Tanner Bean stepped over the cliff edge and rappelled down a slope of crumbling rock, as other members of Colorado’s Mesa County Search and Rescue team watched him descend.
After lowering 300 feet, Bean reached a ledge no bigger than a dinner table, jutting from the sheer precipice several hundred feet above the valley floor.
That’s where Bean found Tiny the dog.
“She looked at me like ‘oh my god, oh my god, a human!'” Bean told ܳٲ.“She started wagging her tail and running back and forth. She just seemed so excited.”
Bean, 40, was ecstatic but also worried by the reaction.
“I was like ‘No no no, please don’t fall off this cliff, not now!” Bean added.
It had taken Bean and his SAR teammates six hours to reach Tiny on this cliff edge in a remote corner of the state, several miles outside of the community of Collbran. The group had set out early on the morning of January 2 after receiving an SOS call from Tiny’s owner, a local hunter. The previous day, Tiny, a 20-pound hunting hound, had been tracking a mountain lion across a series of peaks when she had descended the cliff face and become stranded on the ledge. She couldn’t ascend the loose rock, and trying to navigate the descent would be fatal.
SAR officials said that Tiny was wearing a GPS tracker on her collar, which showed her approximate location within the dizzying terrain. Tiny’s owner could see the stranded dog from below with his eyes. Night fell, and the owner realized that Tiny would have to spend the evening on the precipice. The following morning, he called rescuers.
Mesa Search and Rescue, which is based out of Grand Junction, oversees a huge swath of Colorado’s western quarter, and its area of operation includes popular hiking and biking trails outside of Fruita, the Colorado National Monument, and a stretch of the Colorado River that’s beloved by river runners. During the spring and summer, the team fields numerous calls from hikers, cyclists, and boaters.
“Most of our calls are lost hikers or swiftwater rescues,” said Nick Ingalls, 30, one of the other rescuers. “But we will get maybe two or three dog calls each year.”
Fifteen SAR members met at a trailhead near Collbran that morning. Due to the tricky terrain, the group split into two groups to see if they could find the best route to the top of the cliff. The hike in took far longer than they anticipated, as the teams had to trudge through knee-deep snow drifts and navigate tight gullies and washes.
“We were hiking over these ridges that felt like they were made of Frosted Flakes,” Bean said. “You’d take a few steps up and then slide back down.”
It was nearly 4 P.M. when Bean and Ingalls finally located the bluffs above Tiny. Several miles away, SAR members set up a spotting lens to watch the operation unfold. After fixing anchors, Bean descended the cliff, found Tiny, attached her to a specialty dog harness, and lifted her to safety.
Ingalls said that Tiny’s enthusiasm quickly wore off once she got to the top of the mountain. The pads of her feet were bloody and scarred, and she seemed exhausted.
“She acted a lot like a human patient who had been out in the elements,” he said. “So happy at first, and then after the adrenaline wears off, she just laid down.”
They gave Tiny water, but nobody in the rescuing party had brought dog food. Ingalls said he had a single bar of cell service and he texted a friend who is a veterinarian to ask whether the food they had in their packs was safe to feed a dog. In the end, they opened a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and meat sauce and spooned some out for Tiny. She gulped the meal down.
“I’ve never seen a dog happier to eat human food,” Ingalls said.
But the rescue mission wasn’t over yet—the team still had to get Tiny back to their vehicles. At first, Tiny walked beside the rescuers, but she quickly sat down with fatigue. So Bean, Ingalls, and the other SAR team members took turns carrying the 20-pound dog as they rappelled down cliffs, climbed through dense brush, and trudged through snow drifts. After several hours, Tiny’s owner met them on the trail with his horses, and they finished the journey on horseback. It took them four hours to return to their vehicles.
It was dark when Bean and Ingalls finally reached their vehicles and completed the rescue. The total time for the mission was 13 hours—a grueling day of long hikes, technical climbing, and route-finding in the backcountry. Rescue missions for stranded humans often take a fraction of the time—and this one had been to save a 20-pound pooch. But neither Ingalls nor Bean complained about the outing when I spoke to them on a video call in late January.
Bean told me he’d “100 percent” go through the ordeal to save Tiny again. Ingalls agreed.
“I think we try to always try to have empathy and to put ourselves in their situation,” Ingalls said. “Whether it’s a human or a dog, they’re having the worst day of their life, and we get a chance to help them.”