A Mission to Serve

Celebrate your purpose and be grateful for it. It is a gift; indeed, it is a double gift, one that you bestow to others and one that has been bestowed on you. You are fortunate to have a noble purpose, and the rest of the world is fortunate that you have one.

— William Damon

Keno, the Wonder Dog, Delivers an Avalanche Miracle

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Robin Siggers
Fernie, British Columbia, Canada

Since 1979 I've been a ski patroller and avalanche forecaster working in a winter paradise. The Rocky Mountains of British Columbia offer one of the world's most pristine and adventurous areas for outdoor sports. As peaceful as the snow-capped mountains appear to be, they are also fraught with danger. Deep snow and steep slopes combine to pose the constant risk of avalanche. Skiers and boarders must always be on their guard.

With as many as sixteen people killed each year in avalanches in Canada, highly efficient handler-and-dog search teams are essential for mountain safety. An avalanche travels from sixty to a hundred miles per hour, and the victim has only a 50 percent chance of surviving more than twenty-five minutes. Ninety-five percent of avalanche victims die within the first two hours.

In the mid-eighties I met Sue Boyd, another ski patroller who had an avalanche search dog. Watching Sue and her dog together made me consider dog handling as a way to expand my horizons. I got a dog and started training with the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog Association (CARDA), a nonprofit charitable organization that provides excellent avalanche search-and-rescue team training for Canada.

The CARDA website says that avalanche dogs can do a coarse search of an area in thirty minutes, whereas humans using probes would take up to four hours searching the same area. With a dog's heightened olfactory ability, the animal can pick up the scent of a person below as much as twelve feet of snow. Although weather conditions affect the outcome of an accident, time becomes the major factor in whether someone will live or die after being buried under mounds of snow and ice.

Keno, the Survivor

In 1996 my first dog, K2, was getting on in years. To further my avalanche rescue interest, I adopted a new puppy named Keno, the only survivor of a litter. Keno's mother was Sue's purebred chocolate Labrador retriever, a trained avalanche rescue dog. The neighbor's dog, a collie named Lucky, had jumped the fence and bred with Keno's mother. This made Keno a rare, strangely beautiful golden Lab, whose thick coat of alabaster fur gave the impression that dog and snow were one. Despite the freezing-cold weather in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Keno's wagging tail and friendly disposition warmed the hearts of everyone who met him.

Keno was a pleasant, sociable dog, but he did not like being petted on the head. If someone came near, he would sniff and be friendly but back away from letting the person pet anything other than his rump. It was as if he sensed he had an important job to do that commanded more respect than most people show to an ordinary dog with a pat on the head.

Keno was a puppy when I first met him, and I observed that he was big, fat, and healthy. His hardy body made me think he would be well suited for outdoor search-and-rescue work in the mountains. Keno enjoyed rolling around in the snow. If he found even a patch, he'd tumble in it. Later, I reflected on how surprisingly appropriate it was that this dog who had been the only survivor of his litter, had a father named Lucky, and loved snow became one of the world's best-known avalanche search-and-rescue dogs.

Keno's Training and Certification

Keno was enthusiastic and easy to train, and caught on quickly to avalanche search-and-rescue tasks. I only had to show him what to do once, and he'd learn it right away.

The initial training takes about two years. A dog-and-handler team trains daily, and must be tested and reassessed each year to remain actively certified and at peak performance ability. The dog handler has to show that he or she can search a snow avalanche with probes and electronic transceivers, devices that people carry outdoors on mountains to ensure that they can be found quickly under snow. The search-and-rescuer must be a proficient mountain and backcountry skier who is knowledgeable about snowpack structure, avalanche terrain, and how to select the best route for a search. Of course, this person must have all the skills necessary to rescue a victim after finding him or her.

An avalanche search dog needs to respond to basic obedience commands and hand signals. The dog has to have excellent agility and retrieval skills, and needs to be able to search snow avalanches for live victims and articles as well as travel on vehicles with the dog handler.

In avalanche-rescue training sessions, the handler skis up to someone who plays the role of witness to an accident. The witness gives the handler details about what happened. When I'd ski to a witness at a training scenario, there were times when, before I even finished interviewing the witness, Keno had already begun searching or even dug out the first hidden article. He knew the goal and what his job was. From all indications he really liked the work.

Another thing I especially appreciated about Keno was that he kept working for as long as an hour without getting tired or bored. I'd give him a break, and he'd go right back to searching again. In this type of job, persistence is essential. Some dogs don't work as long as a half hour before losing interest if they haven't found anything, as if to say, "What are we going to do next?"

In addition to Keno's endurance, he had another essential quality of an avalanche search dog — independence. Although he'd mastered the basic commands of "sit," "stay," "come," "fetch," and "heel" off leash, I didn't demand a high level of obedience from Keno. An avalanche dog needs to be similar to sheepdogs or herding dogs, with a mind of his or her own that doesn't require looking to the handler to figure out everything. Keno had to discern a weak scent from a deeply buried article and sort out how to find it. Although I usually told him which direction to search, I didn't know how he was going to locate, zero in on, and dig up an article. He needed to use his own reasoning and problem-solving skills.

Keno wore a vest when it was time to work. Putting on the vest signaled to him that he had to be 100 percent under my control and couldn't run free. Taking off his collar triggered him to start the search. Knowing he was no longer on leash gave him the idea that he had to start thinking for himself. As the handler, my job was to make sure he covered an entire site. His job was not to miss any scent.

When on a search site, a handler doesn't want the dog to...