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Dog rescued off cliff on Thunder Mountain
- Ellie Ruel
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
Bandit and owner spend night on mountainside after marmot-fueled escapade
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Steve Behrns and his 1-year-old husky mix Bandit encountered an unexpected adventure and paths usually only occupied by mountain goats during their evening hike up Thunder Mountain on Tuesday night.
Bandit, who Behrns said can be a bit of a “Houdini” on trails, made his escape shortly after the pair headed back from the summit of the mountain at 7 p.m.
“I had to focus for a few seconds while he was right beside me with his nose in a marmot hole,” Behrns said. “Then I got up and I turned back to look at him, and he was just gone, which blew my mind because I could see in every direction.”
He said he stayed and searched around the area he last saw Bandit for about five hours.
“Because it's such a long hike I didn't want to leave the mountain in case he was there,” Behrns said. “So I hiked down looking there in the basin. I then went back up to the summit and then I went down the mountain on the valley side.”
By that point, Behrns had posted multiple requests for help on social media. People offered to hike up the mountain to search with their dogs and to wait at Behrn’s truck in case Bandit made it down on his own.
“It's really just mind-blowing how the community just mobilized and sprung into action and stepped up, and so many people that I know and don't know went out of their way to do something to help us,” he said. “That's the real positive in the whole experience. That's why I live here, but I didn't realize that that was one of the reasons I lived here till yesterday.”
Behrns received a message saying a dog was howling on the side of the mountain at about 1:30 a.m. When he got to an open area he could hear it too.
“It almost sounded like a mournful wolf howl mixed with dog barks,” Behrns said. “Even though it was dark, when I would come into these open areas, the dog would bark again, and that was the same case in the daytime. And I think it's because he could see me.”
Triangulating Bandit’s exact location proved difficult, since Behrns could hear the howls from near the summit, but people in the valley were convinced he was near the Under Thunder trail lower down.
After climbing up and down the side of the mountain a few times, he found Bandit was on a steep ledge about 2,700 feet up.
“He has climbed mountains with me before, but I don't think he's ever been in that steep a situation, and he was scared and he didn't want to move,” Behrns said. “But I thought, based on his cries throughout the night, which sounded painful, he had different sounds, and I didn't know if a wolf or a bear had got him and was feeding on him. I didn't know if he had tumbled down the mountain and broken limbs, and he couldn't move. But the sound was fixed. He wasn't going anywhere.”
Once the sun rose, Behrns said he had mapped out a route to get to Bandit by approaching the ledge from below and bushwhacking through about 1,000 feet.
“I knew that in getting to him, I was going to be stuck too,” he said. “But I was determined to go get him because when I had been talking with the different rescue organizations, it seemed pretty apparent that they were willing to come get me and not him. And I lost my dog in March suddenly to cancer, and I was not about to lose another one.”
The climb was slick, but Behrns said that Bandit’s cries turning from sad to excited gave him motivation to make the final push.
“I didn't see him until I was 200 feet below him, and I was super surprised to see that he was alert and oriented, standing up, but he was kind of staying put on this ledge,” he said.
Bandit’s excitement upon reuniting with Behrns nearly wiggled the two off the ledge, he said.
“When I reached him, he did his usual happy ‘I haven't seen you in a while’ wiggle dance,” he said. “He almost sent us down the mountain, and that's another reason I knew he couldn't stay there because he just was so excited, and he's only about a year old, so he still has puppy energy, and he almost wiggled us off the mountain. It was a happy moment.”
Soon after, Behrns said the rain intensified and made the already slippery terrain even slicker
After being stuck there for hours, Behrns said Bandit was beside himself and wanted to go down. Behrns decided the safer route was to go back to the summit, since he could feel himself becoming hypothermic and didn’t want to put rescuers at risk to come get him from the ledge. That was complicated by rain that soaked both of them and Bandit’s reluctance about steep mountain goat trails. The rain also disabled the remote for Bandit's training collar.
“It was all loose and sketchy, so I kind of climbed and dragged him up at times, and we made it,” he said.
Juneau Mountain Rescue met them partway down the trail with food and new clothes, and Behrns was treated for hypothermia and hyponatremia. They made it back to the trailhead at about 11 a.m., after over 12 hours on the mountain.
Jackie Ebert, director of operations for JMR, said the organization’s priority is the safety of humans, including their rescue teams.
“In the case of missions that involve rescues for someone lost or injured we often encounter and provide care for dogs during our response, but in general it is the human owners of dogs that are responsible for their care and rescue, when it is needed,” she wrote. “In this case, the individual involved was searching for his dog overnight and eventually found himself in need of assistance — the State Troopers called on JMR to assist the human subject.”
She said JMR would strongly discourage the public from putting themselves in harm’s way to get help for a dog. Ebert recommended that pet owners keep dogs on leash or under strict voice control, and if they find themselves with a lost animal to call Juneau Animal Rescue for advice to minimize risk.
Behrns said he and Bandit took the day to recover. After their adventure, Behrns said he was scraped up and sore from bushwhacking, and Bandit was exhausted.
“Bandit was so exhausted that when I gave him a bully stick when we got home, he just kind of slept on it and didn't eat it,” Behrns said. “He loves bully sticks and devours them right away. It's probably one thing he gets most excited about in life, and he didn't want to eat it.”
Behrns said he’s grateful for all the people who helped him and Bandit safely return, and that the rescuers were willing to put themselves at risk to help him. He noted that he would definitely not have been “climbing like Spider-Man” across the face of Thunder Mountain for fun and if anybody ever wonders what the experience was like, “just don't do it, it's a bad idea.”
“I realized that it was a very hazardous situation that might have put other people at risk, and that's not a position I wanted me or anyone else to be in,” he said. “It's the most intense experience I've ever had, and I never want to have it again.”
Now, he and Bandit are making some adjustments to make sure their hikes don’t turn out as harrowing.
“We're going to give him a different collar with GPS on it and continue working on his training,” Behrns said. “I'll definitely be doing everything I can to make sure he stays by my side, which he generally does. But we found out on this trip that he really likes marmots, and they might take him over the side of a mountain because he didn't know better. But hopefully, he will now.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
