Lost dogs wander wilderness for days

Two dogs dodged grizzlies, wolves, mountain lions and other hazards as they wandered the Bob Marshall Wilderness for 12 days in July alone and hungry.

Abby and Molly, two springer spaniels, had wandered away from their owners' cabin 11 miles away on the Rocky Mountain Front. They were found and rescued by volunteers from the Montana Wilderness Association working on a trail in Bowl Creek, in the heart of the wilderness.

Volunteer packer Greg Schatz of Columbia Falls was one of the crew that found the dogs. He said they were working on a turnpike putting gravel down in the trail on a Wednesday and the dogs showed up at the work site the next day. Judging from their scat, the dogs had been living on grass and not much else.

"You could tell they were in rough shape," he said.

Schatz fashioned a solution for getting them back to camp: He put each dog in a gravel bag and attached the bags to the saddle of one of his horses, according to a blog entry on the MWA web site.

They fed and cared for the dogs and then tried to get them some help. One dog, Molly, still had a collar on with a phone number engraved on it. The crew radioed the number out to a ranger station and through a series of relays, they found the owner, James Cain of Conrad.

It turned out the dogs had wandered away from the cabin on July 2 and they weren't found until July 14.

The owners were unable to hike in to gather the dogs, and the crew still had four days left on their project. For the remainder of the project, each of the crew members took turns staying with the dogs at camp as the dogs rested on horse saddle pads and recovered from their paw injuries. Still shivering, the dogs stayed warm wrapped in raincoats. At night they slept with crew co-leader Sonny Mazzullo in his tent.

Molly recovered enough to walk out, but the Abby had to be carried out in a gravel bag, hung on a pole and carried by two hikers like a queen. Schatz, in turn, carried the hikers' gear on his horses.

Schatz said Shannon Freix, MWA's Continental Divide Trail program coordinator, had designed the gravel bags, which worked well to carry the dogs. They fit just right.

The dogs were returned to their owners, but the story doesn't quite end their, Schatz noted. Schatz's wife, Deborah, works at Rocky Mountain Real Estate and when they got back from their wilderness trip, she told a co-worker the story. But the co-worker said she'd already heard the tale. It turned out that the woman who fills in for Deborah when she's on vacation was the daughter of the dogs' owner.

Small world indeed.