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How to Find a Lost Dog on a Trail

awise — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 10:00:05 +0000

It’s a pet owner’s worst nightmare: halfway through a hike, far from home, Rover bounds into the brush and doesn’t come back. Ten minutes pass, twenty, an hour—and it’s time to deal with the fact that your dog is good and lost. What to do next can be counterintuitive.

That’s where Seattle pet searcher James Branson comes in. For 13 years he’s used his dogs to find other animals, calling his operation (even though his finders now include a 13-pound white poodle and a gargantuan German Shepherd mix named Tino, short for Valentino Squishy Wordsworth). Branson modeled his techniques after those taught by Kat Albretcht, a former police officer and bloodhound handler turned dog detective; he saw her advertisement for training classes on a dog park bulletin board near Seattle, and signed up.

Today, he fields more than 800 calls a year from owners searching for their lost companions. Many are for in-town disappearances, but the hiking trails near Seattle are not an uncommon destination.

“When a dog is lost, it’s almost always the case that the human does the wrong thing,” says Branson. After thousands of searches and hundreds of successful finds, he’s figured out some tips and tricks to increase the odds of finding Rover.

Don’t Shout Their Name

Every owner of a lost pet ever has probably broken this rule, hollering after the dog whether they can be spotted in the distance or not. But hearing its name may only serve to drive a panicked pet farther away.

“It’s like when I was in second grade, and I didn’t want the teacher to call my name,” says Branson; a dog under stress doesn’t want attention focused on them. It may cause a confused animal to bolt or hide. In his experience, calling a dog’s name only helps a third of the time, but otherwise hurts the process.

Call Another Dog’s Name

A wayward pup may freak out at his own moniker, but hearing the name of a BFF? That works, says Branson. Calmly using the name of a dog sibling or playmate will help the lost one know where the humans are and, even better, hail them toward something familiar.

Branson notes that well-trained Tino would be unlikely to bolt from him—but if the bouncy 120-pounder did wander off, he’d call instead for Mu, his cat-detecting lab mix and Tino’s favorite friend. Even chatting at a normal volume can help project calm and let the lost dog find you.

Check the Trailhead

Your canine isn’t as goofy as she looks. Branson notes that about half the time, lost dogs on hiking trails are found back at the parking lot, even when it’s miles away. “Quite often, they’ll just hoof it back to the car,” he notes, which is also why physical tags with an owner’s name and contact information are important. Branson remembers a dog named Snow who was lost while he ran behind his owner’s mountain bike; Snow was found 28 days later and ten miles away from the trail, sleeping on somebody’s porch—reunited only because the pup was wearing his owner’s phone number.

(Oh, and if someone suggests you for your lost pet? Branson has never, ever seen evidence that does anything.)

Lose Your Shirt

When an owner needs to pause their search, leaving a piece of clothing at the place last seen can give a lost animal a spot to return to. It’ll smell familiar and the pet may simply curl up on the sweatshirt left behind. However, Branson doesn’t recommend strewing your entire dirty clothes hamper around the forest, as he’s seen before. “Just, like, a pair of socks,” he says.

If pets are spotted but not caught Branson uses calming signals, a series of behaviors and facial expressions that project comfort and security. He’ll sit on the ground for hours at a time, avoiding eye contact, and let the dogs come to him.

Hire an Expert

��𳦳��’s lists 34 pet finders across the United States who may be able to help if you ever lose your dog.

But Branson notes that searches in the wilderness have their limits; he can’t let Tino follow his nose through terrain he himself can’t handle. And since his search dogs can’t work for more than a few hours at a time, even reaching the place last seen can eat up a lot of his time.

Still, his dogs find their intended target about 25 percent of the time. His first detecting dog, Kelsey, made about 100 finds. And success comes in many forms: Tino’s first victory, in 2018, was tracking a deaf 150-pound Great Pyrenees named Puppy. Tino circled Branson back to a long ditch a few times before he spotted Puppy’s white head, most of his body mired in a mud hole.

One caveat: Branson warns against hiring any outfit that guarantees success, or whose fees feel extravagant. “There’s no regulation” for what he does, he says. He charges about $300 for a single outing of several hours, but has seen rates in the thousands.

Branson, unsurprisingly, advocates for universal leash use on trails, though he does understand that some owners will let their dogs run free. But he says that what owners do can make or break the outcome of a lost animal. “I wish I knew what they were thinking,” says Branson of the lost pets he tracks. “But I do know all the psychology of the humans that interact with them.”

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Stoke Films Are Very White. Two New Entries Are Trying to Change That.

awise — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:05:41 +0000

Ryan Hudson sits in a dug-out snow bench in Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. “People will always remind me of the color of my skin, no matter what,” he says as snow spits around him. “To everyone, I’m a Black snowboarder.” The scene, with Hudson between iconic big-mountain freerider Jeremy Jones and Hispanic snowboarder Rafael Pease, is key to’s new film Mountain Revelations. There’s no place too remote for the specter of racism and inequality.

That includes skiing and snowboarding and the stoke films that have been mainstays of mountain culture for decades, but still tend to feature athletes who are white and male. Mountain Revelations and another new film coming out this fall, The Approach, aim to confront that legacy and bring new energy to the genre.

Unlike TGR’s famed large-cast action films, Mountain Revelations is more of a documentary format, following the trio of snowboarders on a ten-day trip in the Chugach. The goal: to look at racial privilege in the snow sports world and start conversations on film between athletes with markedly different backgrounds—and ride some sick lines, of course.

“We want to show people that, yes, I could stand next to Jeremy Jones on the snowboard and drop in the same line as him. We’re out here kicking ass.”

Executive producer Drew Holt was inspired by the racial justice movement in the summer of 2020, and “the stress and anger and frustration with what was happening from a race perspective,” he says. After seeing posts about racial inequities on Jeremy Jones’s social media feeds, he reached out to the longtime TGR athlete, and then thought of Salt Lake City snowboarder Hudson and the world-hopping Pease. “The best way to tell a story is to get people deep into the backcountry, where they can be really honest and reflective,” says the producer.

, Snowsports Industries America found that involvement in winter sports was overwhelmingly white (67.5 percent) and decreasing among Black participants (down to less than ten percent).

“I can’t say that I speak for the entire population of athletes of color, but I know that over time, it can get better,” says Hudson who’s become increasingly comfortable with talking about his background of being homeless as a teenager and discovering snowboarding through an outreach program. The film, as he describes it, was about three individuals “exercising their right to explore.”

For Pease, who splits his time between Chile and Montana, Mountain Revelations was his first chance to visit Alaska. The film, he says, felt like a small start. “If you really want to talk about it, you shouldn’t have a few men talking about what it’s like being racially different,” he says, and wishes a woman had been part of the cast as well. He says while some of the change he sees in the outdoor industry feels inauthentic, the film was a chance to show that a Hispanic athlete can perform on the sport’s highest stage.

While a solid start, of course Mountain Revelations is only one film. Holt points out that Sierra Nevada and Spark Bindings came on as sponsors for the project, but he was surprised by the lack of involvement from many other brands. And there’s the fact that the flagship TGR film Stoke the Fire stars 17 white athletes (albeit with several women in their ranks).

“I think this film is a good indication of where we’re going, striving to be actually inclusive instead of tokenizing.”

Washington state filmmaker Anne Cleary went a different route with , another shred film debuting this fall. Kickstarted by her frustration at being the token female in so many spaces, legendary skier Ingrid Backstrom gathered a crew of athletes with varied backgrounds—Black skier Brooklyn Bell, Black snowboarder Emilé Zynobia, and Canadian snowboarder Spencer O’Brien, who is of Indigenous descent. When adaptive skier Vasu Sojitra came on board, he refused to be the sole disabled athlete; he recruited Bend sit skier Anna Soens to join the group.

When women appear in ski films made by men, says Cleary, “you get a lot of hair blowing in the wind moments.” The Approach instead captures broken down vans and Backstrom threatening to moon the camera. It wraps with a classic Alaskan heli-ski trip, the kind of big-mountain shots that have for so long featured mostly white men. “I think this film is a good indication of where we’re going, striving to be actually inclusive instead of tokenizing,” says Cleary.

Pease also believes that the action sequences will speak as loudly as the camp chats in Mountain Revelations. “We want to show people that, yes, I could stand next to Jeremy Jones on the snowboard and drop in the same line as him. We’re out here kicking ass.”

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The Battle Against Crowded Ski Hills

jversteegh — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On a recent morning, a line of cars stretched from the Crystal Mountain Resort parking lots, down the Mount Rainier foothills, and all the way to the town of Auburn, 57 miles away. Welcome to a weekend powder day at Washington’s biggest ski area.

For two consecutive January weekends, the resort posted “lots full” on their site and message boards as early as 7:48 a.m. (first chair is at 9 a.m.), turning those away who didn’t see the notice after they’d waited in line for six hours. “By the third day, we went, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,’” says Crystal Mountain president and COO Frank DeBerry.

On January 13, the ski resort announced that they would no longer sell walk-up lift tickets on weekends. “You’re going to know before you get in the car whether or not you can get on the mountain,” DeBerry says. Purchased by Alterra Mountain Company in 2018, the resort will remain unlimited to Alterra’s Ikon Pass holders. Limited single-day advance tickets will be available (Crystal Mountain declined to share an exact number). The first weekend under the new policy sold out online in under 24 hours.��

As a whole, the ski industry is moving away from walk-up ticket sales, says Natalie Ooi, program director of the ski area management program at Colorado State University. “No one goes to the airport to buy a plane ticket for that same day. The ski industry has, over the last decade, been trying to train guests to do the same,” she says. “It makes good business sense”—advance purchases are a hedge against bad weather. Still, Ooi expects many ski areas won’t outright quit the walk-up business like Crystal, instead letting their parked-out lots send the same message: we’re full.

Ski hills across the country are getting more crowded—and something’s got to give. The day-of lift ticket purchase is going the way of wire wickets and day-lodge crockpots;��Crystal is just the first to make it official.��While different resorts are tackling different challenges, over the years��a��few have attempted��to address the problem head-on: Utah’s Deer Valley has been limiting ticket sales for decades. Vermont’s homey Magic Mountain began capping daily visitors at 1,500��in 2016. And in September, Utah’s Solitude instituted a $20 parking fee, mitigated for carpools. (When Denver-area Eldora tried the same thing in 2018, customer backlash killed the policy in the cradle.)

According to the ,��ski and snowboard visits are up 18 percent since 1978, to almost 60 million last winter.��And skiers are more concentrated than ever: the Rocky Mountain region saw a 54 percent jump in visits, while the Midwest is down by a third in that same time period. (Of course, ski seasons fluctuate. Last winter was the fourth busiest since 1978,��though the one before that doesn’t even break the top half.)

Why so many more bodies on the slopes? Seattle’s population has grown more than 22 percent since 2010; Denver almost as much. And just a handful of newcomers can make��a dent in Crystal Mountain’s��3,000 parking spots.��Ski area expansion can’t keep up.��Crystal acquired 1,000 more lift-serviced acres in 2007, and Summit at Snoqualmie—just an hour outside Seattle—purchased an extra 77 acres in 2016, but there hasn’t been a brand-new ski mountain in the region since the sixties. The story is the same in the Front Range. Eldora and Copper Mountain have grown in the last few years, according to Chris Linsmayer at Colorado Ski. But it’s slow going and not always adapted for a wave of new skiers.��Arapahoe Basin added nearly 500��acres in 2017, but more than a quarter of it is advanced hike-in terrain.��

Mountain towns aren’t faring any better. Consider Aspen in 1993, the year of cult classic��Aspen Extreme and spandex bottoms, when it was already the ultimate ski town. The population has gotten 36 percent bigger since then. Name nearly any idyllic mountain burg, and it’s grown since 2010, from Jackson (8.3 percent bigger) to Steamboat Springs (9.4 percent) to Bend (27.3 percent).��Plus, throw in an�� or , and there’s more drawing skiers to the mountain than driving them away.

Ski-area adjacent infrastructure has been slow to��keep��up. Colorado’s mountain-bound I-70 corridor is notoriously choked on winter weekends, so much that the opened the Mountain Express Lane on the freeway in 2015. What’s normally an interstate shoulder opens as a toll lane 100 days or so a year for a 13-mile stretch east of Denver, and its success has prompted the current construction of a similar extra lane in the eastbound direction. Still, Denver’s reported that the extra lane only shortened ski commutes by an average of five minutes.

If highway updates aren’t going to solve traffic jams, resorts and municipalities are turning to mass transit. CDOT launched a Snowstang coach to three different mountains, and Solitude (owned by Alterra) pays for Ikon Pass users to ride the Utah Transit Authority’s ski bus up��its own Big Cottonwood Canyon road (which sees ) and the nearby ski hills. During Crystal’s January crush, the resort’s brand-new bus service was caught in the tangle, confirming that even shuttles aren’t exempt from traffic.

When it comes to crowds, it’s hard not to blame the elephant in the lift line: the��era of Big Pass. Though Vail’s Epic Pass has been around for 12 years, it’s recently��grown to cover 43 North American resorts, and in just two years, the Ikon has blossomed to include days at 33 resorts. Prices quickly made single-resort passes a bad choice for consumers; while a Steamboat season cost��$1,149 in 2017,��Alterra’s��(which owns Steamboat) Ikon starts at the same price with a boatload of extras. (In 2018, ��ԹϺ��contributor��Marc Peruzzi��argued that consolidation was making skiing more affordable.)

Most ski areas aren’t quick��to point fingers: “I’m not going to say Ikon isn’t part of it,” says Crystal Mountain’s DeBerry, but he also blames population growth and lessons, which increase the amount of beginner skiers on the hill.��Neither company releases many details about pass sales, though Vail reports that it saw a 22 percent increase across its global Epic versions��to more than 1.2 million passes.

And so many resorts have begun to rein in the masses. Deer Valley only allows Ikon holders seven days per season��on the mountain despite being owned by Alterra. Colorado’s the Epic in 2019, with COO Alan Henceroth announcing, “The ski area is feeling a pinch on parking and facility space.” Seven months later, A-Basin joined the Ikon, albeit with limited days.

Crystal Mountain’s first no-walkups test was a trial by fire: a holiday weekend while the powder was still dumping. Some 40 miles down the highway, the resort’s car counter (a person named Beth) dutifully logged approaching vehicles and sounded the alert at 7:09 a.m. that��enough cars had passed that a park-out was imminent. And yet, says DeBerry, “traffic that arrived at the mountain was the perfect fit for the number of spots. We fit everybody who drove through.” The new system worked. Crystal may be the first to go all-in on advance sales, but it likely won’t be the last.

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Where Were the Women in Matchstick’s New Ski Film?

jversteegh — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Skiers huck cliffs, then blast down spines of powder while a seventies��rock tune swells. for Return to Send’er, which��dropped August 6��by Matchstick Productions (MSP) ahead of the film’s September release, hits all the classic ski-film hallmarks. In the promo, a narrator says of the documentary’s 11 skiers: “A common thread binds those who dedicate themselves.”

But as a lifelong skier who sat through her first Warren Miller flick before I’d graduated from the snowplow, I don’t feel very tethered to the bros in the clip, elbowing each other around a campfire. Is the��common thread that they’re all men? Because they’re all men.

Just one year ago, MSP published the promo for ,��its cast an equal gender split. For every Cody Townsend and Wiley Miller, there was a Michelle Parker and Elyse Saugstad. “This is a kick-ass ski film that just happens to feature as many women as men,” boasted the Crested Butte, Colorado, film house. ,��“Is the Token Female in Ski Movies a Thing of the Past?” Now, a year later, there isn’t even a token.��

It didn’t take long for critics to pepper with sentiments like “Where are the ladies?!?!” and “Movie should be called ‘Sausage Party,’ I guess.” Director Scott Gaffney jumped in to defend the casting, posting, “Not one of our trusty four women from All In��were available.”

Parker, a longtime MSP star, confirms that she was approached for Return to Send’er��but was busy developing her own show with Red Bull TV. She heard that the other All In��women were similarly committed or, in the case of Tatum Monod, injured. But once those “trusty four” were off the table, the bench of elite women skiers was, apparently, depressingly shallow.��

Parker says she wished the revolutionary All In��had led to a bigger pool of elite lady shredders. “We made a huge deal about having equality [last year]. That stands for something,” she says. But it didn’t seem to change much.

On Instagram, Gaffney dug in further. It’s not that this new film stars 11 guys, he wrote: “It’s really 4 principal athletes and the few friends they naturally brought along.” And when I’m attending a raucous preseason film screening this fall, dodging sticky puddles of beer and surrounded by more dudes than women, how many will think it’s “natural” to only invite other men to ski? I don’t expect elite riders to ski with me, but it’s a kick in the shins to learn that the next Parker or Monod isn’t on the must-hang list of the film’s elites.

MSP cofounder Murray Wais says that this year’s all-male cast is an outlier, and indeed, most of its past films included at least one woman. And besides, he thought the��All In��50/50 feat would garner more media attention, but it��“didn’t really seem to care,” he says, though he calls it a commercial success.��

And MSP is hardly alone. On August 5, the Denver-based movie company Level 1 Productions dropped the trailer for its 20th and final annual ski flick, .��The promo of fist-pumping snow-sports porn credits a whopping 28 men. The closest thing to a token lady in the trailer is a half-second flash of a woman in a bikini, a shot that gets as much screen time as dogs humping in the snow.

Coalition Snow CEO Jen Gurecki says she doesn’t think the Matchstick crew is sexist, just “white dudes not thinking it through,” failing to recognize that gender equity takes ongoing, deliberate work. The women’s��ski maker was the only brand name to comment on the imbalance on��Instagram, and Gurecki notes that this all doesn’t bode well for the industry’s other issues, like racial diversity. “Talking about why there aren’t women is the easiest conversation,” she says.��

The outlook isn’t all bleak; ,��the big 2019 film from Teton Gravity Research, based in Jackson, Wyoming, includes five women among its 23 stars. Freeskier Hadley Hammer, one of that handful, says the industry has moved past the token woman��in a good way. “If you step back, it shows progress,” she��says.��“We’re in such high demand that we’re too busy to say yes to everything.”

(Now the pay gap is real, says Hammer. The fact that her male counterparts can afford trucks and snowmobiles makes it clear that sponsors dish out unequal amounts of pro snow cash. “I’m assuming we’re being paid a lot less,” she says. “Unless men are making really, really poor lifestyle choices.”)

“So baffled that a ‘boys club’ theme is considered a winning choice when deciding how to promote a sport. Is it really 2019?” commented Stephanie Peterson, a Seattle account manager, on the MSP Instagram post. Then later,��“How is this not blatant bias and discrimination?” Gaffney sent her direct messages with an explanation: “We wanted a woman or two in our film (including as a principal star) but it didn’t work out. It’s that simple.” But the defense got, well, defensive, and he added, “Your vitriol about our movie has gone over the top…. I feel you’re diving too deep into this.” The fan clearly struck a nerve, and Gaffney has since said he regrets his wording.

For her part, All In��star Saugstad thinks Return to Send’er��represents a rare departure for MSR, not a new policy. Her take: limiting the potential audience of these preseason hypefests doesn’t make sense for anyone, sponsors or filmmakers. “Ski movies are about selling a dream, and that dream does not resonate with me when women are not included,”��she said in an email.

Peterson’s been one of those buyers since college, when she didn’t really notice the dismal gender breakdown on-screen; with few female partners, she felt like the token woman herself. After films like All In,��she says it’s far too late for the ski world to forgo female representation. “I don’t want to go back to accepting watching just male riders,” she says. “Women are hungry to join this sport. They want people to look up to.”

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