I talk to Rob Speiden (trackingschool.com), who’s an expert in “sign cutting,” which is the tracking of humans or animals over land using clues of physical disturbance. Rob teaches tracking and his site is at www.trackingschool.com. He wrote, along with Greg Fuller, a respected textbook on tracking called Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting, and Tracking (F.A.S.T.).
Topics discussed include: common methods of tracking; the different types of tracking jobs that come up; how tracking is used in search and rescue scenarios; addressing some common misconceptions about what’s possible with tracking; the importance of being fully aware and open to all sensory input; the role of the unconscious in giving us clues, and more. Rob also tells some interesting stories from his career.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
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TRANSCRIPT
[Note: transcripts will contain errors.]
Zach: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people and reading people. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
On today’s episode, recorded october 26,2021, I talk to Rob Speiden, that’s SPEIDEN. Rob is an expert in sign cutting. Sign cutting is the tracking of people or animals over the ground by looking for physical indications of disturbance. The ‘sign’ in ‘sign cutting’ refers to the clues found on the ground, as in ‘I saw sign that someone passed here’. The ‘Cutting’ part of the term, from what I can gather, is about knowing the direction of travel of the person or animal you’re following, and cutting ahead to find their tracks, as opposed to just traveling in a straight line.
A little bit about Rob Speiden: He teaches tracking and you can find his website at www.trackingschool.com. He’s an active member of the Search and Rescue community and has been since 1993. He’s a Virginia Search and Rescue Tracking Specialist, Search Team Leader, and Search Mission Coordinator. He wrote, along with Greg Fuller, a textbook on tracking called Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting, and Tracking, which has the acronym FAST, and is used as a reference and textbook for the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Emergency Management Search and Rescue Tracking program. Rob’s second book is Tracker Training: The Guide to Classroom and Field Exercises for Visual Trackers.
Okay here’s the interview with Rob Speiden
Zach: Hi Rob. Thanks for coming on.
Rob: Hey, it is my pleasure to to be here. Thanks, Zach.
Zach: So when it comes to tracking people. It seems like you could fit some of that work into a few categories, types of work.
What would you say are the, are the main categories that that come to mind of the types of [00:02:00] work?
Rob: Yeah. There, um, there are several ways to break it down and, and one way I kind of think of it is, um, whether it’s search and rescue or law enforcement or military. And the biggest difference between those is what you do with the person when you end up finding them.
Search and rescue might, might rescue them. Law enforcement. Could arrest them, or, um, military could eliminate them. And they’re, they’re definitely crossovers in those. One suggestion, um, that you put out there was looking for people that want to be found versus people that don’t want to be found. I think that’s also an awesome dichotomy and, and that’s certainly, uh, another way to break it up.
Zach: Uh, looking at your website, I, I assume you get called in for help on various types of jobs. Is that fair to say? And if so, what kinds of calls do you get called out on?
Rob: My business is a private business that’s, that’s for profit. Basically. I make money by teaching classes about this, but when I go searching for missing persons, um, that [00:03:00] I wouldn’t call that a job so much as.
It’s a volunteer activity. So I’m a member of several different search and rescue groups that when, um, a jurisdiction receives a report of a missing person, um, it is up to them how they want to handle that and they can handle it on their own or they can call for additional resources. And the teams I’m involved with in Virginia are notified by, uh, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
And the acronym there is VEM. So when VEM gets a call or a request from an agency organization, a jurisdiction for assistance, they will, um, notify resources based on the request. So it could be a limited call out of just a couple teams. It could be a full call out of Send the Calvary kind of. Thing. And so when, um, any team that I’m a member of gets notified of a search for a missing person, if I’m working or doing, um, [00:04:00] if I’m out of state or something, I’m not able to respond.
But if I’m able to respond, then, then I’ll respond under, um, the, the name of the team that I’m a member of.
Zach: So there are a lot of kind of unsurprising aspects of tracking, like looking for footprints, broken twigs, things like that. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the, the lesser known indicators that people might be surprised or used as clues?
Rob: Um, I guess I could, it’s, it’s, I I don’t think anything I’m gonna put out here will be new or surprising. Um, I might debunk some things like the broken twigs thing. It’s like what can break twigs and, and you can have an animal that breaks twigs, a human that breaks twigs, a vehicle, the wind, another, uh, branch that’s falling, can break other twigs.
So there are things like bent grass and broken twigs that, that are very low on the weight. Scale or priority scale of, [00:05:00] Hey, I see this sign, so that must be the person I’m looking for. And, and really that comes down to identifiable sign. Um, just in semantics, sign can be any indication of activity. Uh, it could be a deer bed, it could be, um.
Folded blades of grass, whereas tracks, um, we reserve that term for identifiable signs. So that has characteristics that I could say, I could distinguish one individual from another by that track. So that tread pattern or some, um, unique indication in it, we’ll look for tracks that help us confirm that we’re following the same person and those.
Might be few and far between, where if somebody steps on an ant hill and leaves a partial impression of a tread pattern, we can say, okay, we’re still following this, this person in the next few. And, and possibly many footfalls just create [00:06:00] disturbances as signs. So there’s broken twigs that that flagged or, or, um, bent over.
A grass might be an indication, Hey, we’re still on the same trail, even if it’s not conclusively made by a particular. Or individual
Zach: And reading a little bit about this seemed like it was an important aspect to age the sign, determine how old the sign is. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that and, and what are some of the ways that you can, can age a sign in
Rob: the.
Um, beginning stages of a search for a person, we want to ask a few questions that help us age or, um, narrow down the possibility of the trail that we’re following. One is to find out when that person was last seen, and then we want to find tracks or sign that are. That are that old or younger or fresher than that.
And so aging is a crucial part of that story, crucial element of that story. And there are several tools I talk about [00:07:00] when, um, working on interpreting the age of tracks or sign. And one of those is that interview, that background information, knowing the weather history basically, when was the last time it rained or snow did.
Do form overnight, have there been windy conditions depending on the environment, what aging elements were occurred in the recent past, that will enable us to determine the age of the tracks to be made before that event or after that event, or even during that event. Um, and then one of the tools also we use to help determine the age of a tract we call indexing, which is putting down.
Um, your own track or, or making a, a complimentary sign, a sign that tries to duplicate what you’re seeing. If you find a track or a slip on the ground, a slide or something, um, you duplicate that to compare what you know to be immediate. Immediately fresh, what you just [00:08:00] made to what you’re looking at, and the more similar those are, then the oversimplified deduction of that could be the fresher that track is.
And then the third tool I talked about is just practices. Just going out and making tracks and watching them change over time based on those events, based on rainfall, based on wind or drying events. That helps build that. Library in your mind of what does it look like when a track has been through a, a gentle rain, a mist or dew or, or wind going across it?
Zach: Yeah. I imagine you must get a, a pretty good sixth sense after a while of learning all the factors of like the kind of material it is, the wind, recent rain. Like you must just get a sense of like, you walk out and you see something and you’re like, oh, I have a rough idea of. When that happened, is that fair to say?
You get a, a
Rob: pretty good sense? Yeah, it’s pretty fair to say we, we, um, have a certification process here for, um, search and rescue [00:09:00] tractors in Virginia that involves testing. And one of the tests, one of the stations that we conduct is an aging station, uh, where the, the evaluator puts out over the course of several days.
Puts out several lines of tracks and the people taking the station have to come in and estimate how old the tracks in sign are. And that’s a whole lot easier said than done. Um, aging is a very difficult science to it, basically. Um, there’s a good friend of mine, Mike Hall, who’s a great tracking instructor who describes tracking as.
The complex application of simplicities. So there are a lot of elements that can combine, but the combination of those elements often make it also, on occasion, it can be easy to um, look at traction sign and say, well, those are old, or those are fresh. But also on the flip side of that coin, there are plenty of times where it is very [00:10:00] difficult to accurately estimate the age of tracks or signs.
Zach: Mm-hmm. It comes to looking at. Footprints, can you tell a lot about a person, like for example, can you tell their approximate weight? Can you tell other things about them through deducing things about their footprints?
Rob: Yeah, that’s a great question and, and honestly for me, uh, I’m pretty critical about things like that because, uh, when I go to a search for missing person and I.
Find tracks or, or another team has found tracks, which often happens. Uh, and then it’s my job to interpret them or follow them. Uh, I’m pretty critical about what is able to be deduced from a track or a, a short line of tracks. And, and so for example, the weight that you bring up, that’s a, a common concept among lay people.
Depth of a track, you can tell the weight of the track maker. Uh, I’ve been working for years. It’s one of my soap [00:11:00] boxes, to try to, uh, encourage people to understand that the weight of the track maker has nowhere near the effect on the depth of the track, as does the hardness or softness of the medium that it’s in.
So the ground, um, of the same. Medium the same. Let’s say a soil can, if it’s soft or wet, it can yield a very deep track. But if it were frozen or otherwise hard, it’s going to yield a very shallow track or even no depth at all to it, even from the same track maker. So, um, I’m very hesitant to even think about, um, the weight of a track maker based on the depth of a track or any other information.
Some of the interpretations I think that you can get out of tracks would be how long, uh, going back to the aging thing, how long ago was this person here? How are they moving? Are they moving slack fast? Are they moving slow? Um, and who [00:12:00] is it? Is it a particular person? And again, we’d need identifiable track features or tread pattern to determine that.
And then over the course of a trail following a trail, um, you can glean information about the person, their behavior, um, some aspects of a state of mind, but these kinds of interpretations really go way out on a limb that is often difficult to support and things are often romanticized in media, in, um, Hollywood portrayals of tracking.
So it’s, it’s really a lot of times difficult to make those interpretations about things So. I just urge caution, uh, in that regard. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Yeah. I guess it’s, it’s probably like a lot of the softer sciences where there’s, there can be a lot of exaggerations of what’s po what’s possible either by like practitioners to exaggerate what they can do or just in the.
Yeah, the Hollywood kind of fictional world where they want to make things more exciting by, you know, exaggerating what people [00:13:00] Exactly right.
Rob: Exactly right. Yeah. You nailed it right on the head and, and so my background of search and rescue, if I make a decision or an interpretation, a deduction from something I.
Uh, about tracks or signs that are found out in the field. Basically my perspective is I better be right about that. ’cause that can affect the allocation of resources, how teams are deployed and can affect the outcome, can affect when the person is found, if found sooner or later, and can affect the condition they’re found in, are they found alive or dead?
So that’s, to me, it’s pretty. Pretty critical decision and, and, um, so that, that just means I’m more conservative in offering those deductions than just shooting from the hip and, and making some fantastic call on them, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Yeah. That, this might be a good way to segue into the topic of, you know, when you’re, when you’re doing search and rescue work, I imagine those jobs must be.
[00:14:00] Pretty stressful with the, the clock ticking and, and so much, uh, riding on the, on the line. Can you talk a little bit about the, uh, you know, some of the shortcuts that you’re able to make and, and talk about the, the stress of the, the clock ticking and how that. Get you to speed up a search a bit.
Rob: When I respond to a search for missing person, one of the, there are a lot of tools that we have in the toolbox to approach that problem, and one of the first ones I like to use is to attempt tracking, is to ask about, um, what kind of footwear are they wearing?
What was the weather history recently and, and how, um, how do they walk and other behaviors, what do they have with them? Those kinds of things. But, but that interview is, um, it takes about 15 or 20 minutes, but to, but to do a thorough interview is pretty crucial so that we can interpret. Clues or items that we might find out in the field and, and determine the relevancy to this.
Were these tracks or was this [00:15:00] item of clothing actually left by the person that it belonged to them? Or is it somebody else’s that was just left out there? Um, so that’s one person. One little task to do, um, is to sit down and try to. Forget about that emergency thing and just try to get a bunch of information that’s gonna help out.
While that’s going on simultaneously, there are also teams that are sent out to do, uh, what we call reflex tasks, which are. Go on the trails, the common sense tasks of, hey, if this person were overdue, then they might be coming back this way. If they got disoriented, they might make a mistaken decision at this splitting the trail.
So send one team down the left fork and one team down the right fork and lots of things are going on at the same time. All driven by that sense of urgency of let’s get resources out now.
Zach: Um, I was, one thing I was wondering about, do people that. Or lost, [00:16:00] it would seem pretty obvious that they would know to leave like obvious markers, like as soon as they realize that they’re in trouble.
But does that always happen or do some people just not know that and that makes it harder to find them?
Rob: Yeah, it um, it’s a great question and for those that, um, are. Cognizant of being lost or wanting to be found. Those are behaviors, um, that we occasionally find, but we don’t find that they’re doing a lot The reality of it in search and rescue, we are often looking for people that don’t realize they’re, they’re lost.
And, and just to put that into context, these are children or people with dementia, people with autism, people that aren’t mentally, uh, aware that they’re in trouble and act. Uh, act to draw attention to themselves quickly. So, um, those, and, and also, um, people with mental illness and, and despondent or suicidal folks [00:17:00] or those aren’t gonna be working to bring people to them.
Zach: Hmm. I see. Can you give a rough percentage of like how that breaks down? Like for search and rescue, what percentage are people that are just lost and trying to be found versus people that are fall in that other category of,
Rob: yeah. I wish I had numbers right off top of my head, but I’ll tell you the, the vast majority of people fall into the, aren’t.
Thinking about how to get somebody to help them category. So, um, again, children, people with dementia, people with autism that those account for and people with mental illness. Um, account for the vast majority, I’m gonna say 70 to 80% of the searches in Virginia are those cases, um, where people aren’t intentionally leaving clues or doing things that would help us
Zach: get to them quicker.
A small edit here. I’ll cut ahead a little bit to where Rob’s talking about the importance of being fully present and fully aware when looking for side. [00:18:00]
Rob: Um, so one of the things that, that we teach in Search and Rescue is awareness is just paying attention to your surroundings and, and what’s going on around you.
And, and part of that instruction is knowing your capabilities and limitations and being aware of our senses and how can we use those to, uh, basically be more cognitive, pay more attention to our surroundings. And, and so one of the things we kind of brush on is intuition is. Getting input that comes in subconsciously and maybe a little bit might bubble up into the consciousness and, and act on that accordingly.
And there are a couple searches I can talk about where that, uh, led me to a missing person. But on a, a job I was working as an environmental engineer and. And, um, I’d gone out to a site to, um, to pull up traffic cones that were used to protect the concrete pads, um, that were poured around the [00:19:00] monitoring wells.
And I was gonna take those back to the driller’s office, and this is a two and a half hour drive to get there. And, and we talk about. And intuition input coming in through all the senses and peripheral vision and not just looking straight at something, but receiving something in our side view. And, and I was driving, um, back that I had, I was, uh, given the task of dropping those cones off at the driller’s office.
And I was driving along and all of a sudden it occurred to me that, Hey, I need to drop the COEs off at the driller’s office. And I look in the side view mirror and I was just passing by the office. So what, what I think happened there was, as that driller’s building came into view, my brain started going, Hey, there’s the office.
You know, heads up. So that I think is something that happens every day to everybody, that we receive all this input and can’t process all of it, but some of it [00:20:00] percolates up into consciousness and we can we act on those and might get that sense that somebody’s looking at us or other things that. People attribute to intuition, but it’s kind of the reverse of, it’s not an awesome, extraordinary situation, but to me, the everyday situation can be
Zach: extraordinary.
Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And then that kind of relates to, you know, the work I do with poker towels and kind of the, the reason I’m interested in doing this podcast in the first place was because I think there are these things that people in, in specific industries or specific pastimes know that’s.
Can be at this instinctual level. Yes. Uh, and, and, and those, and, and we have that. Yeah. Like you said, we have that experience all the time. Like, I actually, I actually write down those experiences in my life where I’m like, oh, that clearly, that clearly had something to do with me. Subconsciously sensing something and, and acting on it and, and making a decision.
It’s like I, yeah, that’s the, that’s the really fascinating stuff. Yes. And, and trying to figure out like, oh, how, how can I try to do that more consciously? [00:21:00] And you actually use those things that I’m. I’m noticing all the time. More consciously. Yeah.
Rob: Yes. And my only, the best answer, which I take from a tracking teacher that I studied from is just practicing the ordinance, just paying attention, consciously paying attention to, um, those, those primary senses.
So exploring vision and thinking about colors and darks and lights and, and hearing, just paying instead of. Um, just hearing, actively listening and paying attention to that and smelling. I mean, actually taking a second or a couple seconds every hour to inhale and pay attention to the odors you might get.
Those are just gonna hardwire those neural connections and facilitate that, um, transmission of information and, and basically, um, make those senses stronger so to speak, or more fluid, or happen more readily. One thing I [00:22:00] try to do is. Practice it, it, again, it’s tracking, but, um, is looking for when I go out to the mailbox is trying to figure out if mail was delivered or not.
We have a paved road, but there’s that dirt, gravel travel where the, the mail truck actually drives a few, a couple feet off the road just to put it in our mailbox and, and look at the ground and try to quiz myself. It’s like, can I see? If the mail was delivered or not, and if it rained the night before, the ground is soft and, and that, um, what we call the baseline, the natural conditions of the ground might have been basically reset or cleaned by that rain.
So that would be easy. But if it’s a week of dry, similar weather day to day, um, then it’s gonna be more difficult to tell. So I’ll, I’ll try that as a quiz to see if, uh, if mail’s been delivered or not. Pretty successful over 90% of the time, but not a hundred percent.
Zach: Yeah, good practice for sure, it sounds like.
Yeah. So [00:23:00] are you able to give an example where you had a kind of unconscious sixth sense in a tracking situation?
Rob: So, um, on a, uh, there are actually two searches I can tell you about where, where in hindsight this played a role. And, and, um, and that’s kind of the key thing is it’s not like a. Turned on and said, okay, I’m gonna use intuition now.
It just, um, looking back on events, it, it seemed to have played a significant part. And, um, the first search was for a gentleman that had dementia, early stages of dementia, but he would go for a walk on a regular, if not daily basis, and interviewing his wife who reported him missing. Uh, she indicated that he goes down this trail and accesses.
Just a large portion of woods that we were already sending teams into to search. And, and so I received my task as a walker with a canine team, um, to go search a particular area. And on the way down the trail, I. Even though this is, I was only in the first or [00:24:00] second year of searching, and this is probably my second, third search only.
Um, it occurred to me everybody had been walking down this trail, so he obviously wasn’t on the trail. And, and so we were to go search a particular area, but in route to there, uh. Felt a need to step off the trail and kind of put eyes where others hadn’t looked. And um, as soon as I took a step off the trail, two more steps would’ve been on him.
Uh, he was lying down, basically bidding distance from the trail and, and he blended in, well, he had brown pants on and, um. Kind of a, uh, subdued colored shirt, and he was lying face down. And so I notified the team leader who, who started to work medical stuff while I communicated with command that, that we had found them.
But it was just the moment that that hit at, at a particular point to, to step off the trail and be looking for him. And sure enough, there he was. Mm-hmm. Um, so that’s a short one, but a, a more involved example was. For a [00:25:00] search for an individual that ran trails at a, a park here in Virginia called First Landing State Park.
And, um, this gentleman had parked his car at the park, uh, days before the search. That particular day I’m speaking of was a Saturday and he had parked his car there Wednesday and, and Rangers found this car there Thursday and didn’t think a whole lot of it until they came back on Friday and they’re not allowed to park there overnight.
And they, uh, began a search for him on Friday. Came out missing. So they called in volunteer resources and it, it was an officer in, um, in an arm in the armed forces. And so it got a lot of attention in the news and eventually, um, a couple ladies came forward and they said, I, I think we saw this guy. I. We encountered him on, uh, one of the trails in first landing state park.
And we went out there, it was actually only two of us, myself and another tracker, and Theresa and the two of us went out with those two ladies and they [00:26:00] said, we saw the guy here. And at that location, the trail split and, and they had some uncomfortable interaction with ’em, like he didn’t respond to their salutation, so they went one way on the trail and.
They saw him going the other way, but that trail made a, a big one mile loop. And on their way back, they never saw him again. They had that one encounter and that was it. So Therese and I thanked them. We looked at their tread pattern and, and, um, expressed our appreciation for them helping out with the search effort and excused them, let them go on their way.
And so we started looking on the ground, which was a nice area that we call a track trap, which, um, is any area like snow or soil that if somebody steps on it, it’ll take. Could track pattern and we couldn’t find their tracks, much less ones that, that we thought were his, because after, uh, that Wednesday night, it had rained like cats and dogs, I mean, it poured buckets and, and just washed everything out.
We could see tracks from search. Efforts the day [00:27:00] before on Friday, but nothing we could identify as his. So I just, I thought we’d just split up off of the trail. Obviously he wasn’t on the trail. Once again, if he was on the trail, he’d been found. But, um, I was standing there with Theresa and, and said, all right, let’s.
Let’s just get a little bit off of the trail at the edge of what people could see if they were walking on the trail and kind of walk that edge and start looking for his tracks. Any indication of somebody going off the trail. Um, because there, there’s plenty of sign and washed out tracks on the trail, but one to look for somebody cutting off the trail, which could happen for somebody walking a dog or having to go pee or something, but.
Um, we’re gonna narrow it down a little bit, and as I’m standing there with her, she’s on my left side and I kind of have a, an inkling to go to the left. But I ask her, um, after, give that plan, she says, okay, that sounds cool. And so I look at her and say, which way do you want to go? And she says, I don’t care, Rob.
You’re the team leader. You tell me. And I [00:28:00] still had that pull to the left. But, um, she was standing there. I was like, okay, you go to the left and I’ll go to the right. And we’ll just walk parallel to the trail and look for any side of humans going off the trail. And she started to walk off towards the left and I started to follow her.
I mean, I’m now just being pulled towards that direction and I take a few steps and see that she’s going out there. I know she’s an experienced searcher, like she’s got it. She can cover it. I’m gonna go over to my side, like we developed a plan and, and go over there. And so I go back towards the pass.
Across the path. And before I get to the distance that I’m gonna start walking at, she says, Rob, stop. I got him. And he was right over a sand dune just on the other side of it, said just outta sight of that trail. And to this day, I can’t tell you that I saw anything hurt, anything, smell anything. He was deceased.
He, he, um, as investigations bore out, he, uh, committed suicide actually, and mm-hmm. All [00:29:00] indications were he did that the day that he went out and on that Wednesday. And so it is possible that some odor or something came over and, and kind of in, but when I didn’t even sense any wind direction and, and even standing near, uh, his remains, I couldn’t really smell anything.
But, but that just strikes me again, in hindsight as, hey, something pulled me in that direction out. A strong sense to go that way. And, and sure enough, there he was.
Zach: Is it possible to do urban or suburban or city tracking and or do, do some people specialize in that or is that a pretty, I’d imagine that’s a pretty tough thing and, and you probably just use other.
Tools, like, you know, yes. Uh, spotting people or, or people spotting them or whatever.
Rob: So tracking, visual tracking itself, itself is a specialty. And, and that’s gonna incorporate, uh, basically all environments. So it’s, it’s difficult to get anybody to specialize in any aspect of that. [00:30:00] It. Except for those that live in a particular environment.
And so any tool in my mind, and again, philosophy and what we teach in classes, any tool, every tool has its capabilities and its limitations. So there are times where that. Tool is gonna work and there are times where it’s not gonna work. In difficult conditions, a tool will work less so in hard on hard surfaces.
Tracking is gonna work less frequently. Um, it’s still something to pay attention to, to look for and, and use when possible, because there might be a concrete surface. That has a little thin layer of dust on it that can yield tracks and sign. Um, there can be gum on a sidewalk that can yield a partial impression.
That gives a, a unique tread pattern to it. So there, there are possibilities, um, for using that. And one of the few times I’ve actually been able to track. To a missing person [00:31:00] was in an urban environment. It was, there was an apartment complex and a lady had dementia and she wandered off from this apartment complex.
And somebody in a, a third story, um, apartment as you just mentioned, pointed out, Hey, I think I saw her walking in here in between these two buildings yesterday. And so we went to that location in between the buildings and basically there was a small, like a one acre or less patch of woods behind this apartment complex.
And then, um, further beyond that was this big chain link fence and a, and a divided highway beyond that. But in, within that one acre area, um, I picked up on a, a line of disturbance. So it was just sign leaves were scuffed up and looked a little bit out of place. And. Followed that and ended up at a, a canine team, and they said, yeah, we had, we had come along this way last night when we were, when we first responded to this [00:32:00] report.
So I eliminate that one. I go back to that starting point. I pick up another set of disturbances that was the next likely line or next obvious line, and followed that about 50 yards and ended up finding the lady, um, leaning up against the tree. Those were conditions where that worked. And there, there are plenty more stories of, hey, look around for tracks or sign but can’t find any.
And, and so we put that tool on the tool belt and and use other tools to find that person.
Zach: So when it comes to tracking the people who don’t want to be found, I’d imagine that’s pretty hard. And I imagine you don’t want to give. You know, that much tricks of the trade away, but are you willing to talk a little bit about how difficult that is to track people who don’t wanna be found?
Rob: Yeah. Kind of in that gray area there. Um, there are those people that I mentioned that are vast majority of, um, people that aren’t trying to be found, aren’t. Aren’t we lost? And, and [00:33:00] trying to, to rescue themselves basically. So, uh, a lot of those people with dementia and, and others might actually be in evasive, so they might actually Oh, right.
Try to get away from searching. Or children that think they’re in trouble or, or other things. So, um, it’s really, I guess I was thinking
Zach: more about, uh, yeah, I was thinking more about like criminally evasive is what I meant to.
Rob: Um, volunteer search and rescue resources don’t get involved in many criminal cases.
They’re, we have to approach every search as if it’s a crime scene, so that if we later find out there was foul play, then um, we’ve preserved evidence accordingly and, and. Um, that’s part of our teaching. But as far as, um, people that don’t want to be found, again, the, the earth doesn’t care who steps on it, whether it’s, um, a five-year-old child or a 80-year-old grandparent or somebody that doesn’t want to be found.
If they step on the ground, they’re [00:34:00] gonna disturb that ground. Anytime somebody goes from point A to point B, they have to leave two things behind. They have to leave scent and they have to touch the ground. Nobody levitates and nobody’s an exception to that rule. So any resource that is trained to find either or both of those clues, the scent, which is typically the canine resources and the visual clues, which is us, then those are gonna be the.
Best resources that can follow that trail from that point last seen to the person, whether they want to be found or not. So there, there are techniques that we use that overlap regardless of whether the person wants to be found or they’re evasive and, and yeah, it gets more difficult, but, uh, it can still be done for sure.
And yeah, like you said, I, I do hesitate to talk a lot about. How things are done looking for evasive persons. ’cause we just have to call in the question why, why do people [00:35:00] wanna know about that? And it’s exciting. I understand. I get that. Um, but also to, to help those that are, uh, in the good, I gotta pause it right there.
Zach: Yeah. Like a magician does wanna, that they don’t, they don’t wanna violate the, um, you know. The guild Uhto. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, that made me wonder, when you talk about dogs, uh, I mean, is it fair to say that dogs are pretty much always involved in these kind of searches?
Rob: Um, I wouldn’t say always. Uh, there’s no resource that’s involved in everything, but that’s the most common resource to go to.
They’re, their canines are trained in a variety of, of, um, specialties, whether it’s. Um, looking for a particular object or explosive detection or drug detection or people detection. Um, you can, you can train a variety of breeds of dogs to look for
Zach: a variety of things. Mm-hmm. Uh, well maybe let, let’s go on to, uh, you know, when many people think of sign [00:36:00] cutting, a big application of that is, uh, is border patrol, uh, tracking people across the borders illegally?
Is that, is that something you’ve. Worked on yourself or, or is that mainly something you do for training or?
Rob: Yeah. Uh, I am in Virginia, so I, I don’t have access to the borders either Canadian or Mexican. Um, so I, I don’t work, that’s just not something I do. But I do know that border patrol agents are heavily practiced in, in tracking and, and, um, that is one of the biggest tools on their tool belt.
Zach: Do you do training of, you know, government, uh, or. Law enforcement for, for those purposes, for, for tracking? Uh, yes I do. And your book is used widely and. In the law enforcement world. Right? Is that fair to say?
Rob: Um, uh, since I’m not specifically myself, I’m not a law enforcement officer, and, and so I’m not tied into the law enforcement world a lot.
I know, um, there are a number of people that, that applaud the [00:37:00] book and, and use it, and I’m just, I’m not sure how widely it is. Uh uh, but so yeah, I’ve taught a number of agencies and in Virginia, so I wear a couple hats as an instructor. I started out. Um, teaching and continue to teach the present day for the Department of Emergency Management.
Um, and then, uh, started teaching for them in 1998 and continue to teach as a lead tracking instructor for Search and Rescue in Virginia. I. And I wrote my book for, as a textbook for that class. Uh, and then a few years after starting that job, I, I started my own school, um, to venture out beyond Virginia and have taught around the world, um, a number of search and rescue and law enforcement and other government agencies in, uh, in tracking.
Zach: Well, great. This has been great. Is there any. Other than you wanna mention that you were, you were hoping to, to fit in that we haven’t touched on?
Rob: Uh, one of the good tracks we had just, [00:38:00] uh, another success that we had and there was, um, multidisciplinary in that, um, it was a, a search for a person that was evasive, that didn’t wanna be found, that ran.
He was, he was, um, high on who knows what drugs and, and when, um, he had injured himself. And when a. A friend said, Hey, let me take you to hospital. He is like, no, the police are after me. They’ll be at the hospital. He just, he takes off into the woods. And so, um, we get called in to assist with the search for this person by the sheriff’s office and, and working with the sheriff’s office and investigators.
We put several teams out, which included our search and rescue resources and fire department resources, uh, and the deputies, investigators themselves and. One of, uh, while at the, um, this individual was staying at a, a friend’s house and, um, I went to that house to look around for tracks to a, um, basically a due inventory [00:39:00] elimination, which is inventory is looking at all the tracks that I can find in the area.
And elimination is eliminating the known, so eliminating those that were made by the people that live in the house. I can look at their shoes and eliminate those tread patterns. Look at responding deputies, tread patterns. And, and get rid of all those. And by age and process of deduction, I find a track, uh, that I think was made by the person we’re looking for.
And just a few minutes later, um, a team member of mine calls in that, Hey, about a hundred yards away, they’ve found the other tracks. And I go over. To where they’re looking and they’re in grass and wet and there’s no tread detail, but there’s a trail of sign of basically bent over vegetation going down into the woods.
So I follow that down and end up finding the guy’s cell phone and um, call the investigators over and. Um, while they’re coming over to collect that. I also find the guy’s watch, [00:40:00] and another one of my team members finds a shoe that belongs to ’em, which is kind of good news, bad news because hey, we got the shoe and I can confirm.
Sure enough, that was consistent with the tread pad, with the track pattern that I had found. But now he means he is not wearing that shoe, at least. Um, and maybe not both. Either one of them. And coincidentally, about that time also a team that was further beyond this find some barefoot tracks. So I go down and measure those tracks, and those are consistent with everything we’ve been finding.
So we basically point resources in that direction. And each team, we had four teams out, and each team is coming up with, uh, a barefoot track and or an article of clothing. And so, um, we send teams further on down. So basically we’re leapfrogging, we’re, I’m following these tracks and sending teams ahead and teams find additional barefoot tracks.
And all of a sudden this guy totally changes direction. Instead of going down this creek bed, he [00:41:00] turns up a ridge into rending and thick vegetation and, um, mountain Laurel and all that good stuff. And, and it’s. Hours and hours later or two or three o’clock in the morning, we’re down on hands and knees looking at leaves that are just bent and it’s just sign at this point.
And it could be deer, it could be bear. Um, and this guy is going off the side ridge and coming back up on the ridge and, and we continue going up on the ridge and. Um, about four o’clock in the morning to put my light up ahead of me and see this log without any bark on it. And I realized that’s actually the guy’s leg.
He’s down to his underwear and, and just cold as all can be. But, um, but we got him and, uh. And that’s the success of one of several successes of tracking, which, which makes it all worthwhile. All that frustration and, and, um, difficulty and the training and the practice and, um, that’s, that’s what
Zach: it’s all about.[00:42:00]
I imagine. It must be, uh, it must be exciting. Uh, yeah, that’s, it must, it must keep you very engaged in, in the work, I’d imagine. Yeah. Yes, it does. It’s very rewarding. A small edit here. I’m cutting ahead to where Rob talks about how he initially got interested in tracking
Rob: in addition to human tracking. So back in 1995, I took my first tracking class that got me hooked on tracking period, and that was through search and Rescue.
And there is also an introduction to animal tracking in that, uh, which in, uh. The importance of knowing your environment, knowing the local, as you mentioned before, the floor and fauna. Um, so especially the fauna in the area and what kind of sign they can leave behind. Um, so I just got interested in tracking any animal, humans or four-legged or whatnot.
And, and, um, eventually got, uh. Exposed to or introduced to a program called Cyber Tracker Conservation, um, which is actually a program that assesses people’s knowledge and skills and animal tracking and, and, [00:43:00] um, those skills basically have helped me tremendously in the search and rescue tracking and the human tracking to know what animal tracks and sign look like, especially the sign, I mean, the tracks.
And if a deer track is in the mud, it’s obviously not human. But when a deer walks through that mountain laurel that rend and leaves, they can leave disturbances fairly similar to what humans leave behind. And, and there’ve been more than one occasion that trailing a human have had to eliminate what people come up and say, Hey, I’ve got a barefoot track here.
And no, they’re. Their toes in a pad, but that’s actually a black bear, not a human barefoot. So distinguishing those kinds of things in subtle, uh, or difficult conditions is very helpful also. Uh, but that’s another program. The Cyber Tracker Conservation Program is, is, uh, an amazing worldwide, uh, entity.
Zach: That was Rob Speeden and his website [email protected]. And again, he’s the author of a book called [00:44:00] Foundations for Awareness Sign Cutting and Tracking. This has been the People Who Read People Podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about the [email protected]. If you like the podcast, please give me a rating or review on iTunes or on whatever platform you’d listen on or share an episode you like on social media.
That’s also very much appreciated. I make no money on this podcast and spend a good amount of time on it. So many forms of appreciation are appreciated by me. If you happen to play poker or know people who do, you might enjoy checking out my work on poker behavior, also known as poker Tells. You can find [email protected].
Thanks for listening.