Wren, a black and white border collie, wove through barrels, climbed over snow berms and hopped over piles of splintered timber and hunks of blue plastic scattered beneath her paws.
With her nose to the ground, she could smell the scent of some old moose bones, scattered in the gravel nearby, and a bucket of food buried somewhere deep in the snow. But after a few minutes of sniffing, she narrowed in on the smell she was looking for, and bounded back across the lot to jump on her handler, Will Metcalf.
“Where are they? Point to them. I don’t see them,” Metcalf said.
Wren led him back to a half-buried, junked minivan. She stuck her head into the smashed up windows, and a person in a bright red winter jacket emerged.
“What a good dog,” Metcalf said.
Wren is one of the most experienced canines with Southeast Alaska Dogs Organized for Ground Search, or SEADOGS. She was part of the four-legged search and rescue team deployed at the site of Wrangell’s deadly landslide last November.
The obstacle course she just ran through was designed to prepare her for scenarios like that, where disasters hit more populated places. In this case, a snowy 2-acre parking lot in Lemon Creek was set up as a rough imitation of an avalanche coming down on a neighborhood — a realistic scenario for Juneau.
The course features distracting smells to imitate the kinds of things that might get caught up in an urban disaster.
“There’s going to be refrigerators out there and there’s going to be laundry,” said handler Marcy Larson. “We don’t want our dogs alerting on that. We want our dogs alerting on people.”
They also need to navigate junk scattered across the snow and ice to simulate hazards like crushed houses, splintered trees and toxic waste.
“Even something as simple as, as you know, the chips – the wood chips that are out here,” Larson said. “Some dogs that haven’t ever experienced that are like, ‘what’s this?’”
For the SEADOGS, urban disaster search and rescue is an important skill set. But Mike Pilling, one of the most senior handlers, says it’s not the only skill these dogs have to know.
“For Southeast, since we’re kind of in a bubble here, you know, we don’t have the road system, so if anything happens, we’re it,” Pilling said. “And we’re one of the few places in the country – few teams in the country, that we kind of have to do it all.”
Pilling has trained four of his own dogs, who have helped out in all kinds of crises across Alaska. He said perfecting even one discipline of canine search and rescue can take up to two years.
Pilling’s current dog, Tilly, a stout brown and white mutt, has been trained and certified in backcountry avalanche rescues and tracking missing people on both land and water.
According to Pilling, a lot of dog teams in the Lower 48 specialize in just one type of search and rescue mission. In Alaska, that’s not a luxury SEADOGS can afford.
“I’ve always trained our dogs to be able to find anybody, anywhere,” Pilling said.
But to succeed in an urban environment, the dogs actually have to learn when to work against some of their other training instincts.
Take Korra, a German shepherd, for example. She runs the course, keeping her nose glued to the ground, the way she would to track a missing person. And because she can’t pick up their scent, she can’t find her fake avalanche victim the first time around.
With a bit of correction, she does better on the second run. She keeps her head up and catches a scent on the wind, which leads her to Pilling, who is buried in a culvert behind a heavy wooden pallet.
Since Korra can’t dig him out, like she would in a backcountry avalanche, she learns to wait patiently for help.
“Right there, as you can see, there wasn’t anything really for her to dig into. But she stayed right there,” said her handler Mike Kreis.
Once Kreis reaches Korra, he helps to pull Pilling out. With that, Korra earns her reward — a round of “good girls” and a rousing game of tug-o-war.
