noobing it dude i was just like yeah whatever i'm not gonna look at the map i'm just gonna make this up as i go so it was fun um so yeah made it over to gunstock which was really great and um

[00:53:26] you know as i was heading over there you had to put spikes on it was super icy and um the snow was maybe traced to two inches but it was just slick really slick on the way back i bumped into

[00:53:36] a listener and uh a legend around here cory hemple who actually straight yeah it was great seeing cory she's so cool and i met her i met her dog too which is uh her dog's a sweetie oh yeah i love

[00:53:49] those dogs they're so every time she like posts a story or something i'm always looking at the dogs like have that smile on their face yeah yeah yeah cory's great so she actually um spent a

[00:53:59] little bit of time with me pointing out um the trail system and and answered my question because after gunstock which had an amazing view of the lakes and the mountains i wanted to get over to

[00:54:10] piper and i just wasn't sure if there was an active trail that did that but she you know showed me how to get over there and um sure enough there was an old piper trail that uh got over to piper so i

[00:54:23] went to piper which blew me away it was like being on top of uh dickie northern ledges just wide open ledges with stone benches and just dramatic views so it was really cool um after that i i

[00:54:38] went down this trail which was called the i believe it was called the piper connector trail which took you back down to round pond and that was a mind blender because at that point i'm getting a little

[00:54:53] fatigued and after descending from piper maybe 2 000 feet you're in this deep valley it decides to ascend again for another several hundred feet and oh dude that was totally unexpected looking at the

[00:55:08] map you can see it um i think what was the name of that mountain it circles some white sun sun cook sun cook mountain or something of that nature okay yeah something like that um so yeah

[00:55:21] i was just burnt out by then so when i finally got back to round pond i still wanted to get clem and as i was ascending clem uh my legs are just getting gimpy so i just decided to bail

[00:55:35] so that was about 1 20 in the afternoon so it was that classic decision point do i want to do clem or just turn back and head down back to the truck and i of course made the stupid call of trying

[00:55:46] to do clem but at least i turned around before trying to get all the way up clem yeah i've done like so i've done the opposite like i've hit all those like um eastern peaks like clem mac rand

[00:56:00] quarry and uh straight back in major but i haven't done bell knap and gunstock and piper and white face and those so i'll get out there but yeah it's that's a cool year and running into

[00:56:10] quarries good she's like the expert in the bell knaps oh she sure is she was zipping like it was just a glimpse of her running by me i just a flash like was that cory

[00:56:20] and then number two uh on sunday i did um another 500 highest and that was deception east so the plan was to hike mount deception and deception east which are two mountains in the dartmouth

[00:56:36] range which are just west of the presidential so uh steve reckless steve had asked if i wanted to come along for bushwhack and i threw out some ideas and we all decided to to meet at upper falls

[00:56:49] on the access road that heads towards the cog and actually try to do these mountains from the eastern side which is when you do your research about this uh deception range everybody does it

[00:57:00] from cherry mountain pond road which at the moment is closed but it's walkable for say two to three miles until you get to small cherry pond and then from there people generally bushwhack up a mile

[00:57:11] mile and a half to get to mount deception and these are in the 3500 to 36 3700 range for height it was an amazing day we started at 840 we generally just wore our spikes uh the whole way

[00:57:27] no no uh snow shoes i mean the snow is just too thin until you got to the top and then we were dealing with about a foot deep snow in the call between the two peaks we got out at 4 11 p.m so

[00:57:38] we were at 7.8 miles in basically what seven or eight hours it was slow going i've i've not been challenged like this since the captain and the captain is just you know maybe half a mile of

[00:57:52] that and this was several miles of blowdown fields the size of football fields and just like just tremendously difficult uh terrain but like all good hikes like all most good hikes we got surprising

[00:58:07] views that just blew us away there's one view up top of mount deception that covers the literal entire presidential as you can see all the way from the north to the to the south the entire presidential range from that mountain it's unbelievable so if you're a bushwhacker and

[00:58:24] you're up for like some torture and you want a view that's that's the one right there i need to i gotta figure out what the what the or the name origin is for that one i'm curious i'd be curious

[00:58:40] as well yeah it's funny i'm not quite sure yeah that is but i'm not surprised you can see the presidentials from there because it just sort of like it's it's right in that area so yeah

[00:58:51] so that's all i got yeah it's good to be out again you've been a busy guy here so i did a i also got out into the the kinsmen so my daughter needed a couple of 4 000 footers so ken in the

[00:59:04] northeast here we have um we're very into lists so we have a certain number of mountains that are what we call 4 000 footers so there's 48 of them in new hampshire so we make it a game of like

[00:59:19] summiting all these these mountains and then it's sort of a badge of honor so my daughter is pursuing her list she's got she's at 26 now after this hike so um so we did the kinsmen's we left we got

[00:59:32] on trail around nine in the morning we stopped at the the the hooks at rest area and loaded up on food which i love that place stomp um apple cider donuts so we were we were feeling great

[00:59:45] we met uh listener steve who's been hiking with me all winter and we've gotten together a couple of times and then knobby hikes was joining us and then uh my daughter's boyfriend joined us and he

[00:59:56] was like i'm gonna do it and i said it's gonna be a long hike so i was nervous about him because he's never done a winter condition hike before yeah and um he did great you know it was a little

[01:00:06] bit slow going but we you know got up to lonesome lake and um one thing i noticed about lonesome lake i haven't been there in a long time i camped out there one winter which was ridiculous but

[01:00:16] that is not a place to camp out because what i realized with lonesome lake is that the cold air just sits in the bottom of that like a bowl so like literally you could you could feel the

[01:00:26] difference in temperature when you got to lonesome lake compared to what it was like coming up it must be like a five or ten degree difference in the cold weather oh interesting yeah you'd

[01:00:37] think you'd be sheltered with the uh the wall of mountains to the west yeah but i think what happens is the really cold air just sits at that low point and just doesn't move so it was pretty

[01:00:50] chilly but we got to lonesome lake hot chilled out for a little while and then went up fishing jimmy put the spikes on and uh made our way over but it was a little bit of a slow hike and we ended up

[01:01:02] getting out around 4 30 or so but when we got back when we were heading back we got back to lonesome lake and um it was pretty cool because the moon was rising over franconia from lonesome lake so

[01:01:15] we got some good photos oh beautiful which is cool and then also stomp we had a couple of the weirdest thing happened is that me and my daughter were climbing up to um north kinsman and as we were

[01:01:28] climbing up this was a couple that was um headed down and they were um one of the the lady had said like sounds like a search and rescue and then i stopped and i was like my daughter turned around

[01:01:40] looked at me like was shocked that's weird um i was like oh did you say sounds like a search and rescue and she's like oh is that is that your podcast i was like yeah i'm mike and she's like

[01:01:50] oh my god that's so great so we took a selfie and then i was talking to her friend and he's connected with amc in boston so i've got a i've got to follow up with him but it was great to meet them

[01:01:59] and it was yeah it was exciting yeah that's really funny good few yeah small world yeah um and then my daughter was like oh my god i'm never gonna hear the end of this and i was like no i'm

[01:02:09] cool i'm cool that's great were the trails busy very busy yeah a lot of people out there so a lot of people at the hut a lot of people there not that many people at the hut but uh

[01:02:25] just a lot of people on the trails gotcha gotcha it's awesome all right stop let's skip the notable listeners we'll do that next week because we want to get to ken but before we do that let's uh

[01:02:35] let's do a couple of sponsors here we've got one one new sponsor a sponsor that's coming back yeah let's do it so fieldstone kombucha welcome back and uh we're glad to have you some great news here

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[01:04:06] now that it's local it's like whoo yeah exactly it's great um all right stomp so we um just a quick point here you had a couple of notes here so i'm gonna be finishing up my winter 4 000 footer

[01:04:19] list coming up this winter so i've got two trips to go three trips to go you just tallied up all of your your list and you said you're at 22 so yeah you're gonna try to like get get some of

[01:04:30] these done i'm gonna get cooking on it yeah mr stomp and i were looking through our old uh 48 list she's at 14 i'm at 22 and we've got the fire under our butts so we're gonna dive in this winter

[01:04:43] and see if we can't tackle some okay all right yeah looking forward to helping out yeah right on awesome how many do you have left six all right so you're planning on doing these what really

[01:04:57] quick like a trip yeah when i get back from florida i'm gonna bang them all out in january excellent wow well if we can line them up uh keep in touch we'll coordinate yeah i got a big

[01:05:07] crew actually coming off of owl's head so if you need to do that one um i've got i've got a pretty good group going okay awesome excellent my favorite all right and uh our final sponsor

[01:05:21] of the night here before we get to ken do you have a sweat problem ken sweat can be extremely uncomfortable on the trails well this is something for you this is this is made for you brother so

[01:05:36] plus sweat is a serious risk factor as your clothes get wet your core temperature can dramatically fluctuate this can result in hypothermia heat exhaustion and dehydration so we've got good news here at slasher for you there's a piece of gear that solves the sweat

[01:05:50] problem valkluis's ultralight ventilation backpack frame the frame is a backpack accessory that easily installs in your favorite pack size 15 liters to 65 liters and creates a ventilating airflow gap between you and your pack it's also ultra light weighing less than a pair of socks at

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[01:06:18] gear.com to order an ultralight ventilation frame today use promo code slasher sla sr to enjoy a five dollar discount plus let them know that mike and stomp sent you yeah uh nobby had his uh new

[01:06:35] new version of valkluis when we did the kinsman hike and then caroline um had hers i haven't switched mine back over to my backpack so i was using my bigger gear so i didn't use it this time

[01:06:44] but gotcha what did nobby think large one so like generation two yeah good stuff yeah yeah he said that um you know it felt cool on his back and that um you know it was comfortable and no sweat issues

[01:06:56] excellent yeah they're flying off the shelves we get notifications all the time yeah that's great that's great it's time for slashers guest of the week very cool very cool all right um so ken this is your moment this is your big segment you ready to go

[01:07:39] i'm ready excellent this is and you said this is your first podcast right yes this is my first podcast great great so why don't you start off um giving a little bit of an introduction on your background maybe talk about whether you've done a lot of hiking

[01:07:57] in your younger days and then how you got into search and rescue and then a little bit about your academic background yeah so i did do a little bit of hiking uh you know nothing like y'all are

[01:08:09] doing just undeveloped land uh near where i i grew up um what got me into search and rescue is i got involved in an off-road club that was kind of like the um uh the cajun navy but mostly with

[01:08:25] you know lifted trucks and jeeps and whatnot uh and it's a volunteer group called uh houston area off-road recovery and we went out in the um went out in the the tax day floods uh to volunteer

[01:08:40] and then went out again in harvey and in harvey i wound up linking up with a group on a boat and we did a lot of stuff on a boat did some stuff on a monster truck my wife basically started a dispatch on discord for coordinating people

[01:08:56] um it was it was a really life-changing experience for me um but even doing that i knew i don't know what i'm doing wrong but i know i'm getting it over my head i don't know what the

[01:09:08] right gear is but i know i'm not wearing the right gear um and and that's that's when i got bit by the bug i wanted to keep kind of doing that thing but i didn't want to keep doing it you know with an

[01:09:19] off-road club um i i went through uh a cert training i don't know if you're familiar with fema's cert program and realize that's that's that's not where it's i'm not gonna keep doing

[01:09:32] that same kind of thing um went in with our local cert teams and then i found texas search and rescue and uh went out to one of their trainings watched them work with canines um at first i was

[01:09:46] really interested in becoming a canine handler um but i knew i wanted to become an emt and uh i realized i'm doing that i'm also going to school for this this graduate degree it's not realistic

[01:10:01] uh for me to become a canine handler after i i really grasp how much work and time and money is involved in that um i was already stretching myself um thin so i've been a uh i've been with

[01:10:14] texas since um 2018 i got my emt basic in 2019 um got my uh wilderness emt uh from knolls which is just a really fantastic uh program their wilderness upgrade for medical professionals program and um yeah i started working on my graduate degree in um emergency and disaster

[01:10:39] management two weeks before harvey hit so it was kind of interesting timing starting that degree and then going out into this this big disaster um the very thing i'm researching and and studying and um

[01:10:53] from my experiences in texar i knew uh um i either wanted to do research on volunteer groups or research into canines and i found a way to combine the two and uh i did a couple different projects

[01:11:08] um while i was working on my graduate degree and i was very fortunate to have um the support of of my teammates and in texar um they were very supportive and it helped my research to a great

[01:11:24] degree um but of course while i'm on here tonight i'm speaking for myself and uh and not on not on behalf of my team yeah and the sort of the area that you've been most focused on which is kind of a

[01:11:39] i would assume it's a niche area but it's a critical area is when dogs are out in the field they're obviously at a in they're at a risk of injury so a lot of times it's the people that

[01:11:53] are in search and rescue teams they have medical training and they've got their um you know wilderness first aid training and things like that but it's applied towards humans so your focus

[01:12:03] is around thinking about like how do we triage the dogs if they're injured in the field during their search is that that correct that's that's correct that's what i did my my research on taking it from

[01:12:16] from uh you know the first aid level to to something um of a higher standard was anybody thinking about this or talking about this that you were aware of i have to think that

[01:12:29] this is something that people would just sort of say like well we can we can figure things out based on the knowledge that we have in uh medical procedures for humans but it's it's clearly

[01:12:40] different with dogs you've got to have specialized knowledge so it not this is where it gets really this is where it gets really niche SAR um i don't believe so and and i'm i'm native texan never lived

[01:12:56] outside of texas only done SAR in texas only researched texas teams um so i don't know if it's different for folks in other parts of the country but excluding like federal teams like the

[01:13:08] the USAR teams um and coast guard i don't know if they have dogs but excluding you know paid professionals like that um that doesn't really seem to exist in volunteer search and rescue to

[01:13:22] the best that i've been able to find it is more common in law enforcement settings one of the teams that i i encountered in my research i came across an article about the orange county

[01:13:35] sheriff's department and when you get to a big city that has a full-time SWAT team they have the funding and the resources uh to have um tactical medics on their team and of course they

[01:13:48] also have canines and they'll take this class you know at the paid level like that they're all paramedics that are not EMT basics like me um they'll go and they'll take a course it's it's

[01:14:01] based off of guidelines called canine tech that's tactical emergent emergency casualty care um where you learn to apply basically their paramedic skills um to canines so they already have these

[01:14:14] skills they're used to doing them on people uh and now they learn to do them on on animals um that class is open to laypersons and some SAR people take that class handlers take that class i took it

[01:14:28] and it was very educational helped my research um but so far from what i've seen in the military setting and law enforcement setting um they're already way ahead thinking on how to handle this

[01:14:40] problem uh but that hasn't that that doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to the volunteer search and rescue yeah yeah i would imagine that um and and i think in new hampshire

[01:14:53] i don't think i suspect that in new hampshire it's not as common for search and rescue so so i'm not on search and rescue myself i'm more on the hiking side but i would suspect it's not

[01:15:05] as common as you would find in texas to deploy the canine units just because the majority of you know the it's a mix so a lot of the rescues in new hampshire are focused on hikers where you

[01:15:17] can do sort of litter carryouts and then there's a fair amount of like atv snowmobile activities there are there are um you know elderly walk-offs and young people walk-offs and things like that

[01:15:28] where i would assume they deploy dogs a fair amount but probably not at the level of texas um but can you talk a little bit about like you have i think i feel like you probably have

[01:15:39] like flood and hurricane response and more sort of emergency weather events but can you sort of talk about like what areas of search and rescue are most common in in your um your experience in

[01:15:51] texas sure um being being a big team we've we've got um people that have uh come to texas and join techs are from other states and um i've talked to uh teammates from arizona and montana and seem to

[01:16:11] be wildly different operating environments and wildly different structures so it does kind of help to explain how we do things here unlike most other states search and rescue is not a function of a local sheriff's department most search and rescue teams are volunteer

[01:16:30] non-profit organizations that's what texas search and rescue is in my research i identified um 10 volunteer teams in texas that was almost all i could find and i solicited them for participation and some of my research i also gathered information about them from the web

[01:16:50] and texar is a little bit unique in that um we have a lot of medical people we're very medical heavy uh we were only one of two out of ten teams that i could find that advertised that capability

[01:17:02] on on their team website and the other was associated with the fire department so we're a little bit unusual in that regard and search and rescue is probably a lot different

[01:17:14] than what you guys are doing in the mountains we do do hurricane and flood response um we also do event medical support so there's this one event we used to i've done i've done event medical

[01:17:27] support for like mountain bike races and things like that uh cert competitions where they do the search and rescue stuff and there's a possibility of someone getting hurt um and we do large public

[01:17:40] events there's one a big one down in galveston every year galveston uh boulevard peninsula gets swarmed by tourists that overwhelm the normal resources on the peninsula and esd2 um often brings us in to provide medical support there we do incident management stuff um one one cool thing

[01:18:01] i got to do was serve as a liaison in a fema exercise with a nuclear power plant where they did a tabletop exercise of the scenario where there's a disaster that threatens the plant and

[01:18:15] possibly the plant leading to a bigger safety issue and i got to serve in an imt capacity there as a liaison between the team and uh and the local government there we do a lot of searching for

[01:18:30] missing persons dementia walkaways children with autism things of that nature that just go walking off um occasionally i would describe what we do as wilderness search and rescue but only in comparison to urban search and rescue it's we do occasionally go out to like big bend um but

[01:18:52] wilderness in this context just means a pretty remote area and maybe it's it's not the mountains or a uh a uh you know a trail in the mountains but it could be an oil field somewhere way out

[01:19:05] in the middle of nowhere or a riverbed um you know hiking through a riverbed riverbed after a flash flood and there's a lot of criminal investigations that's a major component of it for

[01:19:20] for us to the point at which um the team has grown large enough to afford several paid positions and we hired a former texas ranger to start a missing persons unit to go through cold cases

[01:19:36] and work with law enforcement to identify opportunities to go out and help these with these cold cases and see if we can find people and bring killers to justice wow and do you um

[01:19:50] as far as the you know the function of the team is it like do you stand by to get a call to say like okay we've got to activate a mission and then you just have to respond back to the the lead to

[01:20:03] say like okay i can help with this volunteer assignment or do they have um or is it an expectation that you have to respond when they call like do you have the option to say like i'm

[01:20:15] too busy to do something or is it um i guess i'm curious about like sort of the call-out process that you have yeah so that that was um we're we're nims compliant uh before you can be even get close

[01:20:30] to being field deployable you have to take your basic nims and ics courses learn about incident command and command structure um we don't self-deploy uh we only um are deployed at the request of you know state federal uh local government um yeah that was my question actually

[01:20:49] thanks for adding this yeah yeah and a lot a lot of um folks um they aren't familiar with techsar they get it confused with other organizations and sometimes you know that that's a good connotation and sometimes it's not but we're very careful to um we try to operate

[01:21:09] call ourselves unpaid professionals um operate just like the professionals the only difference is that um that we're volunteers um we do occasionally this is rare but it's really interesting i didn't i never imagined this would happen but we do occasionally respond to requests

[01:21:25] from um corporations uh there's one i don't know if i can name them but we have a corporate sponsor that um when they go to build a new location um they'll request our canines to go in and make

[01:21:39] sure there aren't any bodies there before they build because if they start building and uncover a body then that creates a massive headache for them so they just save themselves the headache by

[01:21:48] hey guys can you come out and take a look for us um we've also got gotten called out to do damage assessments after a hurricane in um went through louisiana the storm's name escapes me at the

[01:22:00] moment but it was a private emergency management company that handles emergency management and crisis communications for uh large chains like you know hardware stores and pet stores things of

[01:22:13] that nature and they reached out to us to go out and get boots on the ground and drones in the air and assess damage to uh their customers facilities so it's you know mostly state uh state and local

[01:22:26] sometimes federal or task forces but occasionally you get those those oddball corporate requests too yeah that is that is interesting i would have never imagined like a private company would say like you know sweep this area for for human remains so that we don't have to clean up

[01:22:43] the mess as we start construction but i would assume that that you know i guess that makes sense it's just like it's so rare up in this the northeast area that something like that would

[01:22:53] happen but i do feel like i don't know why but i do feel like like there's more likelihood to find a dead body like down in texas for some reason i don't know why but yeah and that that would of

[01:23:06] course completely grind things to a halt i don't know if they'd bring out the sheriff or a coroner or who but they'd have to bring out someone and make an initial assessment of does this look like

[01:23:14] it was a crime or someone just naturally passed is it a very old grave uh grave site you know from the 1800s that you know isn't marked anymore uh and then that would just bring construction to

[01:23:26] a halt so it makes sense to um ask ask us to do a sweep before they get started yeah and then can you talk about the dogs are the dogs the canine units like embedded in texar or are they

[01:23:40] a separate unit that you engage with um based on the the specific case that you're you're dealing with what we have different there's different disciplines and now they're kind of formalized

[01:23:53] into in a sense they're formalized into teams um but we're we're all all one texar um when you join a specific team discipline um there's you know some more oversight and organization specifically surrounding that that discipline um that's that's true for the canine handlers just like it's true

[01:24:16] for the drone drone team or the medical team what is your i'm curious what's your take on the canine handlers are they is is the personality type of the canine handlers are they all similar

[01:24:29] or do they come from sort of a wide background in your your opinion so um i recently delivered i compiled my research into a presentation and before pitching it to my team and coming on your show

[01:24:44] um i presented it to some of our team's handlers to get some feedback and as i was talking with them afterwards you know i said gee you know i really appreciate how much time and effort and

[01:24:56] money goes into this and what what keeps you guys going when you do lose a dog and um one of the handlers said to me well we all have one thing in common we're single oh really yeah so they

[01:25:14] have the time and effort to focus on a dog versus where they you know might otherwise be focusing on more interpersonal relationships so they're making that sacrifice to to to the dog it's it's

[01:25:28] a tremendous amount of time and you know you could train a dog you know on the weekends you know in evenings you could certainly do that um some some call outs are scheduled particularly the criminal

[01:25:40] investigations if the law enforcement already knows the person's probably dead there's no point dragging this out on on a weekday but a lot of other searches um criminal investigations included they have to take place on weekdays and um there are handlers that have normal jobs and they just

[01:26:00] have bosses that are flexible with them um really the it seems like a good key to success is if you have if you work for yourself or own your own business and you you know can be if your own boss

[01:26:13] you can rearrange your work schedule and one of the handlers who did a lot to help me with my research that's the case with him and he treks all over texas with his dogs on different searches

[01:26:25] and what is the is there a governing authority that certifies these dogs or is it just based on the so the validation of the other canine handlers so there is there is at least one

[01:26:42] certifying body um because i'm not a canine handler i'm not as i'm not as familiar with their certification process and general terms i could tell you how it works the name of the

[01:26:53] certifying body there's at least one there may be more than one um is uh escapes me at the moment and then you know there's also internal training within the team making sure the dogs work well

[01:27:06] with other dogs um i was on a search once where two dogs hadn't worked together before and uh one attacked the other and i had my first dog patient because of that wow and can you so can

[01:27:20] we get into the operational medicine around canine so this is the situation where like you just described like a dog gets injured and you've got to go into medical treatment on the dog in the

[01:27:31] field can you can you just sort of describe what is canine operational medicine um can you talk about what that means can you talk a little bit about the research that you've done in this area

[01:27:44] absolutely um so just give your your listeners context the operation operational medicine is just a term used to describe medicine practice in a setting that um you you're either far from definitive care hospital um you don't have normal resources or you're far enough from normal urban

[01:28:05] ems and hospitals that it justifies bending the rules a little if you will uh doing things that would normally be outside of one's scope of practice um it also be characterized by improvisation if you go take a wilderness medicine course from knolls you'll learn how to

[01:28:23] improvise splints and sea collars and things of of that nature uh when it comes to the the canines um advancements in this area have already been made by um it started in the military um the

[01:28:40] a lot of a lot of medical research was done based off of uh experiences uh the u.s military's experiences in the global war on terror um and i believe if i if i'm remembering correctly that's

[01:28:52] where um that that that period of time resulted in the um the military has a class called t triple c uh tactical combat casualty care and there's a combat casualty care committee

[01:29:06] uh and that much of that was adopted into a civilian version called tech um and as the military started using working dogs and the global war on terror they're like well man these

[01:29:18] dogs are an investment they're really valuable we go you know bring them out on missions and they get shot or blown up or you know hurt in some other way and we want to we want to keep them um

[01:29:28] we want to keep them alive and get them back uh in service um and another committee was formed and they adopted adapted the um the the t triple c principles to um to canines um

[01:29:46] and there's some differences a lot of it is a lot of this is the same and on the civilian side um the same thing trickled down you have on the civilian side uh canine tech uh tactical

[01:29:58] emergency casualty care where you learn how to basically do um not not that this makes you a paramedic but you're doing a lot of skills that are at the paramedical level as well as basic

[01:30:10] skills below that and you're learning to do that in a hostile environment where people could be shooting at you uh and shooting at your at your patients um it's really is a really interesting

[01:30:21] class if you if you ever get the chance to take one um but in the the as far as civilian sar goes you know it is possible for a dog to get shot at but typically ids and you know uh gunfire from

[01:30:36] insurgents is is not what you're worried about um we've got two different kinds of dogs um there are human remains detection dogs um which are used to look for deceased person's bones or complete bodies

[01:30:52] and you have live fine dogs um we do have some live fine dogs and they do get called out on live fine searches um occasionally but the bread and butter of our work is um with human remains

[01:31:06] detection dogs hrd dogs and they get called out for a number of uh scenarios where there are environmental hazards um that could result in injury they get called out in floods um when there could be deceased people trapped in debris under the water same thing for hurricane uh

[01:31:26] wildfire um you could be i've talked to handlers that have been brought in as a wildfire was being dealt with and they go into a cold area that had you know fire had come through there and they're

[01:31:38] trying to uh identify bodies and then there's the danger of smoke or fire you know changing directions and coming at them and the dogs could stop could uh step on you know debris that hurts

[01:31:50] them or um uh embers things of that nature tornadoes um other on on water uh disasters and responded to a plane crash once um working with canines they're using them to try to find human

[01:32:06] remains after a plane went down um and of course criminal investigations which we do a lot of and there are um to give you an idea of what we're talking about you know we're talking about anything

[01:32:21] from local gangs to cartels and you know like the cartels have very elaborate ways of killing and torturing people and then they bury them in these weird public places uh and there's like uh

[01:32:37] ritualistic markings i'm curious about the cartels is it common for them to like divide the bodies up and only bury like sections of people or do you tend to find like they're most of the time the bodies are intact

[01:32:54] my my understanding from um talking to to handlers and don't quote me on this but my understanding is that often the bodies are dismembered but they're all they're all buried in

[01:33:05] one place okay and then there are they arrange stuff um they they leave tells that are very subtle but they like to leave tells um we could also get called into there's one one canine handler

[01:33:18] explained to me why he started carrying fentanyl um because he got called out to a search where there had been a bust in a drug house um but they also suspected that a person had been murdered and

[01:33:32] hid on the premises of the drug house um and the law enforcement brought him in and it hadn't been like fully sanitized yet you know and it was an in progress kind of thing um they wanted to work

[01:33:44] as is you know in a timely manner and um there were booby traps uh at the scene um i don't remember exactly what booby traps i think something like punji sticks something of that nature but i don't

[01:33:56] recall um but working crime scenes like these it's possible for the dogs to encounter drugs um that could mess them up um even that search in an oil oil field i mentioned um there was a

[01:34:11] i forget if it's an oil field or a natural gas field it was one of those two and the same handler i was talking with him and he told me that he noticed his dog behaving funny like it had an

[01:34:22] altered level of consciousness so he took it back to his truck and you know later he talked to a chemical engineer friend of his who explained well the gases being off lit um escaping in these

[01:34:34] in these fields uh those could damage your dog's nose and probably he was experiencing an altered level of consciousness because it wasn't handling this stuff and he found out that if the dog had

[01:34:45] been kept out too long it would have destroyed his sense of smell or at least you know destroyed it to the point where it could have affected his ability to um to work and um the when they're on

[01:34:58] these searches whether it's something like that or or a crime scene they can encounter um a number of hazards um a big incident that just happened is um canines got called out to assist law enforcement

[01:35:11] um finding a body in a crime and uh he had uh he brought one dog out a new dog that um he's you know been training for a little while and the dog was so enthusiastic they were on a bridge

[01:35:25] um the dog jumped right out of the car and jumped over the bridge and fell i think something like 20 feet and and injured itself and uh fortunately one of the police officers had taken a um a tech

[01:35:40] a canine tech class um for police canines presumably and uh scooped the dog up and they you know rushed it to um to a veterinary hospital running code in a squad car um you can also have hazards you know

[01:35:57] like debris i've heard you wouldn't you wouldn't think of this but a lot of the dogs wear a vest and you wouldn't expect a dog to get a puncture wound this way um but i've had handlers tell me

[01:36:08] that you know a dog's wearing a thick vest and it's you know running through the woods and a stick gets in between the dog and the vest and the and the stick is you know uh the vest is is strong

[01:36:19] enough that that stick you know just ends up bending towards the animal's body and impaling it uh and this one dog got a puncture wound in its you know chest cavity because of something like

[01:36:29] that and that's not something i i would have thought would happen um but they can get injured in all kinds of ways heat injuries are the most common um but you do have sure um yeah you do

[01:36:41] have other other trauma like this well i can imagine like you're talking about that puncture wound but i could imagine like you know tornadoes or even the aftermaths of like hurricanes or floods and things like that you've got a lot of construction debris that's spread out all over

[01:36:55] the place i mean it only takes one one misstep for the dog to step on a nail or something like that so you've got to have all the tools in your um medical kit to make sure that you can easily

[01:37:09] triage that but can you can you talk through uh in your experience like what are some of the more common injuries that dogs will run into in the field i'm assuming it's got to be a lot of paw

[01:37:20] related injuries right yeah um splinters and cuts on paws um the their paws can also get burned on hot surfaces um some canine handlers they teach their their dogs to get used to wearing boots

[01:37:38] uh and they'll they'll wear um they'll wear boots uh when they're out doing their searches to avoid injuries they can eat something or drink something when they're out there that um makes them ill

[01:37:53] like i said heat injuries are the big thing you have to be very careful monitoring the dog's heat snake bites wild animals if you're out in the middle of nowhere during hunting season potentially

[01:38:04] gunshots then you got all kinds of weirdness and crime scenes as i mentioned earlier you could potentially come in contact with drugs maybe a guy got you know you got a guy hiding out who

[01:38:17] sees hey you know recognizes that dog and recognizes this dog is being used to hit you know go after a certain gang on a certain area maybe they try to go after the dog to stop the dog um the dogs are

[01:38:31] really big deal uh one handlers told me that um his dog orion he would after he first started working with this dog and it had some really amazing successes he would get calls from you

[01:38:44] know unknown numbers from random law enforcement officers random detectives task forces uh at all hours of the day and night uh and they didn't know his name they knew his dog's name um you know hey

[01:38:58] uh you the guy with the with a dog named orion yeah um and they'd ask him to come out and uh and work a search uh for them um so the dog the dog's really that's the bread and butter of what

[01:39:12] we do and a good dog um can set can basically set the reputation uh for a team because people law enforcement knows the dog more than they know the handlers and if you lose a good dog um it

[01:39:29] takes time to spin up another dog and even if you get you know handlers that are really serious about this they'll raise dogs in in phases so when one gets old enough to retire they have another one

[01:39:40] ready um but i i believe that the dog's performance is a mix of both training and natural talent and you know you even if you've got a good canine handler you may not necessarily

[01:39:53] uh get you know your second dog may not be as as fantastic as the first because it's a mix of both training and and talent and the dog's personality yeah yeah and i know you're not

[01:40:03] a handler but i guess if maybe you have a perspective on this but do you know um is there like somebody that's thinking about capacity planning and looking at the big picture of the

[01:40:14] dogs to say like okay related to texar we have nine handlers with seven really good dogs and two okay dogs and in the future we think we need to have 16 dogs or does anybody is there anybody

[01:40:30] thinking that way or is it just you guys sort of like just rely on the handlers to be there and manage that capacity and it's not really thought about too much so there there is some like i alluded to earlier there is some organization and oversight of each

[01:40:50] of the individual disciplines on the team um but to the level at which you're talking about to the best of my knowledge uh no um with texar if you want to be field deployable

[01:41:02] uh you got to fulfill your basic requirements you got to do um you know your nims and your ics and your cpr and leading cert and then you got you got to get your wilderness ground search

[01:41:14] cert and then you are field deployable and can do ground sources the ground searches sorry and after that it's a matter of what do you want to do do you want to do canine do you want to do

[01:41:24] medical do you want to do drone do you want to do wilderness fire or vertical um and you can do more than one uh that just means you are making a greater commitment of of time and money and

[01:41:36] keeping that stuff up um but the canine handlers are just you know they join the team to usually just to do dog stuff although a lot of them you know they did they do the other disciplines too

[01:41:47] um and and they're kind of in charge of their own they're they're in charge of their dogs uh to to a great degree in terms of how many they're gonna have um rotating them uh the time and money

[01:42:01] they're putting into them and they're often on their own um when it comes to uh paying for veterinary expenses um which i think is a big reason to have a formalized canine operational

[01:42:16] medicine program is to both reduce risk to the team also reduce risk to the handler and keep the dogs in service bring them back to into service um more quickly because a lot of these canine

[01:42:29] handlers like it's like that guy who told me that all of them are single like they're really serious about this but i don't think you can take it for granted that um every canine handler is going to

[01:42:40] have the time and money to uh have this long rotation of dogs and phases every two years and cycle through them uh and and you can't you can't make the assumption that you know someone's going

[01:42:53] to lose a dog you know that was a significant investment of time and money as a volunteer and then turn around and you know expect them and they're going to instantly start working on

[01:43:03] another dog and even if they do it takes i think something like two years to uh train and get a dog certified so it's a lengthy process which is why i think prevention um preventing yeah yeah yeah

[01:43:16] no that totally makes sense because you if you look at it dispassionately you say like okay you know one dog is dies and then you just replace them with another but that's not how it works

[01:43:25] because these are family members of these handlers so it's not like they can just keep a rotation going and i would assume a lot of them sort of say like all right i need a year or two of a break

[01:43:35] before i get another puppy and start training so um another question i have and i think you touched on this a little bit but the canine handlers themselves obviously like their their passion is probably more towards the training and then they learn the medical piece to support the

[01:43:53] dog as a necessity but i'm assuming like if it's not their passion to do the medical piece then a specialist somebody that's thinking about this like you would be somebody you could rely on but

[01:44:05] do you do you find that like the interaction with the dogs themselves and the temperament and the basics around getting the dog calm in the field to let somebody that's not the handler

[01:44:15] deal with them do you get to actually get hands on with the dog or is it more around you telling the handler what they need to do in a certain situation because they're easier to get access

[01:44:26] to the dog to do medical treatments um so i i've responded to one injured dog on a mission and i've had a teammate deal with it and it's it seems like more of a collaborative um effort in in both cases

[01:44:47] one more so in the second case than and the one that i was involved with it wasn't a serious injury they just said hey we got an injured dog can you call one of the medics over and uh take a look at

[01:44:58] the dog and the injury wasn't too serious and we got it we got it patched up um but i think it's important to explain to answer your the first part of your question it's important to give a

[01:45:08] little bit of background here um so i did two research projects the first reset research project was a independent study course that had to be um specially authorized by the college american

[01:45:23] military university is where i was studying and i had to find a an instructor that was willing to supervise my research and i got uh a normal i got three hours of of course credit um for for

[01:45:37] that like a normal class but i was basically doing a thesis without being my thesis um in that that loophole and not being my thesis made it easier for me to do what an academic circles is called

[01:45:50] human research you know not i'm not running experiments on people um what i was doing and what that term refers to is involving people in my research doing surveys and interviews so i did a couple of different things human research elements in that first project

[01:46:08] i like i said i earlier i identified 10 teams in texas that i solicited for research four of them responded three of them actually um participated in my surveys and the majority of the handlers um because texts are such a big team i had something like 12 or 13 responses

[01:46:28] individual responses just from texar um so this isn't that that isn't ideal numbers um you know this this wouldn't make it a um uh this wouldn't make it in peer-reviewed study they'd be like man

[01:46:43] the numbers are the numbers are off um there's there's more you got to do there and you'd have to go through um irb institutional review board um but it's still the results were basically

[01:46:54] common sense i pulled handlers on what kind of injuries have you seen based on severity and i pulled them on their background uh and one thing i was curious about is how many of these there's

[01:47:09] two classes that you can take a canine first aid class and canine tech like i talked about earlier and canine first aid is going to be basic um but to my way of thinking if if you're trying

[01:47:20] to be as prepared as possible you want to be operating at a higher level especially when you are operating in remote areas where um help may not be readily available um so how many of

[01:47:31] them are taking first aid how many of them are taking tech and what background do they do they have um because as i i mentioned a layperson and they do this canine handler laypersons do this

[01:47:44] is they'll go and take that class but they are learning skills that are typically you know used by paramedics and to give your your listeners some perspective it took me a few months to get

[01:47:55] my emt basic it takes it's basically the same amount of time as an associate's degree getting your paramedic um you're at a higher level there and legally you learn those skills and you do them

[01:48:09] on your dog and you're doing them in good faith and not you know intentionally abusing the animal legally you can do that um and and that's how a lot of handlers prepare but from a medical standpoint

[01:48:20] from an organizational standpoint from a risk management standpoint um if you were trying to be thorough about this and you know operate at a degree of excellence um you want to have a a

[01:48:32] medical capacity for canines that is equivalent to you know the same kind of medical capacity we have on the human side something closer to what i described law enforcement doing um perhaps you know you don't have paramedics because it's not very common in the volunteer side of things

[01:48:49] but at least have people formally trained and with medical oversight to provide that care and when i i surveyed these handlers um i found that only a little over 18 percent of them reported having an ems certification of emr or higher and emr is a

[01:49:09] certification that's below emt basic and as i mentioned i only saw two out of 10 volunteer teams in texas um advertising uh some kind of medical capability and only a little over six percent of handlers reported having veterinary experience and uh 25 percent said they took

[01:49:32] tech courses and 43 percent said they took um canine first aid courses so just to recap there you're talking not very many of them have human medical experience that could potentially carry over to canines even less of them have veterinary experience that's directly relevant to the animals

[01:49:53] um and you've got you know 43 percent taking these basic courses and a quarter of them taking these really advanced courses that they don't really have the background for and they can take those

[01:50:06] classes like i said and by law you can use those skills on your dog i mean unless you're obviously abusing it um but from an organizational perspective if you're trying to provide you know

[01:50:19] an excellent level of medical care there needs to be some structure and oversight and you don't have to reinvent the wheel um you can base this a lot on um on the structures you see in human ems

[01:50:33] and it brings me to the other part of my human research when i went out to vegas to take a um a canine tech class if i can just give a shout out real quick i took my class with

[01:50:50] joanne brenner and caninemedic.com and her her team collaborated with a veterinary facility that provided us access to ethically sourced cadaver dogs which made um practicing invasive skills that was so incredibly uh valuable um when it comes to things like if you know what

[01:51:12] needle decompression is um that's a skill that you could learn that on a stuffed animal but it is not the same thing as doing it on a real dog and you know you're not going to have many

[01:51:23] opportunities to do that so getting to practice on a cadaver is just invaluable and while i was out there i got to talk with um joanne brenner and some of her uh some of her other instructors

[01:51:35] one of which was a veterinarian so we had the human ems side represented there and we had the veterinary side represented down there and i had started to come up with an outline of life

[01:51:46] of how i thought this problem should be addressed and how do you develop a formal canine medical program as opposed to just this you know ad hoc handlers taking a class here and there and i got

[01:52:00] to sit down with them and get their feedback and um included that in my research uh and i i can't um i can't go fully into depth on developing a program um here but i can kind of give you um

[01:52:13] a bit of an idea of of what's involved in going from that ad hoc approach to a a formal approach yeah that'd be great um so in ems there's a there's a concept called medical control which

[01:52:32] is really important and i know a lot of search and rescue teams you're probably you know only operating with wilderness first aid certifications or maybe wilderness first responder certifications and you know of course legally at least in texas you can operate at that level without any oversight

[01:52:52] but it still makes sense if especially if your team that has the resources to have a medical director and a medical director provides two kinds of oversight they provide what's called offline medical control where they basically standardize your protocols um what different

[01:53:09] levels of providers are allowed to do and how they treat patients you know in in certain situations um and then you probably don't see this as much as in sar but in urban ems you have online medical

[01:53:22] control where you can um where you call in to get authorization to administer a certain medication or maybe you don't uh you're you're kind of unsure what to do in a situation and you can call and you

[01:53:36] can get the uh the doctor's advice and there's um i i came across a couple of interesting academic articles talking about how in search and rescue it's this niche area where it's it's kind of the

[01:53:47] wild west where it's just um wilderness first aid and uh you know wilderness first responder certifications and um you know you can do that but is it is it is that really striving for excellence

[01:54:00] um and and these articles argued for um bringing medical oversight into um search and rescue and that's what's involved in creating a creating a um a canine medical program so let's say if you

[01:54:18] if you're a team like techs are and you have medics and you have canine handlers you could cross train those medics to provide care and you could train the handlers because no one's going to be more

[01:54:28] interested in doing dog stuff than the dog guys and girls um they're they're gonna you're probably going to get even more participants there than then um the medics um you may also have a lot of

[01:54:43] teams like i said the majority of the ones i identified they didn't advertise a human medical capability um so in the situation like techs are where you already have you have a medical team a

[01:54:53] human medical team and you got canines uh what you do is you you get your um human medical director to coordinate and partner with a veterinary doctor so you have medical control on the human

[01:55:07] side you got medical control on the dog side of it and they get together and they decide okay um we got medics you know operating at this level of certification and then we got handlers

[01:55:19] they come up with you know what we call scope of practice what skills is you know the different level of providers what are they allowed to do um they they flesh that out and then ideally the um

[01:55:31] the canine metal medical handler sorry medical director is um providing resources like ethically sourced cadavers and clinical rotations i did a lot of research on medical skill retention

[01:55:46] um too much to to really delve in here um but the point is that um a lot of the a lot of the studies that i i read and you know i cross-referenced them the conclusion that you know

[01:55:58] became obvious is that even you know the common practice or of a two or three year research interval on something like a wilderness first aid certification um it's it's not adequate

[01:56:13] um and it may seem adequate if you test people after two years um you know with a written test a multiple choice test um but didactic retention of didactic knowledge um does not equate to um

[01:56:29] retaining uh radically adequately retaining um your ability to actually perform skills it doesn't equate to competence um they are two different things and they need to be measured differently and a big component to making sure that people can actually perform skills um is to give them

[01:56:50] quality initial training like i mentioned with canine medic that was a fantastic opportunity to work with cadavers really helped you understand um what you're doing there and how to do it and be confident in it um and then you need an opportunity to practice

[01:57:06] um you know that that's where clinical rotations come in that's where the veterinarian you know that director may set you know some requirements for uh continuing education continuing practice and a thing in particular to get experience that i've pitched to um that i'm pitching to my team

[01:57:25] is to develop this into a discipline just like the medical team just like the canine team and offer this service to outside agencies um that would raise awareness of of our team potentially

[01:57:38] open up new sponsor and um and grant opportunities um it would also spread awareness of you know this this kind of niche area one of the last frontiers of medicine uh and maybe get more people thinking

[01:57:51] and talking about it and uh and adapting it and um i'll say one of the last big pieces here i want to make sure that i mentioned is um is hems uh helicopter emergency medicine um so the problem

[01:58:09] that some some people may ask you know you got a dog you know it's doing first responder stuff it gets injured why can't you call an ambulance and just ask them to take it to a veterinary medicine

[01:58:21] uh a veterinary hospital um in most states with the exception of two and this could have changed since the research i read except for two states if you uh are paid to provide medical care um for

[01:58:36] an animal and um you're not licensed to practice veterinary medicine you could be you run the risk of being charged with practicing veterinary medicine without a license even in the course of the search and rescue situation so that's that's where being paid is is what makes the difference

[01:58:58] okay yeah yeah maybe not even directly charging for it but being paid you run the risk of practicing veterinary medicine without a license and initially as i was beginning my research i thought well you know if if you can't do this and get paid there's there's no way

[01:59:20] hems or you know urban ems is is going to do this um but the loop the obvious loophole is that um they can do this uh at least in texas if they do it for free and i never imagined that

[01:59:34] would be a thing but it is um here in houston we have memorial herman and memorial herman life flight and i attended one of their um red duke trauma symposiums and got to meet with the head

[01:59:49] of their newly formed canine tech program and um this this is a program where they where they cross-trained life flight medics and nurses um to adapt their skills to providing care for canines and you know the obvious application there is police dogs that's what most people

[02:00:09] would think about um but when i got a chance to talk with them and and um said you know hey this is this is who i work with this is what we do if one of our dog dogs got injured you know um would

[02:00:21] you be willing to help us and absolutely um they they will transport an injured working dog free of charge within a particular service area i forget how big it is but it's relatively it's

[02:00:36] a relatively big radius um not compared to the whole state of texas but it's it's pretty significant and they have partnered with four different um veterinary hospitals um so that they can you know

[02:00:49] take their helicopter in and land it and um deliver a dog to them if if a working dog whether it's police or surgeon rescue gets injured and i don't think this is very common knowledge um and in doing

[02:01:02] my doing my research i came across studies that reference this database called atoms and it was a database of air medical providers and it provided a lot of information that was useful for um for

[02:01:18] studying things related to hems and there was one study in particular that was a study on how many um how many hems agencies had transported uh canines and um i don't have those figures on hand

[02:01:33] i would have thought the number was zero but it wasn't there was actually a significant number that had transported canines and some that even had written policies on how on what's involved

[02:01:45] in this and policies and procedures um that kind of thing unfortunately that database um it no longer exists i tried to access it for myself and it doesn't seem to exist anymore um so another thing

[02:01:59] that i've pitched to my team that i think is an important component of building a canine medical program after you've got that canine medical director is to we'll have to do our own research

[02:02:13] basically do our research reach reach out use the internet talk to regional offices of emergency management and try to get perhaps get assistance from them and identify um hems providers in in

[02:02:27] our service area which in our case is the whole state of texas that's a lot of area um but it would take time but if we map this out and identify all these providers and reach out to

[02:02:38] them and ask hey you know we got a working dog that goes down are you willing to transport and build out a list build out a map of these a map would be very useful for what we call medical

[02:02:51] incident planning before mission you do medical incident planning to plan for the what if so you're not scratching your head and panicking when something happens and if we have if we build our

[02:03:00] own database like that a map that would be critical and and um in groups like uh um life flight they're going above and beyond just transporting um they're also doing training

[02:03:13] you know if you have an agency approach them and say hey we've got working dogs we're trying to get prepared on the medical side will you train us um they have training available um in in my

[02:03:23] opinion from the research i've done that's that's great it's still not a replacement for having a medical director and if you have human ems you know having that that combo if not just having

[02:03:35] that that veterinary doctor um but it's it's a great start even if you know someone from a small team is listening and it's like four or five people with the dogs and they don't have you

[02:03:46] know the kind of resources that you know i'm talking about it would still be great if you just you know did a little bit of googling and uh identified him as providers in your

[02:03:57] um working area and reached out to him and say find out hey what do you what do you do will you transport our dogs do you provide any training and you may even get free training from them and

[02:04:07] especially if you're a small team with less resources that could be very helpful yeah i think that it's it's an important area to think about and it's not something that i think is thought

[02:04:17] about too often i feel like in your area down in texas you probably the the use cases for search and rescue are probably more heavily heavily reliant on dogs than maybe up here in new hampshire

[02:04:32] but it is a good thing for us to be thinking about and for um you know to just sort of talk about because it's just not something that you consider you sort of figure like okay if the dog

[02:04:41] gets injured we're going to just pick them pick the dog up and take them to the local veterinary but in new hampshire small so like that may be viable but when you're talking about in texas

[02:04:53] like you're you could be i'm just like looking at a map as you're talking and i'm just looking at the distance between houston and say like beaumont texas and then north of there you've got

[02:05:05] sam houston national forest you've got um angelina national forest davy crockett national forest i mean those areas are huge i mean those those comprise almost the entire state of massachusetts so the the distance you're talking about is crazy yeah i was looking up some data here texas is 29

[02:05:25] times bigger than new hampshire wow so you're talking like yeah it's just massive here here's another use case you may not have thought of um this wasn't directly relevant to my research but

[02:05:37] i thought it was interesting i want to say this is this is someplace in california i want to say i don't remember for sure but i read online you can probably google it and find it about a team

[02:05:47] of volunteers that they're basically dogs are so they got hikers that you know you get hikers you know going down up trails you know and they're flip-flops and no water and they know that

[02:06:00] that aren't prepared and those same people are often bringing animals with them and then the animal gets out there gets its paw injured it gets you know its leg injured falls gets scraped on

[02:06:11] something starts to overheat and they're not equipped and i can't remember what city this was in but i want to say it was california i read about a team that um i don't know what their level

[02:06:22] of training was but they they trained to go out and assist uh hikers on on these trails when they you know aren't prepared and they bring a a pet out there that just isn't prepared to uh

[02:06:34] prepared for the adventure yeah we've had a number of episodes where we've highlighted this because what happens in in new hampshire is that like we have very sharp rocks and it's um pretty calm not

[02:06:46] common but it happens relatively consistently a couple times a year where a hiker will bring typically large breed dogs that will you know their paws will get torn up and they'll be in

[02:06:59] a place where they can't continue and search and rescue does not um search and rescue does not by policy come and to save the dog so it's volunteer like usually it's over social media

[02:07:14] where they'll mobilize teams to come out and sort of carry the dogs out and there's a product called pack a paw which is a sling that allows people to carry the dogs and um it's relatively common i think

[02:07:26] we've had probably about four or five of those rescues over the last couple years since we've been doing the show um where dogs have gotten in trouble so right now in new hampshire there's a

[02:07:36] small group that's starting up that's a volunteer search and rescue specifically to come out and help with animals that's awesome yeah yeah so but ken this has been uh this has been fascinating

[02:07:49] stop is there any other questions that you have that you want to cover yeah just briefly so i was rifling through the uh techsar.org website it's uh very impressive i was looking at some of the

[02:08:01] numbers so you guys have 230 active personnel statewide and five what is it five divisions or branches yes yeah we're we're statewide okay so 125 are labeled as wilderness SAR technicians so up here in the northeast we generally do what they call is a shakedown where we take them out

[02:08:24] and um take them on a vigorous hike and this and that do you guys do anything similar for the wilderness search and rescue so our our um our process has has changed um i wasn't here when the

[02:08:37] team was started but my my understanding of the lore if you will is it started out as one team that got the idea to uh unite individual SAR teams across texas into something bigger and um it it

[02:08:53] has it it's gotten more professional over time um understandably you start out with an endeavor like that that it takes time but we've gotten more and more professional and at this point

[02:09:05] um you have you have like i said you have the minimum requirements um you you you got to be willing to do the really dry boring nims and ics stuff and we get a lot of people that they come

[02:09:17] to one or two meetings they're all gung-ho about it they pay the membership fee and then they never complete that stuff and that stuff is free it's just super dry and it takes some time um then you

[02:09:28] got to do your wilderness first aid not your wilderness first aid you got to take your your wilderness ground search class and once you do that um there is a a probationary period um which is

[02:09:41] something that we've implemented um try to get them out try to get new members out on searches and um you know try to pair them up with more uh experienced team members um i've gotten to mentor

[02:09:54] um a few young men that have have joined the team um that was that was rewarding um and and then of course you know you you show yourself that you're competent you know you stay

[02:10:06] you stay calm um behave yourself act professionally and um and then you make it out of that probationary period so there's not necessarily a wilderness shakedown you know there is a practical exercise component to uh that that basic required wilderness ground search class and there's

[02:10:27] ongoing training after that um but there's not really a take them out to big bend on a seven-day hike you know through the desert kind of thing no that's that's not um a requirement

[02:10:39] at this point do you um what's your turnover like and i i want to tie that to um is is texas in general uh properly served by volunteer search and rescue or is it underserved um do you have a high

[02:10:55] turnover in members or um i mean i also noticed go ahead yeah that's fine this may be a little off topic but um no it's an interesting question um so i don't i don't have specific insight into

[02:11:10] the the specific stats for our team and if i did i'm not sure if that's something they would want me to share however i have i can tell you that i have heard you know more than one um division

[02:11:23] leader or instructor uh say that the average lifespan of a volunteer is um i want to say three years so as i mentioned before you get these new people that come in that they're all gung-ho

[02:11:37] and they don't they don't do the basic classes and then they just they they just disappear that's the majority of people then you get you know then you get less people that actually

[02:11:48] follow through with that actually go on missions um and then a lot of those after three years they'll either move because of their job or they'll have you know kids um and it's it's very

[02:12:01] important to have a supportive spouse in this um and i've heard that from from canine handlers um it's very important to have a supportive spouse i've been fortunate that mine even after we

[02:12:12] have had our first kid um she's about to turn one um she's she's still supportive of of me me staying involved with this um but a lot of folks for whatever reason reason either because of life

[02:12:24] changes or burnout they they drop off and then you've got like a few hardcore people that um that just keep going and going and going yeah yeah yeah i could ask you a million questions

[02:12:36] because i i'm in volunteer so i myself um i guess just for time i'll ask you one other thing i noticed that a lot of the handlers according to your data here um it would look as though you're talking about two dogs per handler is that accurate

[02:12:53] uh i don't have i i don't have a number on on dogs per handler um i don't have that i can tell you that i a lot of them have had at least two like i said this year the the ones that have

[02:13:05] been doing this a while um and you you get you get new folks that show up that are interested in it and they have a dog that's a pet you know which pets are great and they're interested in

[02:13:14] doing it and they don't really understand how much work is involved in it and they'll probably drop off um then you've got some folks that won't drop off and they'll stick with it um but

[02:13:23] they may not get to the level of the folks i've been talking about that have done this for years though the ones that are single that um that have that train rotations of dogs they train one dog

[02:13:34] wait two years start bringing up another dog wait two years start bringing up another dog and then you got this full rotation and then when a dog gets to a certain age um it's called uh it's

[02:13:45] often used as a confirmation dog um so when a dog ages out and it's not physically capable of of doing the more strenuous work um you'll use it as a confirmation dog where you'll have one or two

[02:13:58] other dogs maybe more uh hit on a scent but those dogs aren't as uh as seasoned as this dog and maybe they don't have the reputation the the track record of performance that this one does

[02:14:12] and you'll bring the confirmation dog out to see if the confirmation dog uh hits on a scent there now if the confirmation dog hits on it you know you should take it seriously if he doesn't um

[02:14:24] it's it's probably you know it's probably a mistake that's great ken thank you so much it's been super interesting and yeah eventually we get to get you up into the mountains of new hampshire

[02:14:35] they're not super tall but they are um they're very frisky and difficult so um i feel like texas is super flat my my dad grew up there and he's he's told me stories from his childhood of hunting

[02:14:47] and getting into trouble and he had property out there for a while but he sold it and uh so yeah i got an excuse to go out there it'd be fun amazing well this has been fantastic so uh thank you very

[02:14:59] much for your service as a volunteer sar and pass pass on thank you to the team members and uh appreciate your time joining us tonight yeah it's been great thank you for having me thank you for listening if you enjoyed the show you can subscribe on apple podcasts

[02:15:17] spotify podbean youtube or wherever you listen to podcasts if you want to learn more about the topics covered in today's show please check out the show notes and safety information

[02:15:30] at slasherpodcast.com that's s l a s r podcast.com you can also follow the show on facebook and instagram we hope you'll join us next week for another great show until then on behalf of mike

[02:15:47] get out there and crush some mega peaks now covered in scratches blisters and bug bites chris staff wanted to complete his most challenging day hike ever fishing game officers say the hiker from florida activated an emergency beacon yesterday morning he was hiking along the

[02:16:08] appalachian trail when the weather started to get worse officials say the snow was piled up to three feet in some spots and there was a wind chill of minus one degree and there's three words to describe this race do we all know what they are

[02:16:25] lieutenant james neelan new hampshire fishing game who's ended thanks for being with us today thanks for having me what are some of the most common mistakes you see people make when they're

[02:16:33] heading out on the trails to hike here in new hampshire it seems to me the most common is being unprepared and i think if they just simply visited uh hikesafe.com and got a list of the 10 essential

[02:16:42] items and had those in their packs they probably would have no need to ever call us at all