‘Stop at nothing to get her back’: How Kelowna residents rallied to find a lost dog

It was Wednesday evening and Amy Ellett had just finished up a third day of searching for her lost dog, Ruth.

Her beloved 2.5-year-old golden retriever had run off two days earlier, around 12:30 pm on Monday, March 11, after becoming spooked on the trails in Myra-Bellevue Provincial Park.

Ellett had been joined by dozens of friends and strangers in the search for Ruth and they had big things planned for Thursday.

A helicopter was on standby, ready to take Ellett and a friend high above the park to look for the dog with binoculars. A friend was also in contact with BC Parks to get a special permit to fly a thermal drone over the provincial park, which is typically illegal.

“I was going to stop at nothing to get her back,” Ellett told KelownaNow.

But it never came to that, because Wednesday night is when she received a text message from Sam, a semi-mysterious man on horseback with four incredibly-trained German shepherds at his disposal.

Within 24 hours, Ruth would be found and brought back home after spending nearly 80 hours alone in the woods.

Sam is extensively trained in search and rescue and his German shepherds have a similar pedigree when it comes to finding other dogs.

He told Ellett that he was in Myra-Bellevue when Ruth took off on Monday and a bear had run at him. The bear’s smell and presence, he said, is likely what spooked the golden retriever and caused her to take off.

Most importantly, Sam told Ellett that he had been out in the area every day and had spotted Ruth Wednesday afternoon in the KLO Creek area, running toward the Kettle Valley Railway trestles.

All of a sudden, the helicopter and drone were put on the backburner, as Sam had ideas for the search party on Thursday that would ultimately prove successful.

It meant a large search party beginning their day at the KLO Creek trailhead with no distracting noises from above and no other dogs involved, to let Sam’s animals do their work.

Once that search party got going on Thursday, Sam, on horseback with his four dogs in tow, entered the bush from the east in an effort to push Ruth back toward the Myra-Bellevue area.

It was a long and seemingly unsuccessful day initially, but Ellett got the call she had been waiting for around 4:30 pm from a stranger named Doug.

He said he was in the Crawford area and he had spotted Ruth sitting on a ridge line.

"My first question was 'are you pranking me?' because I had been pranked during the week by people saying they had found her,” Ellett explained of when she got the call.

Of course, that call came in one of the rare moments that Ellett was not out searching, as she was home with her terminally ill mother.

But when she confirmed Doug’s sighting was not a hoax, she raced to Myra-Bellevue with a sense of optimism.

She called her long-time friend Sara Muise, who was in the area, told her about Doug’s sighting and let her know she was on the way.

As Ellett powered up the Lost Lake Trail, the same route she took on Monday when Ruth went missing, she got a call back from Muise.

“Sara called in tears saying she had Ruth,” Ellett said, noting that Muise clarified she did not technically have her, but she was 30 feet away from her.

Although Ruth and Ellett walk weekly with Muise and her dog, the scared golden wouldn’t come to Muise, so she simply tried to comfort her until Ellett arrived.

When Ellett made it to their location a short time later, the problem persisted, and not even her favourite treat of peanut butter could lure Ruth toward her mom.

Ellett put the peanut butter on the ground, laid down a few feet away and let her dog approach on her own terms, which she did, creeping slowly toward her until she was within reach.

"When she got a foot or two away from me, I saw it in her eyes; she switched from being a wild feral dog back to being Ruth,” Ellett described.

“She started wiggling and came right over and I grabbed her harness, put her leash on and I just yelled that I had her. My friends that were there all started cheering and clapping."

In the end, Ruth was found at the intersection of the Pink Highway and Vapour trails in Myra-Bellevue, around 400 metres south of where she was eventually wrangled in.

It’s safe to say her journey took her all over the southeast Kelowna backcountry, however, and when the group made it back down to the parking lot, she saw Sam again.

“He had pushed her on Thursday over from KLO Creek and he was up above us when we found her,” Ellett said. “He and his dogs pushed her down onto that ridge line above Pink Highway where Doug saw her.”

Ellett said Sam works on his own and does this kind of work because he simply loves animals, and she will donate some of the money raised by the GoFundMe to him.

Another portion of the money raised by the fundraiser, created by a stranger to help fund the search for Ruth, will be donated to Jan at Lend A Paw Pet Food Foundation, who also significantly helped their efforts while Ruth was missing.

And finally, Ellett will also be donating some of the extra money to the Canadian Cancer Society, a cause that’s vitally important to her after her mom was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer just before Christmas.

Ruth and Ellett live with her mom, and the lovable golden acts as an unofficial therapy dog for the two of them as they navigate through this tremendously difficult time.

"Those four days, all that was going through my head is that I can't lose Ruth and my mom,” said Ellett.

Ellett called the support she received over three-plus days last week “completely heartwarming and overwhelming.”

“When people come together like that...this was literally a miracle that she was found and I think it's because everybody came together and we put all our heads together and all our eyes together and our love together and we found her,” she explained.

While Ruth has received a clean bill of health from the vet and seems rather unphased by her incredible journey, albeit very tired, Ellett says she’s still feeling the effects of the experience.

“I’m the one who’s traumatized,” Ellett said with a chuckle. “I haven’t slept. I’ve woken up every night in a panic, in a full sweat thinking she’s still out there…until I remember she’s still here.”