In a story that will assuredly be adapted into a Netflix movie no one knows exists, an avalanche slammed into a couple of mountaineers in Alaska, separating them from their dog. The dog went missing for about 50 hours before Scripps News Group reported it was finally found alive.
This all went down in Alaska’s Chugach State Park when a massive slab of snow engulfed two veteran human climbers and pushed them right off the side of a mountain ridge, sending them tumbling roughly 500 feet and causing severe injuries. Luckily, all they suffered were injuries, as the pair managed to survive, but they were separated from their dog, a four-year-old poodle-husky mix named LouLou, as it vanished into the freezing void of the Alaskan wilderness.
Lauren Padawer, the girlfriend of one of the swept-away climbers, learned of the disaster on Facebook while traveling overseas. After confirming that her partner was one of the affected mountaineers and that he was receiving medical care, she mobilized a digital army of local pet lovers, outdoor enthusiasts, and just general goodhearted folks with access to drones and helicopters.
A Dog’s AirTag Helped Searchers Find Her 50 Hours After an Alaska Avalanche
All that stuff and all that manpower was well and good, but the real hero was a fairly small, relatively inexpensive, yet seemingly invaluable piece of common consumer tech: LouLou’s Apple AirTag. The tracker pinged satellite grids from the mountain, giving aerial search teams a more precise target area to focus on in the blinding sea of snow.
The combination of AirTag and drone-assisted manpower found LouLou about 50 hours after the initial avalanche separated the dog from its owners. LouLou was found standing around in the freezing wilderness just kind of chilling, shockingly uninjured considering that she survived two full days and brutal subzero solitude after getting rammed off a mountain cliff by an avalanche.
All a screenwriter has to do is write in a bear encounter and maybe a friendly rabbit that leads LouLou to safety or something like that, and you’ve got a movie you can toss on your kid’s iPad for an hour and a half of silence.
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