Man Training Dog Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, PhotographerA few years ago, I agreed to take care of my cousins’ dog Molly while they went on a trip. When they dropped Molly off, they mentioned she was “ball crazy.” They took out a tennis ball and threw it over the house. Molly took off like a shot. Two minutes later she came trotting back and dropped the ball at my feet. “Again?” she seemed to ask. Searching and finding that ball all day long couldn’t have made Molly any happier.
As far back as the Middle Ages, monks in the Saint Bernard monastery in the Swiss Alps discovered how helpful their dogs could be searching for travelers who had become lost in the mountains. In the 17th century, one of their specially bred St. Bernard rescue dogs, Barry, was credited with saving over 40 lives. By 1909, NYC police added a German Shepard, Max, to their search and rescue team.Now, in Cache Valley, there are 4 certified volunteer search and rescue dogs and their handlers working with the local law enforcement.
I was lucky to meet one of these four teams last weekend. Glen Gantz and his dog Moki were training at an empty outdoor lot in Logan. Glen had put a small tin can loaded with a bit of scent on the gravel covered ground. He then kicked enough gravel over the can to hide it from view.
Moki was raring to go. The command to search came from Glen and Moki took off. He circled the perimeter with his head up, and soon caught the scent. A few more seconds and Moki was lying down, his front paws and head pointing at the tin can. Glen acknowledged the successful find with a BIG shout out, “Good Boy!” Moki jumped up and came racing over to Glen for an extra round of praise and a small tasty treat. Then Glen pulled out Moki’s favorite toy and the two played their beloved game of tug of war.
I felt a bit honored to get this close up view of how much enjoyment a dog and his handler could get from working together as a team. I had once talked to a man whose dog would go into the forest with him to find truffles. The dog could smell these tasty fungi growing among the tree roots under the ground. The dog would paw the ground exactly where the man should dig. In the past, truffle hunters had used pigs to sniff out the truffles. The pigs were very good at locating the truffles and digging them up. The problem was preventing the pigs from eating them. He said you used to be able to identify a truffle hunter by how many fingers they were missing. The dogs were a much better team-mate.
A dog’s nose is said to be as much as 100,000 times as sensitive to smell as a human. A human has about 5 million scent receptors . A dog has over 125 million. When it comes time for a search for a lost person, nothing works better than a dog’s nose.
So when a 16 year old was reported missing in Hyrum, Glen and Moki were called in to help. Moki was given his scent and followed the trail. Four hours later, the trail ended at the edge of Hyrum Dam. Sadly, the boy was not found alive, but the family was able to retrieve the body, which meant a great deal to them.
So for our listeners who love to hike in our beautiful mountains, be careful. But know, should you need help, there are 4 certified search and rescue dog teams in the valley that are constantly training to improve their skills. They will come looking, and they will find you.
Ewe with a lamb, Likely a Border Cheviot Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, PhotographerI just got back from a voyage across the North Sea and couldn’t wait to tell everyone about the stunning landscape – Huge blocks of black basalt rock rising out of the sea. No trees in sight. But always a scattering of sheep grazing wherever grass has been able to grow. It being Spring, there were also quite a few baby lambs that seemed to prefer bouncing to walking.
Once, when our ship dropped anchor, a local hiking guide offered to show us how he and his Border Collie worked together to gather the scattered sheep and bring them down to his farm in the fall. He gave the dog a command in Finnish and the dog raced up the hill away from us. Another command and the dog stopped immediately and lay down. More commands – and the dog did it all. It was very impressive. Best of all, the dog seemed to be really enjoying the work-out.
Now, here in northern Utah we don’t get to see very many sheep grazing on our hillsides. But we can see plenty of working sheep dogs at the International Sheep Dog Competition held every Memorial Day at Soldier Hollow outside Midway, Utah.
It’s been going on for years, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I checked this year’s program and was delighted to see that one of the teams came from Cache Valley. Some of the dogs come from as far away as New Zealand, South Africa, and Scotland.
After three days of qualifying rounds, the top dogs were ready to go.
The first handler and their dog step up to the starting post. The big red digital clock started the countdown from 45 minutes. The dog is sent racing and over the hill where 10 sheep are waiting. These are not your ordinary farm sheep, but big rangy sheep brought in from the desert. They’ve never been herded before. The dog circles around behind the sheep. By now the handler is blowing his whistle and shouting as the dog maneuvers the sheep through a gate and back down to the starting post.
The next step is a return trip up the hill to bring back 10 more burly sheep, These sheep are all wearing bright red collars. The real excitement begins for me when all 20 sheep are standing inside a large circle marked out on the grass. The handler and the dog now enter the circle with the sheep. Their job is to separate 5 of the red-collared sheep and keep them inside the circle – while pushing all the other sheep out.
The sheep do not want to be separated. By now the handler is mostly shouting “Lie down!” Too much pressure from the dog and ALL the sheep will bolt out of the circle. Meanwhile, the big red digital clock is ticking down. I find myself holding my breath.
For many teams, the clock runs out.
The ones that are successful now move on to the final challenge. They must move the 5 red-collared sheep into a very small pen with an even smaller tiny gate. Often the dog will lock eyes in a stare down with a burly stubborn sheep. It’s another cliff-hanger.
Win or lose, these hard working sheep dogs are a joy to watch.
You might want to join me at Soldier Hollow next Memorial Day, come rain or shine.
Sheep Dog Guiding Sheep into Pen at Soldier Hollow Classic Sheep Dog Championship & Festival, Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer, https://yout-ube.com/watch?v=60P7itSOl8g
Chariot Racing in Utah Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, PhotographerA few weeks ago, I met someone who mentioned she used to be involved in chariot racing.
Chariot Racing Team Courtesy & Copyright Wendy Wilker, Photographer“Chariots?” I asked. “Like in ancient Roman days?”
“Sort of.” she said. She explained how today’s chariot racing in the Intermountain West involves two horses pulling a small aluminum chariot with the driver standing in the cart.
She mentioned the Regional Championships were coming up at the Golden Spike Arena in Ogden that weekend. So on Saturday, I jumped in my car . I got to the Arena just after the first race.
As I was strolling up to the rail running along the side of the racetrack, the horses in the next race shot by me. I was a little stunned by the hammering of the hooves on the dry dirt, the jangling of the harnesses, the strange whirring of the bicycle wheels — let alone the screaming of the spectators.
For the horses, it was an all out sprint for a quarter mile and it was over in 21 seconds.
In Roman times, the races lasted much longer. A typical race went 7 laps on a U-shaped racetrack with dangerously tight turns on both ends. Wealthy Roman Citizens owned the horses, but they usually sent a slave to drive the team. A crowd favorite was the daredevil slave charioteer Scorpius, who won 2,048 races before he died in a crash at the age of 26. Stories of chariot racing go all the way back to Homer’s Iliad where the Spartan king Menelaus was accused of cheating in a chariot race.
Rome’s racetrack was called the Circus Maximus and it could seat 250,000 spectators.
Back in Pioneer times in Utah, farmers liked to brag about how fast their horses could go, so challenges were made, and the issue usually settled by an informal race. The first official chariot race took place down the main street in Jackson Wyoming in 1950. For the following decades, chariot racing was very popular. Hundreds of teams would show up at the local races.
Going back to the Golden Spike racetrack, I walked up to where the races were starting. I asked if I could get close and climb up on the sidebars of the starting gate and they said ,”Sure.” From there I got an eyeball-to-eyeball view of the horses impatiently banging around in the starting chutes.
I think I was expecting a “Ready, Set, Go” and a starter pistol fired into the air. What I got was a mighty clang of metal on metal when the starter pulled a lever. The gates slammed open, the horses lunged forward, and dirt flew by me.
When the dust finally settled, the days winners were a team from Logan, who clocked in at 20.40 seconds – just 3 hundredths of a second off the world record.
On the way out I stopped to talk to three old timers still standing around chewing the fat.
“The sport is dying out,” one said.
“It’s getting expensive to keep a horse,” said the second.
The third summed it all up for me:
“Used to be you were really someone if you had a car. Now you’re really someone if you have a horse.”
This is Mary Heers and I’m Wild about all the horses in Utah.
Wolf Footprints in the River of No Return Wilderness Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer“A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow…. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank…. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.” Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain
In January three wolves were killed by the US Department of Agriculture and Food in Cache Valley, near Avon. The wolves wandered into a corner of northern Utah (more or less north of I-80 and east of I-84) where wolves are exempt from protection.
These were not the first wolves in northern Utah in modern times. I came across tracks in the Bear River Range a dozen years ago. There have been at least 21 documented sitings of wolves in Utah since 2004.
Wolf Footprints Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Wolf Footprints in Snow Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, PhotographerIn the winter of 2002, on the last day of a four-day, fifty-five mile ski tour, deep in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness, a friend and I were setting a skin-track (a backcountry skiing term for breaking a trail) from the Salmon River up to the canyon rim. We traveled through spaced-out ponderosa pines through light snowflakes until we topped out on flat ground, 5,000 feet above the river. The forest abruptly transitioned to thick lodge pole pines. At our feet, all the snow was packed down with fresh wolf tracks. There was no new snow in the tracks, yet snow continued to fall from above. A pack of wolves had coalesced where we stood moments before our arrival.
Though I had seen wolf tracks before, I was still taken aback by the sheer size.
There are only two known cases of wolves killing people in the last century in North America. Statistically, you are more likely to be killed by a dear, an elk, a moose, a snake, a falling tree, an insect sting, lightening, or just about anything else than you are to be attacked by a wolf. Even with that knowledge, we could not escape a feeling of vulnerability. We looked around cautiously.
Five sets of evenly-spaced wolf tracks, parallel to one another, lead down the trail—the trail we had to follow. After about one hundred meters of skiing, one set of tracks peeled off to the left, disappearing into the lodgepole pine forest. A hundred meters later, a second set of wolf tracks turned off, this time to the right. A hundred meters more, and another set peeled off to the left. Consistent with pattern, a fourth set veered off to the right one hundred meters later, once again.
The wolf pack undoubtably watched us from all points of the compass. On high alert, we scanned the woods constantly for flashes of movement, for golden eyes peering from behind the timber, but saw nothing.
The middle set of tracks—the fifth wolf’s tracks—continued for another mile down the snow-covered trail before they too, turned off into the forest and vanished. We never caught a glimpse of any of them.
I think about those elusive wolves frequently. A wolf encounter is an zenith wilderness experience.
In Thinking Like a Mountain, Aldo Leopold described his younger self shooting a wolf and coming upon it in time to watch it die: “I was young then,” he wrote, “and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die [in the wolf’s eyes], I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
I’m not suggesting wolves shouldn’t be managed, but I would like to see wildlife biologists making those decisions and that they are applied with consistency.
Leopold concluded, “…Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world.’ Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”
Lofton, Shelby, 3 wolves killed in Cache County; picture prompts concern over ‘lethal removal’, KSL.com, KSL Broadcasting Salt Lake City UT, Deseret Digital Media, Jan. 28, 2026, https://www.ksl.com/article/51439305
Wolves in Utah, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, Last Updated: Tuesday, September 9, 2025, https://wildlife.utah.gov/wolves.html
