WOOF (Wilderness Finders, Inc.) SAR Dog Unit, serving the entire Pacific Southwest region, will also be presenting the National SAR Dogs School at Mammoth Mountain, March 16-19. The unit is a non-profit group of volunteer handlers, some of whom are regular skiers in the Tahoe region. In the first nine months of 1977 they worked 19 search missions, and over 50 in the past three years. This winter will again bring missions to help skiers who may be lost, injured or involved in a snow avalanche.
Like the famous avalanche dog teams of the Swiss Alps, WOOF Shepherds are trained from puppyhood in three categories of search work; wildnerness, avalanche, and disaster searching. Fully obedience trained, the dogs nonchalantly ride helicopters and snow cats, rappel from aerial lifts and always work off-lead. Many are police service trained as well and work with local law enforcement agencies in their spare time. The SAR dogs both air scent and track but primarily sniff above the snow deposition on avalanche searches since skiers caught in the snowy torrents leave no tracks to their final location.
Avalanche dogs are the most effective, fastest means currently available for finding people buried in snow. Human scent diffuses upward through the snow pack and is readily detected by the dog working above. Even skiers using Skadis, Pieps, or other radio transceiver devices are better off when an avalanche trained dog comes looking for them; he can easily hear the audio frequency being transmitted beneath the surface. SAR dogs are taught to dig energetically, working to free trapped skiers, in addition to searching out multiple victims.
Avalanche training is no sport for the novice handler. Serious precautions (two-way radios, lookouts, shovelers) are taken when carrying out avalanche simulations because the dog must learn to rapidly and accurately find live human subjects. The initial romanticism associated with avalanche dogs wears thin under the true perspective of hard, cold work in a wet blizzard. The intelligent response and cooperation of ski area personnel with the WOOF unit has been outstanding. Obviously hard work and cold are nothing new to the patrols.
Particularly on sweep or final hill clearance operations, SAR dogs are valuable for noticing off-the-piste sprained ankles, alerting to trails of hot-doggers who roar off the back side of the mountain at four o’clock, finding white-out victims who wander confusedly down the wrong drainage pursued by hypothermia. A well-trained SAR Shepherd can leap all day through deep powder, not giving up in exhaustion before his skiing handler is ready to quit.
Ski areas that would like to know WOOF’s availability for them or want to see the SAR dogs demonstrated in action for them should contact the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department (916) 544-3464, which co-ordinates search callouts for the unit as a free community service. In many cases, military or private air transport can be arranged for emergencies when the dogs are needed immediately. The avalanche victim has little time.
For those interested in more information, Search and Rescue Dog Training, the only book fully describing avalanche dogs (in addition to wilderness and disaster search) is available from the The Boxwood Press, 183 Ocean View Blvd., Pacific Grove, CA 93950, (408) 375-9110.
