Finding Nancy and George

I know people are curious about the details of Nancy and George being found, so will post a few things here and there will be more posts later as well. Just going to do an update before heading back into the mountains to remove all the REWARD posters we put up, and put a FOUND poster at each entrance to the area. While Isaac and I are doing that, Megan will be taking Nancy and George to Bozeman for thorough checkups at the vet.

THANK YOU to everyone who was out there searching, providing emotional support through this site and social media, or helping in other ways. Way too many people to name them all, but a few to call out:

• Our friend Rodger, who has a special connection with Nancy from all the time he spent building our back deck and other projects in 2021-2023. Rodger came out on Monday and road with me to search from very rugged terrain, including the roughest and scariest road I ever have (or ever will!) driven, which included an incident that broke the kayak rack off my truck.
• A guy named Mike from Wise River was the first stranger to join the search, when he (with his dog) rode his 4x4 to all the water sources in the area to check them. Some of those places aren't accessible to my truck, so it was good to get them checked. Mike's instincts were good – three days later, Nancy and George were found near one of the ponds he had checked.
• Our friend Aaron joined me in the search on Wednesday, while his dogs Strummer and Zevon (Isaac's brother) hung out at our house to give Isaac a much-needed distraction.
• Beaverhead County Sheriff Peterson came up to help with the search, and touched base with others who were out there to make sure everyone was OK. He has had three Samoyeds himself, and was one of many searchers who clearly felt what we were going through.
• Keith, a local man whose family has long connections to this area (his parents lived and worked there in the 1950s), used his intimate knowledge of the terrain to search several rugged ATV tracks that I didn't even know existed.
• On Wednesday, I met along the road a couple named Sam and Jess who were headed up to camp for two nights at Vipond with Jess's father for a birthday celebration. Two days later, they're the ones who found Nancy and George!
• Mike from Helena came all the way down (over 100 miles) with his three experienced hunting and tracking dogs, and they systematically searched around the place where Nancy and George were last spotted.
• Eric from Skyhound in Bozeman did an infrared thermal drone search Thursday night that helped verify Nancy and George weren't in some areas that are virtually inaccessible to humans.
• And so many others: people who saw our posters in the towns nearby or saw the news on social media, people I talked to who just happened to be in the area but helped search after I told them what was going on, Forest Service employees, and others. THANK YOU ALL!

Nancy and George's journey

I saw the above video for the first time this morning, having never looked at it while Nancy and George's fate was uncertain. All three dogs continued over that hill at the end, and then they ran through a deep snow drift and into a forest. Isaac came out about 20 minutes later, but we didn't see Nancy and George for five days after the end of this clip.

For the next two hours, while we searched all around the edges of the thick forest and across the meadow areas, Nancy and George moved around the same general area and were spotted by others, but never by us. There were only a few other people up there, and late afternoon they all left to drive down Quartz Hill Road to the town of Dewey and beyond.

Nancy and George did something pretty smart then. Having not seen Megan and Isaac and me for some time, they headed down the same road everyone else was leaving on.

The gallery above is photos that I took three days after they walked down the road, so there is only a fraction of the snow that they walked through. The snow covered the road a foot deep or more in places on Sunday, but temperatures were warm all week and most of the snow had melted by the time I took these photos.

Their destination was brilliant. As we determined later that evening, the two ladies at that cabin were the only people within miles of this location other than Megan and me, who were still searching around the meadows high above this location. Unfortunately, those women were just leaving, and were unable to take them, so they got our phone numbers off Nancy's tags, left a dish of water out (which you can see on the porch in this photo taken later in the week) and drove to cell coverage (45 minutes away) to contact us.

Those women felt just sick all week about leaving them there, after we were having trouble finding the dogs. But it seemed a simple situation. We were up on top, and coming down we would surely find them, because Nancy and George were in a narrow valley with steep thickly forested sides. They could only go up the road or down the road from there.

Unfortunately, things didn't actually work that way. Somehow, when Megan, Isaac and I drove down the 2.5 miles to the cabin, we now know that Nancy and George were headed back up to the meadow, but we never saw them on the road. We suspect they got a short distance off the road at some point and we drove right past them, but we'll never know.

For the rest of Sunday evening, while Megan (on foot) and I (in the truck) thoroughly searched the entire length of the valley below, Nancy and George were up above us in or around the meadows. And it appears that they stayed up there the rest of the week. Many people were searching below them eventually, and we're certain they weren't down in the valley (it's not that big an area to search), but the meadow area is vast, with many places inaccessible to motorized vehicles, and we think that's where they were.

Lost dogs in wilderness areas are more likely to go downhill than uphill, and Nancy and George had already gone miles downhill. So why didn't they just keep going down? More brilliance, I'd say: because they needed water.

A lost dog can't survive more than a few days without water, but they can survive almost indefinitely if they have a water source, by eating bits of vegetation, animal droppings, and so on. The area up high had lots of big snow drifts as water sources, as well as a few ponds, but at the cabin and below everything has been bone dry this week. So dry that the road dust is annoying and often blinds you while driving, whereas up above your tires spin in the mud and ice. So I think they went up to where they could find water, and then stayed there.

The next few days are a mystery. Nobody ever saw their tracks on snow or mud (and some very experienced hunters and outdoorsmen were looking), and none of the food I left out near where they had been sighted was ever touched.

The place they were finally found is within a mile of where they were first off-leash (in the video above), and they were out on the road. The same road I drove countless times this week, searching for them.

I'll post more over the weekend, but that's all for now because Isaac and I need to go take down a bunch of posters in the mountains, and Megan needs to take Nancy and George their checkups.