There’s a video that’s currently making the rounds on social media. It shows two guys skiing in the Mt. Baker backcountry. One of them has a GoPro and we see him dropping into deep powder in the trees just behind a snowboarder, who quickly slides out of sight.
The skier, professional photographer Francis Zuber, stops in a small clearing just long enough to brush off his lens. That’s when he spots the boarder — upside down in a tree well. After a few harrowing minutes — that feel much longer even just watching the video — Zuber manages to dig down deep enough to reach the rider’s face which had been fully immersed in the snow. Thanks to Zuber’s quick actions, the snowboarder lives to ride another day.
Not all of those who adventure outdoors are so lucky. Julia McCarrier Edwards lost her husband Mike in a whitewater accident six months ago. For Julia, being able to see her husband’s body after the accident has been an essential part of her grieving process.
A friend put me in touch with Julia, who for 12 seasons has been a ski patroller at Canyons at Park City Mountain and an A-level dog handler with Wasatch Backcountry Rescue. She’s also one of the rescue program’s most passionate advocates. “Having been on both sides — as a rescuer and as a loved one of a victim — I have a deep appreciation for the need to make all available efforts to recover people.”
This was not the story I had in mind when I decided to write about avalanche search-and-rescue dogs. I’d seen the cute pups frolicking in the snow at Park City Mountain. Running between a patroller’s legs as he skied along a cat track. Perched high on the chairlift above Home Run. And calmly standing amidst dozens of partiers at The Cabin during last weekend’s avalanche search-and-rescue (SAR) dog fundraiser.
When I thought about the dogs and their handlers, I pictured them pawing through deep snow much like Zuber did and finding the relieved face of a buried rider. I did not imagine, as Julia put it, “cute dogs finding dead people.”
Of course, there are a few stories of miraculous SAR dog “live rescues.” Julia told me about a patroller named Roberta Huber and her search dog Bridget. The team helped find a woman who’d been lost in a massive avalanche in 1982. The avalanche had destroyed a lodge, and days after the initial storm, Bridget found a human scent in the debris. Using the dog’s clues, they found a survivor who’d been trapped in a hallway.
“Rescuers have a lot of tools to find people buried in an avalanche,” Julia says, “But if you don’t have a transceiver, an avy dog is the best tool to find you.”
The rarity of finding survivors does not deter Julia or her fellow avalanche dog handlers who train for months and even years, often spending hours in a snow cave training the dogs to find them. Nor does it deter the dozens of patrollers who don’t have a dog, but still give up powder laps to help set training drills and shovel out dog holes.
Park City Mountain has long supported the effort and joined Wasatch Backcountry Rescue around the early 2000s. The organization’s so-called “Dog Father,” Paul Santana, has been leading the program since the beginning, along with an evolving roster of handlers and patrollers.
While humans run the program, it’s often the dogs who deliver the training.
“After a few years of working as support for dog teams, I got to be a second handler for an already-certified dog, named Tucker,” Julia says. “Tucker really was the one who trained me how to work with a search dog. He knew what the game was and I just had to figure out my piece.”
Each backcountry rescue program has its own criteria for dog selection. Julia says the Park City program relies on Labrador retrievers mostly because of their high hunt- and prey-drive. Julia says her own working lab, Piper, would be “a monster of a house pet; she’s just too busy!”
Dogs require one to two years of training to become fully certified avalanche dogs. “Essentially, we train our dogs to play hide-and-seek,” Julia says. “When they find the person, it’s a big party, with toys, food and a lot of praise.” All of the drills are designed to be fun for the dogs, despite the exhausting challenges that are often involved in an actual search.
Not only are the dogs relentless workers, but they’re also intelligent in vastly different ways than we humans are, “seeing” the world through their noses. “It’s incredible to watch a dog fly across a slope and start digging on snow that looks no different than the rest of the snow, but all of a sudden, one of our trainers is coming out of a snow cave.”
Having a dog as a pet is one thing, but having one as your work partner is something special. “You rely on each other, you have to trust each other, you have to understand each other. That extra layer of purpose changes the connection in a deeply meaningful way.”
In the end, “being able to bring an accident victim back to their family is a final act of service that we as professionals are able to perform,” Julia says. And thanks to the avalanche dogs, it is also a selfless act of love.