Jean Larson-Rein and her golden retriever, Minto, circle around small boxes in the parking lot of the Sitka Fire Department.
“We’re looking for bones,” Larson-Rein says. “Minto, bones.”
It’s a training exercise to see if Minto can pick out the package with human remains. He parades around for a bit before diving at one of the boxes with his nose.
“Yes! Good job! Good job!” Larson-Rein says.
Larson-Rein and Minto traveled from Juneau for Paws Across Alaska, a weekend-long K-9 search and rescue conference. The gathering was put together Karen Royce from Sitka Search and Rescue’s K-9 team.
“We’ve done this before with just Southeast dogs, but this time we wanted to do dogs all over the state of Alaska,” Royce says. “Dog teams are here from Fairbanks and Kodiak and Wrangell, Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka.”
Search and rescue teams will sniff out buildings and work along docks and shorelines. They’ll also go over how to decontaminate their dogs and get into baskets the U.S. Coast Guard hoists during their rescues.
The weekend’s main focus is learning by doing. And this afternoon, the four-legged friends will be put to the test.
“They are not back yet,” Royce says, laying out the details of a mock search and rescue, or SAR. “Family is very concerned and reporting them overdue.”
Two volunteers will be staged as lost berry pickers somewhere in the woods off of Katlian Bay Road. The teams go over descriptions of who they’re looking for. They gather their gear — neon vests, bear spray, and walkie talkies — and get into their cars. They head out the road and meet at a gravel parking lot.
“Who wants to run from the top coming down?,” asks Cathy Needham, the mock operation’s designated leader. She splits the group into six teams – each with one or two dogs — to cover different areas.
Teams set out in search of the lost berry pickers. Needham and a few others stay in the parking lot to run operations. They’ll communicate over radios with the crews on foot.
Justin Jacques sits at a folding table behind an SUV working on his laptop. With satellite internet set up for the mock SAR, Jacques is able to track teams’ locations from their personal GPS devices. His map shows what ground has been covered.
“We can create maps that can figure a probability of location or figure out how far could they possibly hike to based on certain conditions,” Jacques says.
He has a TV-sized monitor in the trunk of the car to make the simulation run a little smoother.
“Say the person or instant commander is on the radio, and she just needs to turn her head and see where the team is, she can instantly look at that,” Jacques explains.
After about an hour of searching, Delilah, a German shepherd from Wasilla, finds one of the voluntarily-lost hikers sitting in the woods.
“How are the berry pickers? Are they ambulatory and able to walk out with you?” a volunteer asks over the radio.
“He requests air lift but I think he’ll be fine,” another search team jokes.
Needham radios to the other groups that the operation is complete.
With the lost hikers found, everyone heads back to the fire hall where they’ll discuss what went well and what could be improved. Their mock SAR ended successfully, but debriefing still provides important insight for operation planners and dog handlers in case the SAR had to continue.
Luckily for the pretend berry pickers who sat silently in the woods all afternoon, today’s mission is complete.
