A pet dog with two men caught in an early-season avalanche north of Anchorage was reunited with her family after spending more than two days alone in the mountains.
LouLou, a four-year-old huskydoodle, suffered a chipped tooth and a broken toenail in the Oct. 10 avalanche on Shaker Peak. But the slide badly injured the men LouLou was with, said her owner, Lauren Padawer, who was out of state at the time.
“I think that they were really banged up,” Padawer said. “They knew that they needed help and that it wasn't time to focus on the dog.”
Padawer’s boyfriend, Brian Shum, and his climbing partner, Rachad Rayees, had been hiking through snow that was only about five inches deep. A pocket of snow above them, piled up thicker by wind, released and swept them through about 500 feet of rocky terrain, Padawer said.
Shum suffered a broken jaw and later had to have surgery on one of his hands. The slide broke three of Rayees’ ribs and damaged one of his vertebrae, Padawer said.
They called for help, and an Alaska National Guard helicopter crew rescued the men less than two hours after the avalanche. Their mission was to save the men’s lives, and they didn’t see LouLou.
The white, curly-coated dog got left behind.
Padawer could see LouLou’s approximate location, because the dog had an Apple AirTag on her collar. Using coordinates from the device, multiple mapping applications and even AI, Padawer narrowed in on a location she thought LouLou could be.
“I found the same patch of snow and the same shadow of a ridge and the same gully and the same line of a drainage,” she said. “I really did hone in on it.”
At least 20 people offered to help look for LouLou, Padawer said. A man on foot made it close. The terrain was steep and snowy, yet too rocky to be skiable.
Two days after the avalanche, two teams were preparing to look for LouLou. They gave a scent-detection dog pieces of LouLou’s torn-up bed to help find her. The operator of a drone with a thermal-imaging camera was there, preparing to search.
Padawer had also given two pilots in a privately owned helicopter access to LouLou’s tracking device, which updated when they got close.
Then, all of a sudden, they spotted her.
“Some fresh snow had fallen the night before, and we saw paw prints. So we followed the paw prints, and there she was, just waiting,” said Amanda Barker, along for the ride with her friend Dave Beckett, who was at the controls. “He's like, ‘Oh my god, there she is.’ She was directly at 12 o'clock, straight in front of us, just a couple hundred feet up, just watching us fly around. We still, I still, can't believe that.”
Beckett found a safe spot to land his red Robinson R44 helicopter. They worried the helicopter would scare LouLou away, but she stayed put, Barker said.
“She patiently waited for us. She did make us come all the way up to her. We had to hike a couple hundred feet up to her,” Barker said. “But as soon as we got up there, she came right over to us and she followed us. I could have never in a million years pictured it going that way. She's a really special dog.”
Padawer said she wasn’t surprised by LouLou’s behavior. It fit the dog’s mellow personality, she said.
Padawer and Barker said, based on what they could see from the tracking device, it looked like LouLou had followed the men’s path as they slid in the avalanche to where the military helicopter rescued them, then walked back up to where it started and waited.
Barker and Beckett walked LouLou back to the helicopter, put a black puffy coat on her and flew back to Beckett’s home in Wasilla. They took LouLou to a veterinarian and then delivered her to a friend of Padawer’s, Barker said.
Padawer said she was overwhelmed with gratitude and described Barker and Beckett as “angels.”
She was reunited with LouLou on Oct. 14, and the two shared a big hug. But if the experience of spending two nights alone in the snowy mountains had changed LouLou, the dog didn’t show it, Padawer said.
“Some dogs, they jump and whimper, get all crazy or whatever, and she did seem a little more affectionate in that moment,” Padawer said. “But she's still just really mellow and really reserved, and it's almost like, ‘I don't know what you guys are all worried about. Like, I'm very well equipped for this sort of thing.’”
