Doggone it, LCHS students get life-saving education

COEUR d’ALENE — The hairy, happy golden retriever sat at the feet of a young student in the dark classroom and licked the sophomore’s hand in splendor, taking in each joyous pat of her head. The retriever — appropriately named Bliss — stretched her smile warmly across her face, seemingly ready to provide a much-needed greeting to strangers at a moment’s notice.

Bliss is not just any attention-craving dog roaming the streets of Coeur d’Alene. She is trained — well-trained, in fact — by Kootenai County Search and Rescue to seek out stray hikers under the most dire of circumstances, leading search parties on their urgent quests to save lives.

Friday morning, Bliss joined three other animals on a field trip to Lake City High School to teach students about the virtues and skill sets Search and Rescue dogs bring to the mission. Karen Kelly is Bliss’s handler and a five-year veteran of Kootenai County Search and Rescue, a volunteer division of the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office.

“The Sheriff’s Department has been so supportive of this program,” Kelly said. “They understand the importance of outreach, and they understand the importance of young people knowing these skills and how they can save lives.”

Kelly and a handful of volunteers spent Friday in Lake City’s Survival Science course, one of the few public high school classes in the country dedicated specifically to wilderness and outdoor survival. Teacher Chris Slife said the class is integral to more closely interacting with Idaho’s way of life.

“If you live in North Idaho,” Slife said, “there’s a good chance you’re going to find yourself in the woods at some point. And if you enjoy hiking and the outdoors, it’s critical to know these skills.”

The skills Slife teaches in class — which any Lake City student can take, regardless of grade — focus on simple instructions for outdoor survival, such as building fires and crafting makeshift shelters. The basic nature of the lessons, Slife said, has less to do with success in the classroom and more to do with success in life-and-death situations.

“When your body is stressed, you revert back to basics,” he said. “You revert back to what you know. This class teaches you to prioritize your needs under stressful conditions and focus on what really matters — staying safe and staying alive.”

Furthermore, he said his class also provides students the tools to one day join in search parties and help their community.

The curriculum for Kootenai County’s nearly 70 rescue volunteers — and the dogs — is more nuanced. The dogs, varying in breeds but sharing boundless energy, must all be at least 1 year old before they begin a training program. Dogs certified under the National Search Dog Alliance, a nationwide organization that standardizes and evaluates canines for Search and Rescue teams, do not train for a wide variety of skills. Quite the contrary, they specialize in specific avenues of potential search operations, such as avalanches, wide-area searches and trail scents.

Handlers, meanwhile, study exhaustively under sophisticated contemporary fields, such as search theory and hiker behavior. When volunteers are called out, they put those studies to use with the help of modern tools, including GPS tags on their dogs.

“This allows us to study our dogs’ behavior and movement more easily,” Kelly said, “while also clearing areas so we don’t go over the same terrain in our searches.”

While the curriculum is filled with different lessons, Kelly strenuously reminds students, hikers and others who might someday get lost one important instruction about the team’s dogs.

“The nose knows,” she said. “If you stay in one place, the dogs will find you.”

Slife agrees, adding that students learn one lesson from his class above all else.

“They learn hope,” he said. “If you have the skills to stay calm and stay safe, and you utilize the tools this class teaches, you can give yourself enough hope until help arrives.”