Training Log Archive: Fanatic

Thanks to Bruce Shenker, who couldn't make it to this event, I attended a Wildlife Field Tracking Intensive led by Alcott Smith at the Grafton Forest in New York.

We started hiking around 9 a.m. and finished at 3 p.m. There were about ten participants, which in retrospect, was a bit too many, imo. Very hard to get that many people close enough to see the small tracks while listening to the speaker explain what we were seeing.

However, Alcott Smith was incredible: a very smart man that knows his animals and plants, including the Latin names of everything out there. A graduate of Cornell, where his completed his veterinary work, Alcott is 80 years old and very fit. A tall, strapping man who never ate anything during the hike, only drinking water from time to time. And what a pleasant surprise to hear that he was an ultraunner and avid trailrunner, having done a couple of 100-mile races and numerous runs in the Adirondacks and the Whites. He gave up his practice many years ago, but recently went back to operating on animals for a couple of days a week--because he missed the challenge.

Not really fair to list this as 6 hours of hiking, since we spent so much time just standing around looking at tracks, but it's a nice record of the event, so I won't adjust it.