This puppy could someday save your life

WYOMING – Baggs loves to frolic in the snow, clamber up hills and play with ski patrollers. But the young golden retriever is on a serious journey.

If she succeeds in becoming an avalanche rescue dog, she could someday save lives.

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming is training Baggs and another puppy to join the pack of three seasoned dogs that play an essential role in saving people caught in avalanches. It is a tall order.

Patrollers devote years to shaping an avalanche dog. Right now, the pups are learning to ride the chairlift and ski slung across the shoulders of patrollers.

It all begins with finding a confident pup, like Baggs, that loves solving puzzles.

The puppies need to be motivated, tenacious and able to stay calm, especially around distractions like loud helicopters. They need to show intelligence and athleticism and, of course, have a strong nose.

And if all that is not enough, they need to be good family pets.

Patrollers at Jackson Hole, who own their avalanche dogs, say they tend to favour breeds like retrievers, known for their hunting prowess, and shepherds.

To select the right dog, “you stack the cards in your favour”, said Mr Bill Vore, a 45-year-old patroller and avalanche dog handler.

“The name of this game is trusting your dog to be able to tell you what is going on under the snow,” he said. “Not every dog is meant to do this.”

Baggs is Mr Rob Brennan’s first avalanche dog. He named her, perhaps archly, after Baggs Bowl at Jackson Hole. It is a type of terrain trap, a landscape that can elevate the risk of being caught in an avalanche, Mr Brennan, a Jackson Hole ski patroller, said in a recent interview at the resort.

“She’s super sweet. She likes people, but she also really likes cruising around and sniffing,” said Mr Brennan, 34, as Baggs cavorted in the snow nearby. “It’s all high reward, whether it is treats right now or just really excited, energetic play.”

The training starts as a game of hide-and-seek that gets progressively harder. For now, Mr Brennan stayed in sight. Eventually, he will move out of sight and add distractions like toys or treats.

Over time, Baggs will learn to find patrollers partly, then fully, covered by snow before moving on to more realistic scenarios involving multiple people and avalanche terrain.

This training, which could take about two years, will build up to a validation test. To become an official avalanche dog, she and Mr Brennan will need to find as many as three victims hidden in a 100m-by-100m site in just 20 minutes.

It’s all in the nose

Many ski resorts in the United States, including Jackson Hole, started developing avalanche dog programmes in the 1980s, a decade in which several notable avalanche accidents and deaths occurred in Colorado, Washington and California. Jackson Hole’s programme dates back to 1979.

So far this season, 22 people have died from avalanche accidents in the US, including nine skiers in the Sierra Nevada in February, according to the National Avalanche Center.

All of these incidents occurred in the West, and many of the accidents were in backcountry ski areas where the snow is not controlled. Only about half of victims survive an hour after burial, according to the National Park Service.

A dog’s nose, it turns out, is one of the most valuable tools for quickly finding someone buried in the snow.

Dogs can narrow down a search area significantly, indicating where patrollers should look for beacon signals and deploy probes and shovels.

Avalanche dogs also help rescuers make the difficult decision of when to call off a search, said Ms Heather Munn, a Jackson Hole patroller and avalanche dog handler who owns Levi, a seven-year-old border collie mix.

“Human technology cannot replace what they do,” said Mr John Reller, a former long-time ski patroller and a co-founder of Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment, an organisation that certifies or “validates” avalanche dogs. “There is no substitute for a well-trained dog and their sense of smell.”

Today, the majority of ski resorts in the Western US, where there is higher avalanche risk, have avalanche dog programmes, Mr Reller added.

Most days, Jackson Hole has at least two avalanche dogs on the mountain. They are stationed at different locations, including the summit of 3,185m Rendezvous Mountain, which features some of the resort’s most challenging terrain.

Avalanches do not frequently occur within the boundaries of the resort, but the dogs can also respond to incidents in out-of-bounds areas nearby, as well as in the backcountry.

Although the dogs are not deployed often, when they do, they are “worth their weight in gold”, Mr Vore said.

In January 2019, Mr Corey Borg-Massanari, 22, was swept away by an avalanche in Taos, New Mexico. An avalanche dog from Taos Ski Valley found him alive. Although he succumbed to his injuries days later, his parents credit the dog for finding him, and they have funded seven avalanche dogs through an outdoor-safety foundation created in his name. Baggs is the latest one.

Mr Borg-Massanari’s mother, Ms Bobbie Gorron, said: “I think these dogs are phenomenal.” She added that the dogs and patrollers were “putting their lives on the line to help people”.

An elite rescuer

If everything goes well for Baggs, she could someday be as adept as Cache.

On a blustery Saturday in February, Cache, a six-year-old Dutch shepherd, was relaxing inside a cosy patrol station at the top of Rendezvous Mountain.

The station was a hub of activity, with a revolving door of patrollers coming and the steady soundtrack of radio calls about incidents requiring their help.

Her owner and handler, Mr Chris Brindisi, 55, has been a patroller at Jackson Hole for 27 years. They are the resort’s most experienced duo. Their colleagues raved about the pair’s close bond and Cache’s abilities, which they said placed her among the most elite avalanche dogs they have ever seen.

Outside, two patrollers were preparing a training exercise.

The whole “rescue” took less than a minute. Her reward? A spirited game of tug-of-war.

“It really takes the whole team to train the dog,” Mr Brindisi said, noting that bringing up a dog like Cache had taken considerable time and resources.

“In the end, it is about the people that are under the snow, right? That is why we do this.” NYTIMES