A child has gone missing, an elderly woman has wandered away from home, a skier has been caught in an avalanche, a young boy has been swept away in a flood, a troubled young man has taken his life in the wilderness.

These are some of the scenarios to which Great Basin K9 SAR has responded at the request of public safety agencies throughout the Intermountain West since our founding in 2009. Our volunteers and their K9 partners have traveled thousands of miles and spent countless hours searching in difficult terrain and all weather conditions both day and night. We have done all of this at no charge to any of the agencies and organizations we have supported and, with your help, we are committed to continue this policy into the future.

Our standards reflect our responsibility

To understand Great Basin K9 one needs only to understand three things: our standards, our people, and our dogs.

We know when we embark on a search that we may be the difference between life and death for someone in our community. Because we take this responsibility very seriously, we train our K9 teams to requirements which meet national Search and Rescue K9 industry standards. We are also a proud member of Tri-State-K9, an association of search dog teams from across the Intermountain West which has established a rigorous set of standards which meet the specific needs of our vast wilderness and extreme mountainous search areas.

In addition to meeting Tri-State-K9 testing standards, we have internal requirements for our handlers and dog which are met prior to testing. Meeting these standards requires many hours of work over a year or more to get a team ready for certification testing. Several of our members also test to additional standards to include NASAR, UT POST, and other nationally recognized police organization standards. Many of our teams travel to training seminars where they can learn from experienced trainers and search experts. Testing is rigorous and conducted in realistic terrain. Performance is evaluated by experienced SAR dog handlers from outside of Great Basin K-9 SAR or, when in-house, double-blind testing. The primary question each evaluator asks themselves when conducting a test is, “If my child or my mother was lost, would I want this team searching for them?”

Our people are all volunteers—we have no paid staff

Selection of our Handlers is as critical to the search mission as the selection of our K9 partners. Our team is comprised of current, former, or retired military (veterans of three wars,) federal law enforcement, firefighters, ski patrollers, and avid and capable outdoors enthusiasts. We train together regularly to share our skills and experiences to help each team improve. In addition to learning to work with our K9 partners in search situations, all members are required to be competent in land navigation, radio communications, wilderness survival, wilderness first aid (both human and K9), crime scene preservation, BBP, and ICS/NIMS disaster management at the local, state, and national level.

Our dogs are the reason we exist

The key component of Great Basin K9 SAR is our dogs; they are the reason our organization exists. The capabilities they bring to a search and rescue mission are, as yet, unduplicated by scientific methods or machines.

They work off lead in wilderness terrain. When they find someone, they report back to their handler and lead her/him to the person – just like in the movies. They can find people buried under six feet of snow. They can indicate on the surface of the water where a person has drowned. They can detect the faintest odor of human remains from hundreds of yards away to help bring the deceased home their families.

They are selected from working line Shepherds, Retrievers, and Hunting breeds. They are just like your dog at home, except... they are different.

They have been specifically bred with the drive to hunt and search and keep hunting and searching even when they are tired, sore, cold, and wet. They do it to get their reward, which is usually a few minutes of play with their favorite toy. Selection of our dogs is the most critical part of our training and preparation. No matter how good the trainer or handler, if the dog is not right it just won’t serve the mission. We are very fortunate to have a great bunch of dogs at Great Basin K9 SAR.