GCSO deploys drone to find missing horse
A still from a video taken by a Grant County Sheriff’s Office drone of a GCSO deputy leading a lost horse near the Bishop Recreation Area on Thursday afternoon. The horse had gone missing the previous day, according to the GCSO, and deputies were called to help find the animal.
COURTESY IMAGE/GCSO
QUINCY — It was something a posse of sheriff’s deputies might have done in the 1890s.
According to Grant County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Josh Sainsbury, GCSO deputies got a call early Thursday that a horse being ridden by a member of a visiting youth group had wandered off from the group’s camp and gone missing in the Bishop Recreation Area south of Quincy.
“They stopped in a canyon near Dusty Lake, tied their horses to some sagebrush, and this particular horse pulled the sagebrush up and wandered off,” Sainsbury said.
According to a GCSO posting, the horse was described as a Mustang, 6 years old, about 15 hands high, a sorrel wearing full tackle and “answers to the name Dally.” The youth group spent Wednesday in a futile search for the animal before calling the GCSO on Thursday with a missing horse report.
GCSO deployed a drone equipped with an infrared camera to aid in the search given the foggy and drizzly conditions south of Quincy, Sainsbury said. The animal was found Thursday afternoon, its saddle hanging loosely to one side, nibbling grass in a small meadow.
“We don’t do this a lot (for horses),” Sainsbury said of the search. “We do this a lot for humans.”
Sainsbury said the area where the horse wandered off was too isolated for the incident to have been a theft, and that the greatest risk the horse faced during its night of freedom was being chased off a cliff by a wild animal.
“In that area, there are not a lot of places to go,” he said.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.