Against the Odds: Pups survive 10 days lost on Desert Mountain

Lisa and Jay Burrell have two young pups — Nanuk, a rambunctious 7-month-old white lab-husky mix and Josie, a small-statured 18-month-old German shepherd mix.

Earlier this month the two dogs were amusing themselves with toys and the occasional wrestle involving the trademark polar bear-like pounces that earned the youngest pup his name in the Burrell’s yard in Coram.

Little did the Burrells know the two pups would spend the next 10 days in the less-than -friendly-woods near the Burrell’s home.

The dogs, not typically allowed to roam freely, were outside their fenced-in play yard that afternoon in part to test their brand new GPS collars, the Burrells told the Hungry Horse News.

Jay had just programmed the new collars with a set perimeter around their property which, if crossed by the pups, would send a notification alert to the Burrell’s phones.

Sometime later Jay looked up from his work to realize his dogs were nowhere in sight. Seconds later, an alert notification sounded on his phone, twice.

At first he began following the dogs’ trajectory into the woods, whistling and calling their names, but he quickly began postholing in what was still deep winter snow. Meanwhile the young pups, each scarcely over 30 pounds, scampered lightly on top, quickly outdistancing Jay.

Abandoning the chase, Jay and Lisa began watching their dogs’ woodland meanderings via the GPS collars’ tracker app, hoping the pups would return home that evening.

As nightfall came, Lisa’s hope of the puppies returning home began to dwindle, and the couple watched on their phone as the dogs bedded down for the night southeast of their property near the base of Desert Mountain on the closed Forest Service road colloquially known as Hard Money.

From then on, it became full search mode for the Burrells. Jay woke up the next day before dawn to track the pups, this time equipped with snowshoes and other tracking gear. Lisa began spreading the word, sending out the alarm on social media; contacting friends, neighbors and any relevant organization she could think of, even leaving a note on her front door to alert the UPS driver.

“We don’t have kids, you know, so these are definitely our kids,” Burrell said.

They took in Josie as a rescue last March right as the pandemic started. Not long after, Nanuk was adopted to help round out the family.

As the search began in earnest the next day — Saturday, Jay, who was out in the field following the dogs’ tracks as well as their GPS coordinates, noticed the tracking collars’ pings were inconsistent and sometimes several

hours apart. He watched as the distance between him and his pets kept increasing, and then became exponentially more difficult to close when the dogs left the road, venturing straight into the vast woods. Eventually, the GPS pings stopped entirely.

The batteries in the units were dying.

Just before the collars’ batteries died that Saturday afternoon, the Burrells were left with two last coordinates that pinpointed their dogs as somewhere on the side of Desert Mountain between Hard Money and Trough Creek Roads.

The following day word had rapidly spread, and friends were out searching with their own dogs while neighbors offered the use of their camera drones, or began looking at the footage of their game cameras throughout the area.

Someone who’d heard of the effort through social media reached out to North Valley Search and Rescue, and as Lisa was printing flyers Sunday evening, she received a call from the local emergency organization offering to help with the search through the use of a scent dog from the Flathead K-9 Foundation, as well as one of their thermal-imaging drones.

“In situations like these, [North Valley Search and Rescue said] they’d rather search for dogs in the wilderness than the people searching for their dogs in the wilderness,” Lisa said.

She was surprised, but gratified, by the organization’s outreach.

While the search and rescue efforts weren’t able to locate the pups, they were able to determine that the dogs hadn’t come down onto Desert Mountain Road, therefore likely narrowing their location to still somewhere on the side of the vast and snowy mountain.

Throughout the next week the Burrells continued to receive an outpouring of support from the community, with hundreds of people expressing their concern and well-wishes or offering useful advice or assistance. “Anybody that had heard about it, you know, was either sympathetic or helped or prayed,” Lisa said. “So many people are dog lovers around here.” For the first half of the week helpful leads kept piling in. The couple’s good friend Brian Rowland, who was frequently recreating in the area with his hound dog, Balto, found the pups’ tracks several times. On that Wednesday, a fresh deer carcass surrounded by fresh tracks was found on Hard Money Road.

A neighbor helped them set up a trail camera over the kill to see if young dogs had been around the site.

But by midweek the search began to grow cold. No new leads had come in, and after two days, footage from the trail cam showed images of foxes and even a black wolf visiting the deer carcass, a reminder of the area’s abundant predators.

A week had passed and prospects of finding the pups were looking bleak. “At that point, it was getting desperate because it’s like, we had hit the exact one-week mark, and we hadn’t had any leads for two days, plus we had the trail cam back down showing a black wolf on

it,” Lisa said. But over the next two days the Burrells and their friends didn’t give up on finding the animals. That Sunday, March 14, 10 days after the dogs disappeared, the Burrells’ friend Ginny Foley, who’d been instrumental in the search effort “from day one,” Lisa said, decided to check Desert Mountain Road one more time before heading into town for the day. At the base of the road, Foley ran into a group of snowmobilers from the Flathead Snowmobile Association about to head out on a ride. After informing the riders of the lost puppies, Foley gave the group her last flyer containing the Burrells’ contact information.

Jay was scrambling through the thick brush of a steep ravine, following the faint tracks of his dogs that Sunday afternoon, when he got the call from Columbia Falls resident and Flathead Snowmobile Association president David Covill: the dogs had been found.

Just a couple miles downhill from Desert Mountain’s summit, on his way home with friends, Covill had rounded a corner on his snowmobile to find the two puppies standing in the middle of the mountain’s main road.

After a brief hesitation the pups came right over to the snowmobilers, “ready to be petted and hugged on,” Covill said.

Lisa, who’d had the message relayed to her by Jay, was waiting for the rescuers at the bottom of the hill. After an elated reunion with the living pups, Lisa noticed Josie’s gaunt appearance, and saw she had stepped through her collar with one leg and cut her armpit.

Lisa was overcome with emotion. “I lost it big time. I mean ugly cry. Loud. Sobbing. Hugging her,” she said. The two dogs were brought to Flathead Pet Emergency where Josie was monitored overnight before being able to recover at home with Nanuk. “I want to emphasize just how grateful we are for all the help and caring from the community,” Lisa said. “I mean, I would have never in a million years thought that people would help like this and come out of the woodwork to help. I mean, we have been just overwhelmed and it quickly renewed our faith in humanity!”