Dear RMC NAVHDA Members,

I hope this finds you all doing well amidst the crazy times right now. 

I’m sure you all are anxious to get back to training days and the camaraderie of your fellow versatile dog owners. I hope that you all have been working with your dogs and puppies as much as the current situation allows. We are still planning on having the training day at Cobb lake on Saturday, August 8th. We are looking to add another Saturday training day at Cobb lake in July as well. As soon as we have our permit we will post the date and also information on how the training days will look. We are having to make some adjustments due to COVID-19 regulations so these trainings will look different than we had originally planned back in February. Stay tuned and we will share more information as soon as we secure our dates at Cobb.

We are also going to start the Friday evening trainings at Surefire Kennels back up starting this coming Friday, June 12th. These trainings will look a little different as well. Each of these trainings will be a “mini clinic” covering a specific topic. Sara and myself will work with attendee’s dogs through training scenarios showing how we train through different situations and lay our foundation. They will not be NA or UT specific nights anymore. If you are interested in the topic of the week, please come join us. Signups for these will be on the website and will be active the week of the training. The information for all of these training nights will be on the website. Feel free to email Sara Heesacker if you have any questions regarding training days/nights.

I would also like to update you all on our testing situation the rest of this year. We are still planning on a 3 day test August 21,22, and 23. Unfortunately due to difficulty securing additional judges, we won’t be adding any more test days this year. If you have a puppy that needs to be tested this year, and you are not currently in our August test, I highly encourage you to read Dave Trahan’s President’s Message in the June issue of the Versatile Hunting Dog Magazine with the updated NA testing policy. I also highly encourage you to look at the testing calendar toward the back of the magazine and look at entering your puppy in another chapter’s test. There have been a lot of test days added this fall in surrounding chapters but they will fill up fast, so don’t wait to send in your entries for other tests.
Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions.

Thank you and I look forward to seeing you all in the field very soon!

Jake Heesacker
RMC NAVHDA President
Dogs with Altitude

Wow! What a weekend! I want to extend a huge thank you to all of the volunteers that came out in force to make this a very successful test! Special thanks to our Director of Testing Allen Kidd for organizing a great test and to Sheryl Dierenfield and Erin Normile for making sure we were well fed all three days! The judges were very impressed with how efficient our test ran and even with a few weather delays we finished early all three days. As always, our volunteers were on the mark and we performed phenomenally! Without our volunteers this wouldn’t be possible! THANK YOU!

I would like to thank our judges Rick Holt, Geof Ferrer, Craig McLaughlin, and our apprentice David Hahn for coming out and evaluating our dogs. It was a very fun weekend and truly a pleasure working with all of you! Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to come visit Colorado and see some good dogs work this weekend!

I would also like to thank our handlers. YOU are what makes NAVHDA a successful organization! Without our handlers coming out and getting their dogs evaluated this organization wouldn’t exist! Thank you again for putting yourselves and your dogs out there to be evaluated. It was extremely enjoyable watching great dog work all weekend!

Below are the scores for the weekend. Truly amazing results that show every handler’s hard work! Congratulations to all of the handlers and dogs this weekend, and special congratulations go to Tim Griffin with Delle and Terry Uhrich with Remi for their Utility Prize I perfomances on Sunday! We all know how hard you have been working to achieve this and we look forward to seeing you at the Invitational in Iowa next year!

May 2019 Test Results

Weekend Photo Highlight Reel

Friday Test Photos

Saturday Test Photos

Sunday Test Photos

Huge thanks to Mark Lance with River Light Images for taking photos all weekend! Very excited to see some great photos of the dogs and handlers that ran this weekend! If you are interested in ordering any prints, please contact Mark at [email protected] and he can help you with those orders. All proceeds from Test Photo sales are donated back to the chapter.

Thank you all again for your hard work and dedication to RMC NAVHDA! Without you, none of this is possible! Looking forward to a great clinic in the end of June and our fall test in August! I know we will knock it out of the park again!

Jake Heesacker – RMC NAVHDA President

I hope everyone had a great hunting season and are looking forward to another successful year with RMC NAVHDA as we roll over into the 2019 training and testing season. 

We had a large turnout at the Annual Meeting with great conversation.  We elected 5 new faces to the board and retained 4 board members.  I am really excited to work with this team.  They have been dedicated to the chapter for many years and their insight and ideas to make this chapter successful for years to come is invaluable.  They have been working extremely hard since the meeting to get 2019 started off right and planning the opportunities available this year.  We had some great discussion regarding the Bylaws, Standing Rules and International motions.  It was wonderful to see the whole membership, newly elected board members and those in attendance alike, come together to discuss, compromise, and collectively work towards decisions we felt were best for the organization as a whole as we move forward.

Steve Roberts has done a phenomenal job of updating the website since the meeting.  Please check out the following links to view:

• 2019 Officers and Board of Directors and Elected Positions
• Minutes from the RMC 2019 Annual Meeting
• By-Laws updated January 2019
• 2019 Training Day Calendar
• 2019 Testing Dates
• 2019 Membership Form

I am very excited for 2019 as we are going to be implementing changes to event sign ups and the structure of training days.  We will no longer be using SignUp Genius as we are transitioning to integrating sign ups on the website.  Please be patient with us as we develop these new features.

I highly encourage all of our members, especially new members testing and training for the first time, to attend the February Indoor Training Day.  We are going to spell out how our training days are going to operate this year.  We have reached out to multiple highly successful NAVHDA Chapters across the country for some new ideas and group training styles to implement at RMC NAVHDA.  They are going to be fun and focus on the tools to be a better handler and develop a more finished gundog.  We also have some exciting things planned with two different clinics this year and we will announce them at the February training day as well. 

I look forward to seeing everyone in February and I am excited to serve as your president in 2019.

Jake Heesacker
RMC NAVHDA President
Dogs with Altitude