Lost in the Wilderness
By Jay Stoeckl, MAT, OFS, May 8, 2026
The most amazing search and rescue dog I had ever seen was NOT CRICKET.
I know that must surprise you to hear me say that, but it is true. And the detail of this will astound you, because it wasn’t just the dog, it was her handler.
If life had been different and Jennifer and I had remained living in our simple world in Colorado, I would be training Yeti for search and rescue. Why? Because I loved it.
It was Jennifer who first introduced the idea of training one of our dogs for wilderness search. And when she presented the idea to me, I was all for it.
Our primary dog in those days was a black and gold female named Citara. And from a puppy, Jennifer began training her following guidebooks she had ordered online. And I started out as the “subject” for Citara to find.
When Citara reached her first adult year, Jenn and I took a trip to Oregon to visit our families. Jenn convinced her mother that she needed another puppy for search and rescue work. Lois had a litter of 8-week-olds from the “J” litter and was extremely generous in that she offered her daughter any puppy including the pick of the litter, a gorgeous silver male named “Judge.”
That was when Jennifer selected an equally confident female named Janey. And Janey went with the two of us back to Colorado. Jennifer wanted a new name as we all do when we adopt a new puppy, so Jennifer suggested to me the name Cricket.
And that was how Cricket came to me.
Search and rescue training was immensely intense for all the right reasons. The volunteers wore the bright-colored uniforms with their bright red hats. There were four-wheelers and a helicopter. Every dog being trained wore special harnesses and had long lead lines.
Jennifer and I felt a real belonging in that group. And for the better part of three years, we trained two dogs as often as we could afford to, Jennifer with Citara, and me with Cricket.
The weekend camp out trainings were the most fun, because the best dog and handler teams from all over the state came together. The experts not only helped with the training of us novices, but we also got to witness some extremely difficult search scenarios.
For reasons I won’t get into now, Cricket and Citara never made it to certification, at best, an arduous two-year journey. In short, life got in the way and we weren’t able to finish what we had started with them.
Though Cricket had every talent for becoming top dog in that arena, there was one other who I recognized as the best dog and handler team I had ever seen.
And you’ve got to hear this, because it will knock your socks off!
In that group representing Search and Rescue Dogs of Colorado (SARDOC), there were the best of the best in the whole country. SARDOC was not only the most demanding, it was the best program bar none. Those weekend trainings gathered 200 handlers and their dogs from novice to expert.
And then there was Roger.
Roger and his dog Isabelle, a German shepherd mix, could unravel a trail that ran for miles like there was no tomorrow. And this is how he and his dog stood out above all the rest.
I asked Roger and his team if I could tag along during his mock search. He readily agreed. He and Isabelle had been on multiple real-life searches. How many lost souls they rescued, I do not know.
His mock search involved around a square mile of search area. In secret, the trainer would send a person out into the wilderness and would direct that person to literally HIDE in a grove of trees. People who actually get lost, get so disoriented, they will actually hide from their rescuers, symptoms of both exposure (hypothermia) and shock.
In the mock search, both the handler and his trusted navigator have no idea where their subject is hiding. They just know that he or she is somewhere within a vast given area. Left behind is a scent item the subject had worn like a sock or tee-shirt.
Roger and Isabelle had long graduated from the first one to two years of trail scent and moved to air scent. This means that there is no immediate trail for them to follow.
Think about this for a moment.
He and Isabelle had to find someone hiding in the wilderness WITHOUT a trail to follow. The subject had entered the wilderness by another route. How in Sam Hill can a rescue team do that?
Scent, as Jennifer and I learned early in the program, is like baby powder continuously coming off the body. Imagine even the scent of baby powder only each individual person has his/her own unique signature. To the rescue dog, one person can smell like cinnamon while another like cloves. It works a bit like that.
That unique scent coming off the body is then carried into the air like a fine mist, invisible to all our senses, but never to the impressive olfactory sensors inside a dog’s nose. If a light air current flows up the valley in a particular direction, the dog can surmise that the person they are searching for exists down below.
But here is where it became immensely impressive.
Roger and Isabelle knew exactly where their subject was hiding and the subject was still at least a quarter mile away.
He initiated the search by hiking with Isabelle over the top of a ridge. A half mile in, he stopped. He turned to the rest of us and pointed way down into a particular valley and said, “That’s where he’s hiding.”
WAIT… WHAT???
“How could you know that?” I asked Roger.
He looked at me and said, “Because Isabelle just told me.”
My head was spinning. I had been watching his dog the WHOLE time and did not pick up on anything unusual. Oh, Isabelle did gaze off in that direction at some point, but she did that in other places as well.
Roger had gotten to know his dog so well, he knew exactly what to look for. She did not turn to him with a woof and say, “Hey, I think he’s hiding down there in that grove of trees. But Roger knew by watching her subtle mannerisms that the dog knew. Isabelle had picked up the subject’s scent flowing up the ravine, not strong enough yet to cause her to bolt down to find him, just enough to become curious.
And Roger knew how Isabelle stood with her erect ears and slight wag of the tail that she had become intrigued. And I… I was left in wonder of the two of them!
We continued that course another thirty minutes, Roger allowing Isabelle to unravel the scent clues until we were down in that same valley. And the closer Isabelle got, the more animated she became, zigging this way and zagging that way until we completely lost sight of her.
And like with the recall exercise story I shared with you about Cricket, out of the forest comes Isabelle giving Roger the tell-tale bark, “I found him!”
We run in following that beautiful and amazing shepherd into the forest grove, EXACTLY where Roger had indicated to me high up on the ridge.
It was not the dog’s ability to finding someone that impressed me the most, it was Roger’s ability to know his dog so well as to understand her language. That is a bond most of us could never recognize without such focused training.
Through those adventures, Jennifer and I discovered that our American Dirus’s make the most amazing search and rescue dogs. If your heart needs to be rescued, see our available dogs at: https://direwolfdogs.com/dogs-for-sale/
Jennifer Stoeckl is the co-founder of the Dire Wolf Project, founder of the DireWolf Guardians American Dirus Dog Training Program, and owner/operator of DireWolf Dogs of Vallecito. She lives in the beautiful inland northwest among the Ponderosa pine forests with her pack of American Dirus dogs.