For five Telluride Ski & Golf employees, their most valuable asset is their nose.
They are Lady Bee of Hemlock Hollow, Wiley, Mona, Sadie and Stella. And they are avalanche rescue dogs.
Gary Richard has served as the avalanche rescue dog coordinator for Telluride Ski & Golf since 1986 after he traveled to Jackson Hole and learned of their program.
“We live in a Class A area where we have a lot of avalanches and we’re pretty steep,” he said. “We had a need for avalanche dogs so we decided to try it out.”
The dogs undergo lengthy training in order to locate buried victims in the event of an avalanche.
First, they are scent trained to locate buried articles of clothing, before moving on to locating a person, and within a year-and-a-half of training, the dogs are able to locate multiple buried people, searching avalanche paths that are often several miles wide.
The most common breed of the current five avalanche dogs is Labrador Retriever, but the newest addition, Stella, is a Border Collie/Blue Heeler mix.
“As long as the dog has a nose and the handler has the patience to train the dog, it can happen,” Richard explained. “Any kind of dog.”
“It’s not just the dog,” he continued. “It’s the handler too. And the handler has to be able to take care of himself in the backcountry. It’s equally dangerous for a human as it is a dog, so it’s quite a team.”
Richard prefers lighter dogs that he can carry if necessary. Running long distances on packed snow can hurt the dog’s paws, so if needed, he can pick them up and ski with them. He lifts his yellow lab by her harness as he explains.
Her name is Lady Bee of Hemlock Hollow, but Richard generally calls her Lady Bee for short.
The five-year-old pup works five days a week at Telluride Ski & Golf, riding the chair lift up with Richard or another handler at 8 a.m. to position themselves for any avalanche calls.
Twice a week they go through avalanche drills, one simple, but one in deeper snow covering a wider path.
Into early February, there hadn’t been any avalanche rescues yet this season. But Richard said that mid-February has historically been the time when backcountry avalanches seem to release.
He and Lady Bee have been training for the upcoming avalanche season, so they’re prepared. And Richard says Lady Bee is quick to get ready because she can identify emergency situations from the mood.
“She can tell just through our voices when something serious is going on and she just starts whining, “ he explained. “Sometimes it’s not even an avalanche.”
“Sometimes when you have a big accident on the mountain and the tone of everybody’s voices gets different, she picks up on that,” he continued. “And it’s like, ‘Okay, Bee, just settle down, this isn’t us this time.”
Lady Bee and fellow avalanche dogs not only serve as rescue dogs on the mountain, but also assist in emergency situations in surrounding counties.
Richard said that the crew has performed searches in La Plata County and Montezuma County, and specifically mentioned rescues at Shark’s Tooth Peak, Paradise Bowl and Burro Mountain.
Unfortunately, he noted, searches outside the resort are generally recovery missions, as helicopter crews have to fly to Telluride to pick up the rescue crew and then fly back to the site.
“By the time they come and get us to go there, we’re not looking for a live retrieval, we’re looking for a body,” he explained.
“The reason we have them on the ski resort is because this is the best chance,” he continued. “If someone says, ‘my friend got buried in an avalanche on the ski resort,’ they could say where and we could be out the door in minutes.”
And Richard, and the buried party, would rely on the nose of Lady Bee or one of the other avalanche dogs to lead them to the rescue.
