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In Tragedy, a true crime podcast, we discuss missing persons' cases, violent crime, and other sensitive topics that may be difficult for some listeners.
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Listener discretion is advised.
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Our show is a place where every story matters and every voice deserves to be heard.
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Welcome to Tragedy, a True Crime Podcast.
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I'm Elisa.
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And I'm Michael.
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Today we're joined by Mark Kolp, a respected search and rescue professional with extensive experience in wilderness searches, missing person investigations, and tracking.
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Throughout his career, Mark has supported search efforts in some of the most challenging environments by combining practical field experience with a deep understanding of how people move, how evidence is interpreted, and how search strategies evolve over time.
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In this conversation, we'll explore the realities of search and rescue, the science and skill behind tracking, and what families and communities should understand when someone goes missing.
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Mark brings a thoughtful, experience-based perspective to a topic that is often misunderstood, and we're grateful to have him with us.
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Thank you for being here and welcome to the show.
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Thank you for inviting me on the show.
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I'm glad to be here.
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We are so excited to have you uh here.
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This is a little bit different for us because we have actually met you in person, which is really great.
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We had an opportunity to meet you, I think it was in Knoxville.
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That's right.
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And you were traveling with uh Kathy Decker and that team at the body farm, right?
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Yes, yes.
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And we were not that far away.
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And so we took a little drive up there and we got to meet you and Kathy for the second time.
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Well, it was the first time we met Kathy.
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In person, yep.
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In person, and several members of the team, and you all spent some time talking with us about Jody Kilgore and Ian Rogers, and we are really excited to extend the conversation here today.
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So it's so good to have you with us today.
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I was, yeah, I was super excited to meet you there.
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I didn't have much experience with the with podcasts, and I it was so interesting to know you and understand what you were doing here on Tragedy.
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And to me, just how you care about people and their families and everything really intrigued me.
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And um, so I was super happy to have met you.
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That was that was great.
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Thank you.
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That that is so nice, and that means a lot.
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And something that is also a little different is you are actually an avid listener of the podcast.
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So you listen to the podcast, and so when you're talking about what we're doing to support families, you know that to be true because, well, you're you're a listener.
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So we have a listener who's an expert, and we're going to learn so much from you.
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So tell our listeners about you and your background.
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I'm Mark Kolp and I um I live in the northwest in in Montana, um, kind of on the western side of Montana in Lake County.
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And one of the things that has brought me onto this show, I believe, is that I kind of specialize in doing visual man tracking.
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And I got into doing that after I joined the local county uh search and rescue in 2011.
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So I've been doing this for oh close to 15 years.
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So one of the things that I specialize in the most and spend the most time in is visual man tracking.
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And also I instruct quite a bit.
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So I um I actually go to other counties and other states in the Northwest and um actually teach other people things uh about man tracking and and how it can apply to search and rescue specifically, and hopefully it can be used as a vital thing for for people to use in in searches of missing people when they when they go lost.
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Yeah, one thing I can imagine is, you know, we've we've talked, you know, I guess my my experience here is with the Haley Athey case, and one of the things that they talked about a lot was how difficult it was to find anyone in the Pacific Northwest because of how dense the woods.
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I can imagine that it's much harder in that terrain than it would be in some other areas of the country.
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Is that relatively true?
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That is kind of a a true concept.
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I would say sometimes it's fairly easy, probably easier than it would be in some other places, but just learning how to actually know and understand what that looks like in the Pacific
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Northwest and places where there's a lot of vegetation and brush and that kind of stuff, just learning to know what that looks like versus somewhere where somebody thinks it would be easier to see, like, like let's say further south in like a desert type area or somewhere where there's um more sand or less vegetation where you would actu see like actual footprints with tread pattern.
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Here in the northwest, what we're focusing more on would be the vegetation damage and and that kind of stuff of the passage of a of a person.
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And so I wouldn't say it's it's that much harder, really.
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In fact, probably really in in all reality, um, footprints or passage of of people in the northwest probably holds on a lot longer um because you can use actually vegetation damage for several years um because of how vegetation grows.
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And so you can you can actually use that in the in the northwest probably more than than other areas.
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It's a good point.
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I didn't think about it that way.
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Like a footprint in the desert could blow away.
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Blow away.
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Or maybe a lizard runs over it or a tumbleweed.
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I don't know if there's tumbleweeds in the desert, but in the Pacific Northwest, you're breaking branches.
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Right.
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I think that's what you're talking about when you're talking about vegetation damage or stepping on a log that breaks.
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Yeah, so there's a lot more, yeah, woody type vegetation and also like a lot more perennials and stuff that come back every year.
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So they carry that damage on, you know, year after year.
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And if you know how to read that and understand what that looks like, you know, you can actually see with the passage of somebody that somebody's been through the area, it may be a little bit harder to visually know the exact shoe or something somebody was wearing.
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But sometimes slug patterns and like that can stay the actual damage on the vegetation can actually be there for for quite some time.
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Uh at the risk of eating too technical kind of early, I'm just when you talking about this, I thought I thought instantly about a question I was curious about is what type of process do you follow where you can tell the difference or can you tell the difference between a human that's gone through a path versus an animal?
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So humans are our bipeds, um, obviously.
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So we have two feet, and that's usually what we walk on.
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And um most animals have four legs.
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So a lot
of times you'll have for starters, you'll have just the way that the footprints from an animal or a person, an animal would have a lot more like hoof marks or or paw prints that would be on the ground versus somebody like a human that would be a biped, unless they're just shuffling along.
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The footprints are probably going to be a little bit further spaced.
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That's one of the things.
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The other thing would be depending on the animal, the width of the area that the person or the animal makes, the trail, I guess I'll say, depends, um, can be a lot wider or narrower, depending on on what the whether it's a person or whether it's an animal.
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So a person a lot of times will will create close to you know 12 inches or so, depending on how they walk of an area uh width.
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And so like a deer or a dog, that kind of stuff, they create probably a little bit less because the way they walk is kind of in a single line.
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And and that's one thing that we have interesting here in the Northwest is um we have a lot of bears.
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So bears are fairly similar to how humans look and and stuff as far as the way their footprints are on the ground, but a bear will make a lot wider swath, a lot wider trail through through an area.
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And so a lot of times you can determine whether it's a human or whether it's not just by how wide the trail is.
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That makes a lot of sense.
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I've been sort of as you've been talking, I've been like, you're talking about bears and I put my arms out because I know they're going to be wider, so I can visualize what you're talking about.
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Now, you said you started uh doing this work in 2011.
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And so what inspired you to become skilled at uh in tracking and search and rescue?
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Well, that is kind of an interesting question.
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I guess one of the things was I landed on a a search um that was in my area before I got started in search and rescue, and it was um for an autistic woman that she was, I think, in her 30s.
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The community uh we all kind of came together to sort of help with the search.
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And we ended up with like close to 120 people, I think.
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And so we just spread out and searched, grid search, which is kind of a normal thing for search and rescue.
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But at the time, before I joined search and rescue, there was some visual tracker, man trackers that was in the search and rescue.
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And so they were actually using tracking as a as a method to try to pinpoint a direction of travel that this person had gone.
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And it was just to me, that was just really interesting.
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Um, it took us a couple days to actually find her, find her.
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We found her.
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Um, she had went to a neighbor's house that they weren't home and actually had old up there for quite a while.
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And so she was safe and everything during the time, but but that's kind of how I got into it.
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And so soon after that search, I I joined Search and Rescue and got into a lot of the different technical stuff that search and rescue gets into, like ropes.
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And we here in our county where we are, we have a huge lake, Flathead Lake.
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It's it creates a lot of rescues and and searches, actually.
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So we are fairly busy um in this area as far as as the amount of searches that we do have every year.
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And so that was kind of one thing for me was I just I really like helping people and giving back to my community.
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And so that just really seemed to fit in the whole thing with kind of what I felt like I was able to give back to my community, and and that's that's one of the reasons I joined search and rescue, I guess.
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You you talked about Flathead Lake.
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Are you also involved in water searches or are you talking about just searching around the bodies of water?
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We do end up with searches here on the lake.
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A lot of people go missing in their boats.
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Um, so they'll leave, leave an area, their residence, and they'll head into town and then they'll try to come back in the dark.
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And um the lake is just big enough that it's really hard to to know or or understand what the what the area around the their residence looks like.
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And so a lot of times they'll call and be like, hey, you know, I'm here by some some island or something somewhere, and that could be one of ten islands.
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And so that makes it kind of interesting.
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But we do have a few drownings, um, usually uh I would say on an average of about one drowning a year.
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So we do quite a few, you know, we search for people, try to bring them back, at least get some closure for the family that they, you know, they have been found.
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Unfortunately, you know, in drownings, um there's there's not any way to really to bring them back to life, but just having that closure that you know that you have found the body of somebody really just helps, I think, give people the closure and the peace that they they know what happened and they, you know,
they're able to kind of have that back.
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Um and then also to answer one of your other questions is do we do any searching?
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Is that is the searching around the lake?
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And we do quite a bit of that.
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We do have mountainous areas, um, so we do do do some searching around on the lake.
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Um, sometimes there's Wild Horse Island is a fairly big island.
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Um, we've actually had some searches there for somebody that's wandered off from their group.
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We've had rescues there where people have, you know, they've tripped on a rock and broken their ankle, and there's a lot of land and we do um around the lake, and so there's a lot of recreation that that happens.
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So there are lots of ways that people can search for other people.
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There's drone technology now, helicopters, canines.
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Tell us just what are the basics of visual man tracking and why is that so important, even with the age of you know, new technology that's supposed to be helping us find people.
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It is interesting.
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Um, I think a lot of people get uh look have some misconceptions a little bit about what tracking is and what it what it does.
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Um so there is, you know, quite a bit of stuff on television that people watch and and just what people think tracking is is probably not really what um what it is.
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But one thing with tracking, and I'll just I'll just do a simple explanation for what tracking can really help with, is for for one thing, people leave a lot of footprint evidence wherever they go because you know they're gonna be walking around.
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So so you have as a explanation, a human lays about 2,000 footprints in a mile.
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So that's so so is kind of what we explain to people is that in a mile, there's there's 2,000 clues of this person if they went missing.
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Visual man tracking, we obviously use the evidence of of footprints to determine whether somebody was in the area or or not to begin with, and then also we can get a direction of travel.
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So you can get like two or three footprints from a last known place.
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So let's say somebody left a vehicle or they were last seen in a trailhead or they left the residence, they just wherever they left from that somebody last knew they were there or actually had seen them there, it usually gives us a starting point, and we can usually find a direction of travel, which can really narrow down a search area big time as far as the area that needs to be searched.
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Because usually, if you have
a direction of travel, somebody will travel in that direction unless they make a huge decision to go in the opposite direction, you can narrow that you know, a huge search area down to like an eighth of the search area.
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And so that really helps with resources.
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So because we live in such rural areas, trying to get enough people to help with searching can be a problem.
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So being able to actually send resources in a direction that would be a higher probability of finding someone is is where man tracking comes in.
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It can't, I I would say that um man tracking can't always be used, but that's just kind of a general explanation of what tracking can do.
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Like you said, there is there is a lot of technology that has come on board, and I would say drones are pretty huge as far as being able to take videos or pictures of an area, and it can pick up a lot of things, it can pick up footprints sometimes, um, especially um like if you're using well, you you can use it as a as a camera source, but I'm thinking about like so in the winter time, sometimes the heat signatures off a uh off a footprint in the snow, you can actually see see a footprint.
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And so you can actually you could use that to track somebody, but also it's just a drone's able to go in a lot bigger area and they can do a lot bigger search.
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So so that technology, if it's used, you know, is a tool, just like man tracking would be.
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There again, one of the other things you suggested was um, you know, there is we, you know, we do have dogs, we have canines, and they're again a very good resource.
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Dogs have helped a ton.
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They're usually a lot quicker than we are as humans, as far as being able to get on a trail and move it quite fast, sometimes that can help, especially in a search and rescue case where you're you're really trying to get a um a person back.
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The only thing is is with dogs, a lot of times is only have so long of a runtime.
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They they'll they'll get tired out, they'll get, especially in heat and that kind of stuff, they'll they'll get extra, they'll get pretty hot.
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And so, but it's it's kind of a little bit the same way with with man tracking also, because um, obviously we're humans, so we we're we we're we wear out too.
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There's just a lot of different um you could do a lot of different comparisons, is where I look at it, I guess, is just that everything is kind of a tool and it can be used to really complement or help each thing out.
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You know, one thing that we're trying not to lose focus on is in search and rescue, is we are, you know, we're trying
to find that missing person.
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I mean, just just like you know, what you're doing with giving awareness and and trying to help families find answers or finding finding a missing person if they aren't found.
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That's really, really the ultimate goal that we we all work for.
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And sometimes I think we we get a little wrapped up in in a lot of other things that that happen.
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They're all tools to be used.
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It's just one thing with man tracking is the evidence that's left behind can be detected if you have somebody that that knows what they're looking for.
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Uh hopefully that answered some of your questions that you had.
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Oh, I thought it was great.
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Um, I wanted to make a comment while we were talking about drones and you know, looking at aerial things, it it actually did make me think of uh a breakout session that we went to um at a it was basically a survival conference and fishing conference.
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And we originally went there to learn about oh, growing sprouts and root cellars and things like that.
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And then the guy doing the presentation broke into this conversation about making sure that you take a mylar blanket with you because you can cover yourself and not be picked up by infrared if they're searching for you.
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And so I right away went, I looked at Elise.
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I'm like, first of all, what did we just sign up for?
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And two, how am I not on some federal list somewhere for having attended this?
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Yeah, because he said you can hide yourself so the government can't find you.
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And we were like, what?
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I I want to be found.
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I'm I'm I'm lost.
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You know, I didn't, I guess I didn't understand the demographic that would normally go to this.
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I completely forgot about that.
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I was thinking about when he was talking about drones, how you used to have drones and you would use them, you would like shoot the drone up the river to see if we wanted to continue fishing up that river or if we just wanted to read the room.
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Yeah, some of these trails are so rough that I was like, I don't really want to hike this trail.
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I'm gonna shoot this drone as far up as I can get it to see if it's worth fishing the spot.
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That's so funny that both of us had you know memories that um came out of that conversation.
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You ended uh what you said was if you know what you're looking for.
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So what are some of those uh what kind of trainings and experience, experiences do people need so to be able to know what they're looking for in your line of work?
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This is something that that's a little bit hard to, I guess, just give a a blanket thing for somebody.
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Partly, okay, so I'll I'll just start this way.
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So one of the basics of visual man tracking is that is just learning to see signs.
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So, you know, you're like, well, how do you do that?
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Well, one of the things is we as humans, our brain is is so efficient, I'm gonna say.
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So we go about our lives and we we see And think and and say things that the brain feels like is is worth saying, and then all the other stuff just kind of gets put on the back burner, I'll say.
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And so one thing with the basics of visual man tracking is we actually will take people and will teach people how to actually see a footprint.
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So people see them all all the time, especially people that haunt and need to use that for finding animals and that kind of stuff.
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They're like, oh, I know all about tracking, you know, I you know, I see footprints all the time, and and they probably do.
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But for the majority of people, we see footprints all the time, but we just never think about that.
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That's what it is.
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And so basically, it's just what I've done as far as over the years is I've tried to explain to people that if you really want to learn visual man tracking, is what we do is you have to be kind of aware of your surroundings, but you have to take time to observe what it is that you do see.
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And then to a lot of people, that that value is is not really any good because it's like, what are they going to use that for?
00:23:18.640 --> 00:23:42.240
And so is like a lot of times what I like to give people challenges on, or if if they're interested in it, is take your residence, your job, places that you go a lot, and you have people that you know go a lot and find footprints there or make footprints and mark them and and look at them and see what they are.
00:23:42.480 --> 00:23:51.200
And and the reason for doing that is then you learn all the other things that come along with the basics of learning to see sign.
00:23:51.680 --> 00:24:27.359
And that is like um sign aging, you're you're trying to see all the you know the vegetation damage, like anything in the soil, disturbances and a lot of things like in gravel and that kind of stuff, where you have a dislodged rock, and sometimes it may just be a little bit of compression in the ground, it just may be parts of it, you know, parts of a footprint, but all of those things are kind
of what I tell people if they if you want to learn what visual demand tracking is, you have to kind of observe and learn how to see this.
00:24:27.519 --> 00:24:45.359
You know, I could spend probably hours trying to tell you exactly um, you know, what to look for and all this, but until you personally are able to experience that and go out and look at it and see it, or have somebody show you what that looks like.
00:24:45.599 --> 00:24:50.240
The brain basically will just say, well, this isn't something that I need.
00:24:50.480 --> 00:24:56.240
Um, I have you know bigger and better things or whatever that I need to I need to deal with.
00:24:56.400 --> 00:25:05.200
And so so it's just basically training your brain how to observe things that are there, um, that people see every day.
00:25:05.440 --> 00:25:11.759
It's just learning to know what what they are um and and what they pertain to.
00:25:12.079 --> 00:25:17.839
Michael, I don't know about you, but this is making me think a lot about Jack Fox, just in different ways.
00:25:18.000 --> 00:25:23.519
So, what Mark is talking about when we're talking about tracking is learning to see the signs.
00:25:23.680 --> 00:25:35.359
And when we talk to Jack Fox, who's our statement analyst, we learned from him to listen to the words, stop and listen to what people are actually saying and what and what they're not saying and what's not there.
00:25:35.599 --> 00:25:38.400
So to me, this is very similar.
00:25:38.559 --> 00:25:43.200
It's visually based as opposed to language and auditory based or written if it's a good idea.
00:25:43.359 --> 00:25:44.079
No, that makes a good point.
00:25:44.319 --> 00:25:45.839
Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking about.
00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:57.920
I'm like, you know, after we talked to Jack Fox and precision precision of language, it really did change the the way that we speak to people and maybe some of the words that we do not and and we do use.
00:25:58.079 --> 00:26:05.039
And so now I can see our next time we go on a hike, you know, we're always looking for like scat to be careful about any kind of animals.
00:26:05.119 --> 00:26:08.880
You're precisely Michael, you're always looking for snakes and things like that.
00:26:09.039 --> 00:26:12.400
But now we're gonna start looking for footprints and broken branches.
00:26:12.559 --> 00:26:16.640
Yeah, this is expanding expanding our minds, which is really good, I think.
00:26:16.960 --> 00:26:22.480
One thing I guess, um, I guess has really challenged me and opened up my thing a little bit.
00:26:22.640 --> 00:26:42.000
And I'll just explain it this way because I think it's easy for people to understand a little bit, is as you learn to see the the signs or the the footprints that are out there of people, you actually um can start picking up some of the behaviors that people do.
00:26:42.240 --> 00:26:54.799
So just in how they walk and how that looks like on the ground, you know, whether they're they're walking fast, slow, um, whether they change their mind often, um, a lot of those things.
00:26:55.039 --> 00:27:02.720
So, so is what runs our feet is there again, is I'm I'm gonna come back to it, is is our brains.
00:27:02.960 --> 00:27:14.960
And so everything that happens up there in that busy, busy head of ours is going basically right to our feet, and and our feet are doing basically exactly what we're thinking.
00:27:15.200 --> 00:27:23.680
So, you know, if you're walking along, you're talking on the phone and you like all sorts of different kinds of emotions, that kind of thing happens.
00:27:23.839 --> 00:27:26.000
Um, you can actually see that in the ground.
00:27:26.079 --> 00:27:33.519
And so it's what I like to a lot of times make that analogy, is that it's kind of like reading a book.
00:27:33.680 --> 00:28:07.440
So, you know how it is, like you're you're you're reading a book and you you get the idea of what you know what the book's about, and and that's really what it's like when you start following somebody, you start following their footprints, and you're like, oh well, you know, they were thinking about, you know, they were doing this or they were doing that, or or they were gonna, you know, there's there's a it's really, really interesting just a lot of the things that you can pick up off the ground of of what somebody um is maybe even gonna do.
00:28:07.599 --> 00:28:17.680
And I wasn't necessarily gonna get into this too much, but it even reads into the minds of what somebody might do criminally.
00:28:17.920 --> 00:28:28.880
So you can follow somebody that's that's maybe staking out and observing people, or you may see where they come back day after day and they do the same thing.
00:28:29.039 --> 00:28:39.680
You know, there's there's a lot of different things that you can read of somebody that's that's wanting to do, you know, criminal mischief or or wanting to do, you know, a crime of some sort.
00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:44.240
You can read that for a long time after the person has been there.
00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:56.640
And if it's if it's documented correctly and explained, it can be um it can be used in criminal evidence, you know, against against a person as far as what they were doing.
00:28:56.720 --> 00:29:07.920
And it makes me think of the John Dene Ramsey case and the footprints that were leading to and away from a particular window that went into the basement of the home.
00:29:08.160 --> 00:29:19.440
So I understand completely what you're talking about when you're talking about using, you know, footprints specifically to collect evidence and maybe even footprint patterns, right?
00:29:19.519 --> 00:29:37.599
There have been cases where they can pull a shoe pattern and it maybe it's a unique soul pattern, and then they can find the person who owns that shoe because it was like a an expensive tennis shoe or something like that, and it leads right back to the person who did it, and it's their their shoe print
that you know convicted them.
00:29:38.079 --> 00:29:57.599
Yeah, and it makes me even think about the Jody Gilgore case because one of the things we talked about in that is they talked about the crime scene very being very small and that you could tell that there was a scuffle, you can tell it involved two men because of how close the footprints were, and they were even able to approximate size um based on these footprints.
00:29:57.839 --> 00:30:03.519
So yeah, I mean, I can see how when you start telling the part about it tells a story about what was in their head, it makes total sense to me.
00:30:03.759 --> 00:30:04.160
Totally.
00:30:04.400 --> 00:30:07.359
Yeah, there and there's a lot of things you can pick up.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:09.839
Um, like you just brought up, Michael.
00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:20.480
Um, you know, one of the things about the size um alone of a footprint um can tell you, you know, whether it was a big person or a small person.
00:30:20.640 --> 00:30:28.000
I mean, most of the time, you know, that it doesn't happen real often where you have a small person with a huge footprint, you know.
00:30:28.319 --> 00:30:33.519
And like you were saying, Lisa, was about, you know, picking up from different tread patterns.
00:30:33.680 --> 00:30:46.079
We had a case soon after I was in search and rescue where the deputies actually they stopped a guy that they thought had um done some theft.
00:30:46.240 --> 00:30:50.079
They had a car chase and and the guy got out and ran.
00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:55.599
And um, he tried to tell them that, uh no, you know, he wasn't he wasn't in the car, he wasn't involved.
00:30:55.839 --> 00:31:11.519
And um, we actually took and were able to get part of his sneakers, um, the tread pattern that he had on the bottom of his sneakers that he was wearing, and we were able to actually go and get that off of it off the brake pedal off of his car.
00:31:11.680 --> 00:31:25.119
And we showed that to him, and you know, he he there wasn't any way that he could really argue, you know, other than he could probably still try to say, well, you know, that was somebody else that had some, you know, a shoe like mine or whatever.
00:31:25.279 --> 00:31:40.799
But but you know, so there is um, you know, there's there's a lot, and and and that that's the interesting thing too, is there is a lot of places that you can pick up tread pattern that people wouldn't ever think about.
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:53.759
And that that's one of the things that, you know, just comes a little bit with experience and just, you know, being in, I guess I'll say, discipline of of visual man tracking, um, because that's kind of really what it is.
00:31:54.079 --> 00:31:59.519
So you know that several of the families that we are serving are families who have missing loved ones.
00:31:59.599 --> 00:32:06.480
So I would just like you to speak a little bit to those families and families who may be listening who have missing loved ones.
00:32:06.640 --> 00:32:12.160
What would you like them to understand about the work that search and rescue teams do?
00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:42.160
So I guess one of the things with with search and rescue is understanding, I guess, is the people that come into search and rescue and just about any kind of group is so most search and rescue groups are volunteers and really is is what the heart and soul of of people that are in search and rescue is that they are there to help the people of the community.
00:32:42.559 --> 00:32:50.640
And anytime that you know that somebody's lost or missing, they want to be there to help that family out in any way they can.
00:32:50.720 --> 00:32:54.400
You know, usually, you know, the main focus is trying to find the person.
00:32:54.640 --> 00:33:16.559
I really feel like in this in the search and rescue communities that I've been able to be in, the real heart, I feel like, of the people that are there is they want to be there for for the families because you know it's a hard thing for people when they when they lose a loved one, um, you know, how however they do it.
00:33:16.720 --> 00:33:30.960
And like, you know, a lot of the cases that you bring up, you know, the people, a lot of them um, you know, are are murdered or assumed to have been murdered and they just they haven't been found.
00:33:31.200 --> 00:33:48.400
And um, and I think, you know, where where search really comes into the rescue part of it, we want to get out there and and really help those people that are missing a loved one and try to try to find them in any way that you know that we can.
00:33:50.079 --> 00:33:53.599
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