01:13:26 PMA man could learn much about survival and self-reliance from a few days in the desert. That’s what Mike thought about as he and Dagget trudged to the crest, watching for the sign. Given a choice between warm and cold-weather searches, Mike preferred winter. Tracking was simpler over a layer of fine, fresh snow. White powder made spotting marks easier, and a shallow dusting supported cutting the tracks over great distances. Also, during winter the lines dividing a day became less pronounced. With the right combination of moonlight and snow, searchers might continue from dusk through dawn, uninterrupted by the cycling of the sun. Mike relished rundowns like that. There were technical advantages to the cold, too. Thermal-imaging equipment, like FLIR, functioned best in searches where gaps between body heat and the temperature of whatever surrounded that body existed. The more pronounced the gap, the more striking the image appeared on the screen, and the easier identifying an out-of-place heat source became.And he believed in one more advantage of the winter without a doubt: low temperatures boosted his visual acuity.
