Professional Problem Solver vBy Jeremy Hoeck Dan Altman calls himself a “professional problem solver.” In his line of work, that’s rather accurate, he’d tell you. “You have to take little steps to solve a problem,” he says. As a wildlife conservation officer with South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks (GF&P), Altman — who works in the Yankton area and state’s southeast corridor — has to be ready on a moment’s notice to respond to and help with a variety of issues. Sure, there are the usual wildlife, fishing and boating enforcement duties, but Altman also encounters things like this: * A prairie dog trapped in someone’s basement furnace, or * Two deer with their antlers locked together, or * A pickup stuck in a ditch “It’s one problem after the next,” says Altman, who began his career with GF&P in 2009 and has been recognized many times for his performance. What he’s learned over the years is that a conservation officer has to be ready for literally anything each day, he adds. “You can’t solve every problem,” Altman says. “What you want to do is know what to do and realize what you can do to handle each situation. “You just never know what strange things will come up every single day.” In an effort to shed light on what Altman and his fellow GF&P officers encounter on an average day, Altman agreed to allow the Press & Dakotan to spend three hours with him on a Saturday afternoon in mid-December. What follows is an account of that time with Altman as he drove around the area. — — —12 p.m. Altman is in his office at the Lewis & Clark Recreation Area visitor center — a rare sight, he jokes. “I’m not normally in here,” he says, as he works on his laptop. “I do a lot of my work out of my truck. The two main things Altman carries with him from his office on an average day is his laptop and a manila folder with printouts of current investigations. Although it’s a Saturday, Altman says he envisions seeing plenty of duck hunters out in the fields — deer hunters would’ve been out earlier in the day, he adds. — — — —12:15 p.m. “It’s kind of up to us when we want to work,” Altman says, as he heads west on Highway 52. “That’s why it helps to hire people who are driven, because this is such a wide open schedule.” It has to be that way, he says, because there aren’t nearly enough 16vHISVOICEvJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 officers across the state. “The easiest way to describe it is ‘connect the dots,’” Altman says. The workload varies with the time of the year, as well, he points out. For example, summers in the Yankton area are understandably busier with the number of visitors along the river, Altman says. His district includes 94 miles of the Missouri River, he adds. Although he’s not nearly as busy during the winter months, Altman says the change in seasons means more interviews and more investigations. Either way, he enjoys what he does. “It’s always a challenge,” Altman says, as he turns west onto Highway 50 and then turns north onto 430th Ave. “It doesn’t get stale. It’s nice doing this here, because we have the change in seasons. If it was summer-like all year, that’d get rather old.” Prior to moving to Yankton in 2013, Altman served as a conservation officer out in Presho, an area he says was vastly different from Yankton. How so? “Out there, it was wide open prairie without a river so close like we have here,” he says. “It was crazy busy in the fall and winter with hunters, and out here, it’s the opposite.” — — — —12:33 p.m. Five months north and west of Highway 50, Altman slows down his truck near a patch of land that is leased by GF&P for public hunting — he’s checking to see if anyone is out this morning. “We have lots of these areas in the county,” Altman says, as he looks across the field. Seeing nobody, Altman turns around and heads back out on 304th Street. That’s part of his job, he adds, to make regular checks on those state-run areas. — — — —12:38 p.m. It doesn’t take Altman long to reach another area, this one about three miles from Tabor. This patch of land — a Production Area — offers hunting and fishing (with a pond that is stocked). “Each area is unique,” Altman says. Part of duties also includes serving as a trainer for new conservation officers, he says, and so when he takes trainees through these areas, Altman says he asks them questions: ‘What are you seeing?’, for example. One thing he says, he adds, is that someone had clearly been out testing the ice on the small pond — a series of dark circles gives it away. It’s still rather early in the season to be ice fishing, according to Altman. Had someone been out there, he would have checked — “The first thing I would’ve asked would be, ‘How thick is the ice?’” — — — —12:45 p.m. On the topic of how different the Yankton area is from the Presho