“I cannot thank you enough for allowing your K9s to come out and search for my spouse. I heard they played a big part in finding the two victims that drowned. ...You will forever be in my thoughts. God bless you all.”
Cadaver ~ Human Remains | Wilderness Search
The mountains and wilderness can be harsh and, unfortunately, some rescues become recovery operations. It is important to find the remains of missing persons to help families and friends deal with their loss. As such, our dogs are trained to missing find hikers, hunters, children, elderly, or anyone who has gone missing and expired due to unfortunate circumstances. In addition to training our dogs, our handlers and flankers have successfully completed numerous skills and courses to include Incident Command System and National Incident Management System so that we may seamlessly integrate with requesting agency law enforcement and SAR personnel.
Cadaver ~ Human Remains | Water Search
Water search dogs work from either the shoreline or out on the open water from the bow of a boat. The dogs are trained to alert to the gasses emitted from a submerged victim which reach the surface of the water. Although our dogs won’t dive deep into the water to recover a missing person, they provide a resource, working in concert with divers and underwater side-scan sonar, to narrow a search area and to provide crucial “nose” confirmation of a victim’s location.
LIVE Air-Scent | WILDERNESS SEARCH
Thousands of people go into our mountains for recreation each year. Some of them get lost. Our wilderness SAR dogs can trace the airborne scent of a human across all types of terrain. One dog can efficiently cover an area that would require many human searchers. When one of our dogs finds a missing person, the dog returns to its handler to signal the find and then takes the handler back to the missing person. This trained indication sequence is called a “find-refind.” While covering these vast areas, our dogs are equipped with GPS collars which show their location throughout the search. After a search, the GPS tracks can be downloaded and provided to search management teams so they have an accurate record of search area coverage.
Avalanche SEARCH
Avalanche Rescue dogs are trained to find victims buried up to 6 feet deep and can search large areas in only minutes that would require hours for human searchers to cover. Although GBK9SAR has fielded several Avy Dogs since its founding in 2008, we have discontinued training for Avalanche Rescue inasmuch as Wasatch Backcountry Rescue provides single-purpose ski patrol Handler/K-9 teams throughout the Wasatch Mountains which are on-site and in better position to provide immediate response.