While Signal has been part of Search and Rescue for several years, Echo, a labrador-spaniel cross, is his first search dog.

He says there are many boxes to tick to become a certified handler. “Before you even get a dog, you go to a training camp as an observer. Then you get invited to pick your breed and buy your dog, and it’s up to you to train it. That can involve several hours every day for maybe two years, depending on the dog. After all that you have to pass a rigorous assessment to be certified, and once operational you have to attend annual assessment camps.”

Signal says search dogs need a good nose, high energy, a loud bark and strong legs. “We do a lot of our searching in rough country, off track, so the dogs have to be able to get over fallen logs and through thick bush, and keep on going. It’s great to see them at work.”

Wilderness dogs can be tracking dogs – that’s ‘nose to the ground’ following scent step by step (and it can be up to three days old), or aerial, ‘nose in the air’, searching for air scent. “You put the dog on a ridge and they can pick up a scent perhaps 400m away, three days after the person has been there.”

They are an amazing asset, Signal says. “Their sense of smell is 40,000 times better than a human’s. While they are trained to detect human scent they can also be clue finders: a dropped tissue or chocolate wrapper can be crucial to narrowing the search area.”

Once a dog search team is operational, ‘maintenance training’ is ongoing. That’s more hours each week, says Signal. “You’re constantly building rapport, the team bonding stuff between you and your dog. All our training is based around a game, and Echo’s reward for a find is a tatty bit of rope that we’ll play tug of war with. He’ll do anything for that bit of rope.”

Training is about fun and positive reinforcement, agrees Bridget Martin, a Queenstown-based police sergeant. Martin is a handler for Stag (Echo’s brother), plus she is now training a hardy little labrador-spaniel named Bandit. “I was too busy to buy a ski pass this year,” she laughs. Before moving south she worked with Zin Zan, a black shepherd, for LandSAR in Auckland.

Each handler also has to be competent to handle the rough country and atrocious weather. “It’s a big skillset,” says Martin. “And even with all the training, it’s a different kettle of fish when you deploy. You never know if you’re actually good enough until you’ve had a find.”

Zin Zan proved himself. On one occasion he scented a group who were confused by trapline markers in the Waitakere Range. Another find was a man with Alzheimer’s who had been missing overnight.

“The wind wasn’t blowing in the right direction for us but Zin Zan heard a noise. The man was cracking little twigs and Zin Zan heard that. It was a truly life-saving find and it was solely on the dog.”

There is a large community behind the search dog teams, says Martin. “In Queenstown we often work in subalpine country, and searches can be massive. This means we need access to huge areas for training and for this we have wonderful support from high country farmers, who trust us to go on their land. We also have help from local businesses, helicopter operators, and volunteers who set tracks or ‘hide’ for our dogs to find.”

Martin says the dogs are just one part of a search team. “There are also the foot soldiers, visual trackers, the Incident Management Team, helicopter pilots and the people who feed us. There are so many volunteers who will get up at 2am for people they don’t know – every one of them dedicated to finding the lost, missing and injured.”

LandSAR operations are police-led and, given his local terrain, National Park senior constable Conrad Smith has led a few. He says dogs are another arrow in the quiver of search tools.

“They can find an immobile or unresponsive person we’d otherwise miss,” he says. “They can search a large area quickly. For example, on ridgetops with the wind right they can catch a scent from way down in a valley. Sometimes we’re searching for people who don’t want to be found, who might hide from a search party, but a dog can increase our chances of finding them.”

Smith says it takes a special skill to work with a dog team to get the best result. “You have to keep the dog away from a ‘contaminated’ site, where they’ll pick up the scents of the searchers. For that reason it can be good to get the dog to an area first, especially on snow where they can cover a massive area way quicker than we can on foot.”

Wānaka-based Matt Gunn has been an avalanche search dog handler for 22 years. In the 1990s he was a ski patroller on a Canterbury ski field when three colleagues were hit by an avalanche. He helped rescue two, but one died. “That was incredibly traumatic,” he recalls. “In hindsight, it played a big role in my motivation to train up an avalanche search dog.”

Gunn is now with his third dog, Wizzid. “Our bond is huge,” he says. “There’s such an emotional connection to the dogs; you just have to separate that and see them as working dogs.”

While some deployments fly into the backcountry, avalanche dog teams are essentially based around ski fields where, if an avalanche occurs, they can respond faster than human searchers.

“An avalanche area of two hectares would take 20 people with probes several hours to search,” says Gunn. “One avalanche dog can cover that in 20 minutes. So with the dogs we can quickly reach a point of high confidence that there is no one to find, and that also reduces hours of exposure and risk for searchers, especially when an avalanche is most likely to occur late in the day with night closing in.”

He says the dog’s ability to scent minute particles in snow is quite incredible. “They can consistently find something up to two metres deep. Like the wilderness search dogs, they are trained to find human scent, that’s the link to their toy. If they find a human they get their toy.”

Gunn carries an emergency grab bag everywhere he goes. “One thing we’ve learned is that even if an avalanche victim is found alive they succumb quickly to hypothermia once they’ve been exposed, so we also carry a thermal heat bag, sleeping bags and tents for overnight shelter.

“We all invest so much time and energy. However, it’s a real privilege to be part of this organisation,” he says.

When Gunn first got involved he thought he’d be saving lives. Turns out that isn’t a common scenario with avalanches, where survival chances diminish quickly.

“On the bright side, I’ve seen that by having the dogs present, especially on the ski fields, we have the ability to get people thinking about safety. Just walking through the car park talking to people, we find the dogs really break down barriers. We also visit schools. I’m passionate about helping people, especially kids, make good choices about safety in the mountains.”

Smith also appreciates the educational value of search dogs. “If we’re up on the mountain, the dog is an icebreaker to get people talking, and that helps us to deliver our safety messages.”

The dogs also help in proactive missions.

“Last Easter, we did a sweep with Steve and Echo through the Tongariro Alpine Crossing each evening. We went up there to help people down, pre-empting any likelihood of them getting caught by dark,” says Smith.

When you’re lost

If we are caught out, what can we do?

Try and stay put, says Signal. “Take a whistle and a spare light as well as your cell phone. In a night search a torch shining into the treetops can be seen from a long distance. A light and a whistle can be the difference between finding and not finding you. And make sure you’ve taken warm clothes.

“Leave your intentions with someone, and if there’s a change, tell them. We had a search for a guy who had been ‘missing’ for 13 days. His intention was to go out for four days and he was found in a hut a day’s walk from where he said he’d be.

“Obviously take a PLB. A Garmin inReach is useful; you can turn your mobile into a satellite phone to get a message out, such as ‘I’m OK but caught by a river’. Or use it after setting off your PLB to send a text message with helpful information for the searchers.”

Martin says to use your phone light. “Even if it’s dark and there’s no coverage, the light of a cell phone can be seen a long way at night from a helicopter. And if you do have a PLB, make sure it’s on your person and not in your pack.”

Matt Gunn says he’s seen many fatalities and the trauma they bring, and the one consistent thing in those situations has been poor decision-making.

“More people are going into the mountains and it’s amazing how many people have no comprehension of the environment they are going into. Recently I spoke to three guys heading into the backcountry from a ski field car park. They planned to share one transceiver, one spade and one probe between them. How was that going to work if the guys with the probe and spade were caught in the avalanche, and not the guy with the transceiver?”

Back at Erua Forest, Tom Donald shed some light on what he would have done differently.

“I would have taken more notice of where I went off the road initially, and looked for distinctive things in the bush I could use to find my way back. It wasn’t that far, but everything just looked the same. If you go off a track, make sure you know how to get back.”