All in a Day’s Work

It was mid-July, and a Montana Wilderness Association trail crew was on its sixth day of a ten-day trail project in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area about ten miles into the backcountry. Hauling bags of gravel from a nearby creek for filling a turnpike on Bowl Creek Trail, a connector to the Continental Divide Trail, the crew was about to go on break when two cocker spaniels approached along the trail. No one thought too much of seeing the two dogs. Everyone figured the owners would be trailing along shortly. They never showed.

It was clear that the dogs had been alone for some time. Their paws cut and sore, they hobbled and shivered. Quickly, the crew gathered the food they had on them—granola, bagels, and other items the dogs could safely eat. The dogs wolfed down every bit they could get and lapped vigorously at the creek water the crew scooped into their hard hats.

One of the dogs still had on her collar with a tag that said “Molly.” The other was missing her collar.

Abby and Molly, soon after being rescued

“They were really happy to see us and really happy we had food,” says Sonny Mazzullo, the crew’s co-lead and field coordinator for CDT Montana, a MWA program that stewards the Montana section of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. “They begged all the time after that.”

Since the nearest trailhead was about ten miles away, Sonny assumed something bad had happened to the dogs’ owners. Why else, he thought, would the dogs be alone if the owners weren’t in some kind of distress?

“It seemed out of the realm of possibility that these dogs had come all that way on their own,” he says.

Judging by the dogs’ poop, the crew members were fairly certain the dogs had been surviving on grass. Now safe among people, the dogs refused to walk any longer on their battered paws. Backcountry horseman and CDT Montana volunteer Greg Schatz fashioned a solution for getting them back to camp: He put each dog in a gravel bag and attached the bags to the saddle of one of his horses.

“There were no complaints from the dogs,” Sonny says. “They were too tired to fight it.”

When the crew returned to camp, crew co-leader Nick Burkland radioed the Schaefer Meadows Ranger Station and reported finding the dogs. The ranger called the number on Molly’s dog tag and later reported back that he had reached the dogs’ owners.

It turned out that both dogs had been missing from the owner’s cabin, on the other side of the Continental Divide and about 11 miles and 1,800 feet below the crew’s location, since July 2. It was now July 14.

The owners were unable to hike in to gather the dogs, and the CDT crew still had four days left on their project. For the remainder of the project, each of the crew members took turns staying with the dogs at camp as the dogs rested on horse saddle pads and recovered from their paw injuries. Still shivering, the dogs stayed warm wrapped in raincoats. At night they slept with Sonny in his tent.

On the day the crew headed back to the trailhead, the dogs' paw wounds still hadn’t healed completely. And so they again rode in the gravel bags, this time hanging from a pole that two crew members could together carry. Before long, Molly was scrambling to get out, obviously well enough now to hike out on her own. The other dog, however, enjoyed the ride.

Left: CDT Montana crew with dogs, standing (l to r): Tracy Mikesell, Nick Burkland, Doug MacCartney, Sonny Mazzullo, Craig Bacino, John Beard. Kneeling (l to r): Matt McDonald, David Morey, Megan Schulze. Right: Co-leader Mazzullo and volunteer MacCartney carrying Abby after finishing trail project in the Bob Marshall.

As the crew hiked out, they noted wolf tracks on the trail and marveled all over again that these two dogs had survived two weeks alone among grizzlies, black bears, mountain lions, and other predators in the Bob Marshall.

One of the dogs’ owners was waiting at the trailhead when the crew arrived. She informed the crew that the name of the dog who had lost her collar was Abby and that she was Molly’s mother. Overjoyed to see the dogs she didn’t think she’d ever see again, she insisted the crew accept the $500 reward she and her partner had posted for finding Molly and Abby. The crew unanimously decided the money was best spent as a donation to MWA and our CDT Montana program.

Donate now and help us steward the CDT in Montana.

– Ted Brewer, MWA's communications manager