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Show STORY BY TAYLOR STOCKING, PHOTOS BY CONOR BARRY I 'm in a cold, dark hole. Everywhere I look there is at least a foot of packed snow. I hear a crunch as Kyle Gilbert, a ski patroller at Solitude Mountain Resort, puts down another block, then another. Then he shovels on loose snow to fill in the cracks. Each time he does, it gets a little darker inside the hole. By the time he's finished, the small amount of light seeping through the snow has turned everything a haunting shade of blue. I take off my glove and pull my phone from my pocket to compose a tweet, because it's 2014, and if it's not on the Internet then it never really happened. "Everything okay in there?" The voice of Heidi Gilbert, a senior in communication and an intern at Solitude's marketing department, crackles through my radio. I respond in the affirmative, and the radio falls silent again. Heidi and Kyle have been married for five years, they live close enough to the resort that they commute on skis, and they have a badass German Shepherd named Bridger. Bridger is nine-years-old, which is old for an avalanche dog. Training usually begins while still in puppyhood, but Bridger was already four when he started. The coolest thing about Bridger — and all avalanche dogs, for that matter — is that he doesn't even know he's working. "It's basically almost a big game of hide and seek," Kyle Gilbert says. There are four stages to training an avalanche dog. During stage one, a handler holds the dog back while "Daddy" teases it, then Daddy runs away and jumps into an open hole. The handler lets it go, and when the dog finds Daddy in the hole it gets rewarded (some dogs are trained using play as a reward, some with food). Stage two is the same as stage one, except the hole's entrance is covered up. Stage three is where things start to get a little complicated. The dog has to learn to find other people hidden under the snow, not just Daddy. This time, Daddy starts out buried in the hole and another handler is brought in. Just like during the first two stages, the handler teases the dog and then runs and jumps into a hole. This way, Kyle Gilbert says, the dog learns to find any human scent under the snow, that "it's not just Dad that's gonna give him a reward." During stage four they pull the switcheroo. Daddy holds the dog while another handler teases it and then hides in a hole. Once a dog reaches this stage the difficulty gets increased little by little. The tease gets taken away, handlers get buried deeper and deeper, and more than one handler gets buried at once. "The goal is for them to recognize a human scent in the snow and want to dig after that," Kyle Gilbert says. Basically, whenever Daddy says "search," the dog knows 6 magazine / |