Fifteen years
on the trail

I'm Gary Adler. I've been hiking dogs professionally since 2011, and it wasn't the plan.

I'm a musician. I'd been working in IT and wanted a day job that kept me outside and moving instead of watching an hourglass spin on a monitor. At the time I was staying with my cousins near the Presidio of San Francisco, walking their dog Harley on the trails by the golf course, and I kept crossing paths with the same crew of professional dog walkers. Musicians, photographers, actors. People a lot like me. I asked a lot of questions.

That's how I ended up at Dogwalks.com, one of San Francisco's original dog walking companies, where the owner Julia Frink took me under her wing. She taught me the habits I still run on fifteen years later. Dogs come out of the vehicle one at a time, called by name, instead of an avalanche of them piling out at once. I carry a leash for every dog on every hike. Nobody is ever in the street off leash. She also sent me through the Dogtec seminar, three days run by the former head of training at the SF Humane Society. I worked for Dogwalks.com for about a year before branching out on my own in 2012.

These days I run two hikes a day, Monday through Friday, and a fair amount of the job is the driving in between. I'm the UPS guy and the dispatcher at the same time, working out a route that gets everybody picked up, hiked, cleaned off, and home.

I use reward-based positive reinforcement training methods. If your dog needs more than I'm trained to give, I'll tell you so and point you to someone who does that for a living.

Groups get matched by age and by how the dogs carry themselves. I put real thought into who hikes with who.

When I'm not on the trail I am often playing my guitar and composing music. The dogs don't seem to mind.