Tulsa County Sheriff's deputies learn the art of 'tracking'

Members of the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office spent all day in a heavily wooded area of Sequoyah County Friday. But they weren't tracking a dangerous fugitive; they were learning "how" to track

Friday, April 2nd 2004, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Members of the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office spent all day in a heavily wooded area of Sequoyah County Friday. But they weren't tracking a dangerous fugitive; they were learning "how" to track people.

News on 6 reporter Steve Berg follows the story to Dwight Mission Camp in southeast Oklahoma.

"So this is our initial footprint from here." Welcome to Tracking 101. "Everybody has the ability to see that physical evidence, recognize it, and do something purposeful with it." Joel Hardin is one of the world's best-known tracking experts, who spent much of his career on the US Border Patrol.

He teaches law-enforcement, search-and-rescue, even military personnel who are now in Afghanistan, how to spot a bent twig here, an area of compressed grass there.

Tulsa County Sheriff's Deputy Judy Wood says they had just begun taking the tracking courses before the recent and frustrating search for accused killer Scott Eizember. She's says it can be an invaluable tool in future searches. "You can see where his heel went; you can see the damage to the grass here, where the grass is compressed."

Tracking has been around as long as there have been people to track, but Hardin says techniques were mostly handed down by word of mouth. The first formal school didn't come about until 1969. And organized manuals even more recently. It's taken awhile to catch on. And it takes a long time to learn.

"The real secret to tracking is training your conscious mind to be aware of what your eye already sees." One of the big mistakes is actually having too many searchers and contaminating the trail.

Still even Hardin says he's been fooled before. "Sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you're in the wrong place, sometimes you don't see what you should, or you don't understand what you're seeing." But many times, they do.