As part of the Wasatch Backcountry Rescue School, 17 dogs trained for search and rescue with an emphasis on avalanche recovery.
The four day program took place at both Park City Mountain and Deer Valley Resorts last week. This year was in-house training but on alternating years, they offer an international school, with dogs coming in from as far as Poland.
Andy Vanhouten is the Avalanche Dog Handler at Park City Mountain Resort. He said search and rescue dogs love the job they have.
“The windy, cold, snowy, blizzard days, that's what they love,” Vanhouten said. “They love sitting outside in that weather. And this is all they know from seven weeks old till you know whenever we retire them. This is everything they do you know, even in the summer, it's focused on training and obedience to make them better in the winter. And so yeah, so the dogs, this is the greatest job I think a dog could ever have to be honest with you.”
He said at Park City Mountain they have about 45-50 dogs - most of which are golden retrievers and labradors - that range in age from 10-weeks-old to 10-years-old.
He said the type of training dogs receive depends on where dogs are in their “careers.” When training, dogs are broken up into three groups: puppies, intermediate and advanced.
He said they try to make sure puppies are comfortable on the mountain and also focus on obedience training. As dogs continue through their career, they will start to learn more advanced techniques, like tug-of-war.
“We try to make this as fun as we can into most of these dogs,” he said. “It's just a game of tug-of-war. And they know if they find somebody in the snowpack, they get to play tug of war with that person. Through the training, obviously, in a real situation, that's not going to happen. But to them, they know if they get if they find something in the snow, they get to play tug-of-war.”
He said the benefit of using dogs is that they work faster than humans.
‘The dogs in that regard are worth about 400 people just in terms of terrain making over and how fast they can cover it,” he said. “Watching these dogs work is nothing short of amazing. It is something to be seen how fast these dogs can move on avalanche debris.”
Another part of WBR’s training includes medical call-outs. Dogs will get sent out to help skiers in the backcountry who have been injured.
He said they’ve also started to expand rescue missions beyond the winter months.
“We started using more in the summer for missing hikers,” he said. “A couple years ago, a bunch of our teams got deployed down to Colorado city, for the flash floods, when we had some folks missing. So we're starting to utilize the dogs more year round versus just in the winter. But right now, our primary focus is still avalanche rescue and recovery.”
If you see a dog on the mountain, he said they’re friendly and enjoy the attention.
“We encourage a lot of social interaction with our dogs,” he said. “It's a big part of what we do. We've got our dogs up on the hill, we, you know, if we had a bunch of 100 pound German Shepherds that were snarly, you know, like, police dogs, it wouldn't go well. So we actually really enjoy it when we get a chance to have guests come up and interact with our dogs.”
He said just make sure to ask to pet the dogs and take off your skis because they can get hurt on the edges.
