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BY DAVE PHILIPPS
THE GAZETTE
(This is an edited version of a story that originally appeared in The Gazette on Feb. 12, 2006.)
No one wants to be buried alive in a frozen grave.
So I tried not to think of it that way as I squeezed into a snug spider hole four feet beneath the snow near the top of Breckenridge on a recent morning and watched one of the mountain’s ski patrollers, Kevin Kerr, wall up the entrance with blocks of snow.
"Doing this always reminds me of that Edgar Allan Poe story ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’" he said with a smile.
Not a very nice thing to say, considering the story is about a gentleman who lures one of his rivals into a corner of his basement, then bricks him up alive. Fortunately, the order of my day was not revenge.
Kerr owns the ski patrol’s only certified avalanche rescue dog, a 5-year-old petite black Labrador retriever named Rudy. He regularly buries volunteers for Rudy to find so that when a real avalanche swallows a skier, the dog knows the drill.
Learn some basic avalanche prevention and safety tips and FIND LOCAL SAFETY CLASSES.
Before Kerr shoved the last block of snow in place, he told me my scent would take about five minutes per foot to percolate through the snow. "So sit tight for 15 minutes or 20 minutes and we’ll come looking for you."
He handed me an avalanche beacon and radio.
"The cave probably won’t collapse, but you never know," Kerr said. "This way, if it does, we can find you."
I fumbled to cradle the radio in my mitten as he started shoveling snow over snow bricks to erase any clue of the hole.
The light dimmed to a pale green as if I were sinking to the bottom of a lake. I heard the creak of Kerr’s boots as he walked away. Then nothing.
I watched my breath swirl into the cave like a steamy ghost. This is how most avalanche victims die. The slide doesn’t kill them. It’s the waiting.
Tons of snow pin them like a wave of cement. They lie under the snow, listening until their warm breath builds an ice shield around their mouths and they suffocate.
People dug up within 15 minutes usually live. But rescuers have to find them first.
That’s where a dog like Rudy comes in.
Some travelers in avalanche terrain wear radio beacons that signal rescuers through the snow, but many don’t.
Without a beacon, rescuers have two options: use a narrow aluminum pole called a probe to find the body or count on a dog’s nose.
Probes usually take too long to strike a telltale soft lump that could be a body. The dog sometimes can find a person in seconds.
Human noses have about 5 million scent receptors. Dog noses have about 250 million and a correspondingly larger portion of the brain devoted to processing scents. A good avalanche dog can smell someone under 30 feet of snow.
Studies suggest a trained dog can find a body 160 times faster than a human searcher.
Rudy seems like he has ESP when he works. Before I was buried, I watched a drill in which a dozen patrollers searched for six dummies in an area the size of a football field.
The patrollers found three dummies wearing beacons quickly, but couldn’t find three beaconless dummies after searching 20 minutes.
Rudy arrived, and in less than a minute found two.
Kerr rubbed Rudy’s ears, cooed as if the lab had just found a sock toy instead of a body, and slipped him a piece of string cheese.
That’s usually how training starts. The dog’s owner hides a favorite toy around the house. The dog finds it and gets a reward. Then the game moves outside. Slowly, the dog begins finding people.
"For the dog, this is nothing but a game of hide and seek. You have to make it fun for them," Kerr said.
When Rudy does find something, whether a dummy or volunteer or a body, he gets a piece of cheese.
To be certified for avalanche rescue by Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado, a dog has to find two people buried under at least three feet of snow in less than 20 minutes. Rudy also had to show he could ride calmly to rescues in a helicopter for an additional flight certification.
Since being certified last year, he has gone on two missions. In both, the dog found the body in seconds, but both times he didn’t arrive on the scene until after the victim had died.
In my own cave, I had plenty of air but could not dig out if I wanted to. I had to wait for Rudy.
I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I started trying to guess how much time had passed. Fifteen minutes: no Rudy. A half hour: no Rudy.
Maybe he had been called off on a rescue and was in a helicopter right now. Maybe they had forgotten me.
Then I heard the creak of boots and the staccato of paws, first crisscrossing over my head, then furiously digging through the snow.
Suddenly, sun broke into the little cave and snow poured through, followed by a black snout and a tongue that licked my face.
Rudy had earned another notch in his near-perfect record, and another piece of cheese.
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