I'm back. I've been looking into the Dametz case trying to make some progress on that one, with the hopes that my fresh eyes could see some details I had missed previously. So I decided to do the same with Kevin's case; the month of September brings back that "nostalgia," so I occasionally come back and read through this board. Your messages since we found him are very kind, we really do appreciate them. But low and behold, some details now stand out to me that I think we previously took for granted.
The main thing is where the SAR dogs picked up Kevin's scent: remember that one scent trail led searchers up Limbaugh Canyon, over to Mt. Herman road, then down the road into the Monument Preserve before ending. The other big one led us from the PLS up to Balanced Rock road, then up the road for some distance before turning down into a gully. These two paths led in opposite directions to different parts of the forest, plus on each path, there were other "hits" nearby. Remember, the Limbaugh Canyon path was so convincing that almost all of our searching was directed in the Mt Herman-Limbaugh Canyon area. After finding Kevin along the Balanced Rock path, in a totally different part of the forest, I then wrote off the Limbaugh Canyon scent trail as a false positive; the dogs were just wrong, or that maybe they were following an old scent trail left by Kevin from previous times he hiked or ran that particular route. However, looking back on it, he hadn't been in town for months prior to his disappearance, and given the terrain of this scent trail, there would be no way it lingered around for months with all of the wind, rain and snow the area receives. In other words, the dogs legitimately believed they were following a path Kevin took on 2 September 2018.
I understand dogs being unable to detect scents that are there, but do they really give false positives? Let alone multiple false positives in the same vicinity? Looking back on it, this detail bothers me.