YODOGS: Yosemite’s Four Footed Heroes

Ok. YODOGS rock.

Friends of YOSAR: most of the YODOGs are “area dogs.” This means that instead of following a scent trail, the canine team is assigned to a specific area and the dog’s job is to find every person or fairly large object (like a pack) with human scent on it within that area.

Thus a typical large search in Yosemite works like this: when it is determined that a person is missing, the call goes out for the dogs. Meanwhile, search management identifies the (theoretical) maximum area in which the missing person may be found from the LKP, which is the speed of the missing person times the amount of time he or she has been missing, with due allowance for barriers like roads, large streams, or unscalable walls. YOSAR members “run the trails,” sometimes literally, within the search area, and set up “confinement:” trail blocks, lights, and sometimes even lines to contain the lost person. Back at Incident Command, the search area is divided up into roughly square kilometer-size segments. Dogs and some ground teams are sent in to find the lost person, if he or she is in the segment, or, almost as important, to determine that the person is NOT in the area. The idea, of course, is a process of elimination of areas which continues until the person is found. Of course, both dog and handler are also on the look-out for clues such as footprints.

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