Help Bring Meadow Home: A Rescue Mission

We are saddened to share that our dog Meadow ran away from our river raft camp last Thursday 4/25. We have been trying everything we can to find her and are so grateful for all the support we have received! The expenses have added up & any help would go a long way in our search!

Funds will help cover the expenses of hiring 2 drone experts, scent sniffing dog, live traps, bait, kayak/raft rental for river transport, lodging, & hopefully a donation to the animal search & rescue organization who is currently helping us. We found fresh tracks from her yesterday and had a sighting of her Saturday as well as several indications she’s alive. We have 1 infrared drone specialist that started working with us last night and another one with a scent sniffing dog starting Saturday!

We were camping overnight on the river on the Moab daily section of the Colorado River. Within a minute, we noticed she was out of sight and quickly realized she had run off following a game trail downstream and may have gotten disoriented. It was around dusk, drizzling & windy, and surrounded with desert canyons and unfamiliar territory.

Within 30 minutes, our neighboring camp said they saw her run by with her nose to the ground heading downstream. Unbeknownst to us until the following day (4/26), they had spotted her running downstream along the river roughly 2 hours after her disappearance from camp, and were unable to get her on their raft.

We immediately had so much help from locals & members of search and rescue and finally spotted her on Saturday (4/27) about 5 miles downstream from camp where she has been stopped by a choke point and is cliffed out. At this point, calling for her only scared her more and she ran away from us which we believed was very unlike her. As we’ve learned in this process, dogs who are lost go into survival mode (flight or fight) and forget their owners and their own name. This was an extremely scary realization as we knew that reuniting with her would take much more effort than physically seeing and finding her. She is alone, scared, and has gone into hiding. We continue to search and over the last few days we have found & confirmed tracks of her paws, which has kept us hopeful.

We have now sought out professional help from a drone pilot and dog rescue/trappers.

This evening, we have hired a drone pilot (Charles Bailey) to use thermal heat technology to pinpoint her exact location, whether she is alive or deceased, this will help us to keep going in hopes of reuniting with her or give us closure to stop this rescue mission.

It has been physically, emotionally, and financially draining and we have been in awe at how much love and support we’ve been receiving from dog lovers, locals, agencies, and professionals.

If we are successful in finding her location via drone and game cameras, we can better place and set live dog traps that will lure her in via food bait.

This is where Trish Anderson comes in, she owns a dog search & rescue/trapping organization out of Salt Lake City, UT. She has volunteered her time to coach us in lost dog behavior, patterns, and how to lure her in/trap her as we will never be successful in physically grabbing her or calling her to us.

We have felt so defeated and hopeless at times but have been fortunate with people reaching out and connecting us with resources that we believe will work.

At this point, we have spent a lot of funds on this unfortunate event and are asking for any help in covering some of these costs, in addition to donating some money to Trisha’s dog rescue. She is a selfless dog lover that does whatever she can to help reunite missing pets with their owners and we would love to shine light on her organization and help her as she’s been a major support for us and many others.

We will continue to keep everyone up to date on our rescue efforts and status and just want to say we are extremely grateful for everyone’s interest & kindness.

Meadow is the sweetest & most loving adventure dog and we miss her so much. She is a huge part of our family & we would love to see her safe & at peace.

We hate asking for help as we’ve already received so much kindness, but at this point we just want to bring meadow home and give back to the kind people that have been helping us.