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Ruby York is not scared of helicopters or snowmobiles or ski area chairlifts.  Her owner, Brian "Bumpy" York, on the other hand, is terrified.  He rides the lift with his arms wrapped around the safety bar, and he'd rather not get into a helicopter if Ruby isn't there.  "She calms me down," he says.

Unfortunately for Bumpy, the two of them spend a lot of time in the air. Ruby, a four-year-old golden retriever, is a Colorado-certified avalanche rescue dog, which means that they can be dispatched whenever there is an avalanche with someone trapped in the snow.  They're based out of Arapahoe Basin, which is surrounded by heavily trafficked, slide-prone terrain  that Bumpy has overseen as a ski patroller since 1997.

This morning, Bumpy puts on a red vest stitched with a white cross and rubs sunscreen into his grizzled face.  Then he slides a matching vest over Ruby's head and they go to work.  She waits outside while he has breakfast, then they ride the lift to the top of the mountain together. "Ski patrolling is a really amazing job," Bumpy says. "And being able to bring you best friend every day makes it even better, huh, Ruby-doo?"

Bumpy brought Ruby up on the mountain, stuck in his backpack, when she was just ten weeks old – her first introduction to the years of training that would follow.  Once he got clearance from the resort to train her he started playing hide and seek with her, gradually making the game harder and harder.  By the next winter she could find a person buried under five feet of snow.

To get certified through the Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment program, which works with Flight for Life and local sheriff's departments to run the statewide avalanche dog program, a dog and handler must find two people buried in an area the size of a soccer field within 20 minutes . "It took me two and a half years to get her certified," Bumpy says.

They failed the test on their first try.  Bumpy says that's common, despite how much they had practiced beforehand.  He has a binder filled with records of every practice rescue Ruby did before the test. "I have documentation of over 70 live burials," he says.

To simulate a human burial, dog handlers will dig a shaft five to eight feet deep in the snow and dig out a person-sized compartment at the bottom. Then, a willing human victim wiggles his or her way down into the hole, and the shaft is filled with snow.  The "victim" lies in the icy cave, which is about the size of a mummy-style sleeping bag, until the dog catches the smell and finds the hole.

Human scents penetrate the snow, forming what Bumpy calls a "scent cone," starting out at one point and then spreading out.  He'll take Ruby to the downwind side of the plot and then she'll work her way upwind until she smells something.  Once she does, she'll start digging, and then Bumpy and other avalanche technicians will grab shovels to help out. "I like to let her help dig the person out, " Bumpy says. "That way she gets the satisfaction of finding someone."  Ruby, who doesn't play with toys often, gets one tossed to her when she finds someone.

To keep Ruby on her toes, Bumpy sets up practice scenarios for her almost every day.  Today, he's buried a couple of old gloves in a wind-packed snow bank.  He waits 20 minutes for their smell to permeate the snow, then goes to get Ruby, who's been waiting inside.

Once he clips a leash into her harness, Ruby, who usually gets to roam free, knows it's time for business.  She starts pulling and whining.  
"All right, time to go to work," Bumpy says, and unclips the leash. She gallops off, stops to roll for a few seconds, and then zigzags back towards the drift where the gloves are buried.  She starts digging, hits the glove, and pries it out of the snow with her teeth.  The whole thing takes less than a minute.

Avalanche dogs have never found a fully buried victim alive. After a half an hour of being buried, chances of survival go down quickly. Bumpy says that the calls they go on are either false alarms or body recovery.  But he thinks that there is the potential for it to happen soon. "There are more and more cell phones in the backcountry," he says. "People can alert quicker. We can be flying in 20 minutes."

Ruby finally passed her certification test last spring, right around her third birthday.  She was dispatched to her first avalanche, a false alarm on Loveland pass, in February.  Two snowboarders had triggered the slide, on an area of the pass called "no brain," and had walked away from the scene before a passing car spotted it and called the sheriff .  When Bumpy and Ruby showed up they scanned the area and didn't find anything. "She looked around and was gave me the 'there's nothing here look,'" Bumpy says. "She always wants to find something."

Bumpy and Ruby live in an A-frame house that Bumpy bought in the early '80s when he moved to Summit County to ski on the pro mogul circuit.  An old friend of Bumpy's rents a room in the basement, but they don't see him much.  Pictures of Ruby—as a puppy, standing in front of a helicopter, sitting on a raft in the summer—dot the walls, next to Bumpy's collection of old ski pass pictures.

Bumpy has a girlfriend, but she lives in California and isn't around much.  Mainly, it's just him and Ruby.  The two of them are rarely apart.  In the summer, when Bumpy works construction, Ruby comes with him and hangs out on the jobsite.

In the winter, when she's not training, or dispatched on a call, Ruby spends her workdays hanging out at Arapahoe Basin ski patrol headquarters.  Her dog bed is tucked up under the desk near the radio and phones.

While she's lying under the desk, waiting for her next mission, 12-year-old Brendan Duncan  sticks his head in the door, and immediately beelines for her.  "I might want to be a ski patroller," he says. "But I don't think they make very much money." 
He digs his fingers into the coppery fur around Ruby's neck and she pushes her nose into his knee.  
"This is a cool dog," he says.

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