Victory lap
This is one of a series of posts about the time Nancy and George went missing in the subalpine wilderness of Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest on May 10-15, 2026. Click the button below to see all of the posts in the series.
FYI, I have lots of notes from this crazy week, and dozens of photos and video we haven't shared, so we're planning at least three more posts in the wilderness walkabout series after this one:
- Lessons Learned – what worked well, what didn't, and what we'd do differently if we had known then what we know now.
- Dark Thoughts and Desperation – we tried to keep things upbeat on the status update posts, but now that the story has a happy ending we'll share some of the things we didn't tell you at the time.
- Going Forward – an overview of how we're going to make sure that nothing like this ever happens to the pack again.
On Saturday, Isaac and I spent several hours driving around to all the places where we had put up MISSING DOGS posters, to take them all down so that people wouldn't be spending time over the weekend searching for Nancy and George. It felt like we were taking a victory lap, because almost everyone we ran into was full of smiles at the news, which many of them already knew from social media.
It was snowing in Butte when Isaac and I headed out to take down the posters.
Our first stop was at the McDonald's in Rocker. That was the first place we left a poster on Monday morning, when we stopped for coffee on the way to the mountains. The same woman was working, and she was thrilled to hear the news that should could take down the poster that she had hung on her door.
Our next stop was Great Divide Outfitters, a fishing store in Divide, Montana that had one of our posters next to the cash register. Another joyful reaction. Then more smiling faces and congratulations at the bar in Dewey, the town near the base of Quartz Hill Road.
The town of Dewey has 15-20 homes in it, and their mailboxes are all in a row out along the highway. I had put a MISSING DOGS poster in each mailbox, so on this trip I went down the row and checked each one – if the poster was still there I simply removed it, but if they had picked up their mail and it was gone, I gave them a FOUND poster.
Next stop was the town of Wise River, down the road a few more miles. I had already removed the poster from the bar in Wise River when I stopped on my drive to Jackson, Montana on Friday evening to pick up Nancy and George. A cheer went up when I removed the poster, and I later learned that that bar was where Jess (one of the people who found the dogs) had stopped to use a landline to call Megan and report that the dogs had been found.
When Isaac and I stopped in Wise River on Saturday morning, the MISSING DOGS poster was already removed from the door of the general store, because they had heard the news. We removed the one from the post office, and turned around and headed back to Quartz Hill Road, where we replaced the poster at the entrance with a FOUND poster as shown in the header image above.
We drove up Quartz Hill Road, and the first vehicle we saw was a couple from Butte who had been out there searching for Nancy and George since 7AM. I sobbed when they told me that, and they smiled and cheered and congratulated us.
Next we stopped at a place where four RVs were parked, to let Keith – the local man whose family had deep history to the area – know that the dogs were found. Keith had been doing a lot of searching, so we wanted to make sure he knew. He had driven into town for something and wasn't there, but a man named Sam from Butte told us he'd pass on the news that those missing dogs were found. Then when he realized they were my dogs, and that Isaac was their packmate, he called over some people sitting around a campfire to meet us. "This is the owner! This is their other dog!" Isaac and I were being treated like celebrities on our victory lap!
The next people we ran into on the road were a couple who own a cute cabin near the one where Nancy and George had been spotted. When I asked them whether they knew that the two lost dogs had been found, the man said "yes, we talked to Andy this morning and he has them back." I replied "who's Andy?," and after some confusing conversation the man said "oh, you're the owner of the white dogs that were lost, Andy's are brown and white." It turns out that a man named Andy had two dogs that had gone missing along Quartz Hill Road on Friday evening, and he had been out calling for them after dark and eventually found them along the road in the morning.
This blows my mind. I spend five days driving up and down that road calling for Nancy and George, then we got them back, and then that same evening, two other dogs went missing, and a different man was driving up and down the road calling for his lost dogs! Glad he got them back, too!
Isaac and I went on up the road, removing posters as well as my dirty t-shirts I had stapled to some stumps along the road earlier in the week. Then on up to the meadow at Vipond, where there was a heavy graupel shower happening and the fog was so thick that we could only see a hundred feet or so.
Isaac checking out the spot where we had hung a poster at the Vipond meadow near where Nancy and George went missing.
Next we drove past the spot where Nancy and George had been found, and checked out the pond where their tracks had been spotted by Frank (Jess's father) on Friday morning. That pond will now be a special place to us forever, because it is the water source that kept Nancy and George alive for five days.
Isaac checking out the pond where Nancy and George's tracks were found.
After the week we'd had, I decided Isaac deserved to stop and play in a big snow drift for a while.
We went down the far side of Vipond Park and past the charcoal kilns to remove some posters there.
The final stop of our victory lap was at the bar in Melrose, Montana, to remove a poster that Aaron and I had left there on Wednesday.
