B you live in a difficult area, you will have to do some driving to hook up with any working folks. When we lived in Nevada it wasn't unusual to drive 10-20-30 hours each way to go digging, no joke. The running dogs were a different thing, we could drive 20 minutes and run out of dogs before we ran out of things to run.
a dog can weigh 14 pounds when it is sitting in a kennel doing nothing other than "looking" good, and weigh 20+ pounds when it is in good substantial working condition. So don't get hung up on a dogs size, it is its drive and desire to get to its quarry, at any cost, tha