Karrie and Vern Dunham, top-ranked equestrians from Nevada County, had traversed many California trails on their beloved Arabians, but they had never been to the Point Reyes National Seashore. The spectacular Coast Trail ride was high on their bucket list.
On June 25, they started off early at the Palomarin Trailhead, near Bolinas, and rode on the bluff high above the Pacific, taking in the spectacular view. All went well until they turned inland and reached Bass Lake, where Chaco, Karrie’s handsome 20-year-old gelding, tumbled more than 30 feet into a ravine.
It took seven hours, about 20 first responders and a highly trained veterinarian to extricate him from the tangle of trees, rocks, roots and brambles below.
“This was far and away the most complicated horse rescue we’ve ever responded to,” said Michael St. John, leader of the Marin Sheriff’s search and rescue unit. “There was a very high degree of complexity and difficulty.”
The Dunhams, retirees from Penn Valley, emerged from the ordeal deeply grateful for the skilled first responders who came to their aid but concerned about the state of the seashore’s trails.
“There’s got to be a way to ensure that the parks remain safe for everybody,” said Karrie, who hopes their mishap calls attention to the need for better trail maintenance. “I hope we didn’t fall in vain.”
There was no barrier at the spot where Chaco tumbled, she said, and no warning signs.
Without cell phone service, the Dunhams had no way to call for help. Eventually, a couple of passing hikers managed to call 911 when they returned to base. Given the remote location and difficult access, it took several hours for help to arrive.
Few who saw Chaco trapped in the wet, muddy gully—legs up and torso contorted—imagined they would get him out alive. He weighs more than half a ton, and the grade was steep.
“I did not see a good outcome,” said Meg Gould, a Bolinas firefighter and one of the first to arrive at the scene last Tuesday. “It just seemed impossible to get him out of there.”
The Dunhams had been planning to stop at Bass Lake for lunch. They paused in a boggy area where water trickled down the trail, which looked perfectly solid, if just a few feet from the lip of the ravine.
“Our boys wanted a drink,” recalled Karrie, who was riding in the lead. “My horse bent down and put one foot behind to steady himself, and the ground gave way.”
Chaco’s hindquarters fell into a sinkhole, with Karrie in the saddle. She suddenly found herself staring straight up at the sky—chest up and perpendicular to the trail. Chaco clung to the edge with his front legs, but the ground didn’t hold beneath him.
“Jump! Jump! Jump!” Vern yelled, as Karrie freed herself from the saddle and flung herself into a jumble of poison oak, stinging nettles and mud.
As she leapt from the horse, she tossed Vern a safety rope, and Chaco tried to push his way out of the sinkhole, only to slide further down the steep grade. “He ended up going head-first, almost Indiana Jones-style, down into the ravine.”
Karrie has owned Chaco for eight years, and aside from Vern, he is her best friend. Now, each time he tried to scramble back up to the trail, he slid back farther, several feet at a time. He wound up wedged in an S-shaped turn in the gulley, where he came to rest on his side in the mud, four inches deep in very cold water. With trees and brush crisscrossing the ravine, it was impossible to see anything more than the tip of his nose.
“It was horrific,” Karrie said. “He’s my baby. He’s my heart horse. He’s a special boy.”
Holding onto the safety rope, Vern eventually slid to the bottom of the ravine with him. He tried pulling him up, to no avail.
“Each time Chaco thrashed, he’d wind up in a new position,” Karrie said. “He was upside down, then right side up, then backwards. He’d rest, and then he’d try again.”
At one point, Vern later told her, Chaco appeared to be folded in half. Vern began clearing the stinging nettles, poison oak and branches blocking their way, while trying his best to soothe Chaco and coax him up the incline. His arms were bloodied.
Back on the trail, Vern’s horse, an Arabian named Rabba, whinnied and neighed in distress. Karrie fought back tears and tried her best to hold it together.
“I had to remain calm, because Rabba was calling for Chaco, and Chaco was trying to call back to him. The last thing we needed was for them to get hysterical.”
They didn’t.
“This was a really exceptionally well-trained horse, and I think that really contributed to the outcome,” Sierra Frisbee, a park ranger who assisted in the rescue, said of Chaco. “He was remarkably well behaved for the situation that he was in.”
Before first responders arrived on the ground, a rescue helicopter appeared overhead. A man rappelled down, mistakenly thinking that Karrie had been trapped beneath the horse and needed medical attention. He urged her to leave, but she refused.
“I’m fine. I’m not leaving my horse,” she told him.
By the time the search and rescue team arrived at around 3:30 p.m., Chaco had been stuck in the gully for about four hours. It would take about seven more before the books were closed on the operation shortly before midnight.
His body temperature was dropping fast in the cold water that had pooled around him at the bottom of the ravine.
As soon as the 911 call came in, dispatchers notified the Marin Humane Society, which sent Teresa Crocker, a large animal veterinarian from Santa Rosa who has trained extensively in rescuing trapped animals.
“I was raised by a Shetland pony and horse is my first language,” said Dr. Crocker, who roped her way down to Chaco and was deeply concerned by what she found. He appeared to be going into shock.
“He was basically in a grave, both physically and metaphorically,” she said. “He’s hypothermic. He’s unable to move anything except his eyelids.”
She tried her best to soothe him. “Hey, buddy, how are you doing? You got this, buddy. You got this.”
With her back to the cliff, she nudged Chaco’s head upward. “He looked like he was stuck in the birth canal of a horse. His head and legs were turned the wrong way.”
She would have to extricate him as she would a colt from a mare.
Dr. Crocker got his head and neck out of the water and over the top of his front legs to facilitate airflow to his lungs. She applied acupressure to get his circulation going, repositioned his limbs and used a large syringe to squirt Karo syrup into his mouth.
“If your blood sugar is crashing, and somebody gives you a soda, it feels good, right? I gave him a little jolt, and after he got a little taste, his tongue started going.”
She cleared mud from his left eye, which had been scratched, applied some antibiotic ointment and put some safety goggles on him.
“I’ve done a dozen extractions,” she said. “This one required pretty much every drop of training and experience I have.”
While she attended to Chaco, the search and rescue team set up a system of ropes and pullies to help hoist him to safety. The Bolinas firefighters had begun clearing a zig-zagging trail through the ravine, but more work remained.
“They needed multiple chainsaw batteries,” Dr. Crocker said. “Some of the logs they had to cut were larger than my torso.”
At one point, when things were looking especially grim, Karrie heard a first responder say something about retrieving a firearm in case they needed to euthanize Chaco.
“If you do, you better bring two bullets, because you’re going to have to shoot me,” she told him. “There’s no way I’m letting you do that to my horse. He’s going down fighting, and we’ll fight with him.”
They wouldn’t need the gun.
After Dr. Crocker repositioned Chaco, the team slipped a rescue sled beneath his body and wrapped orange netting around him, packaging him into place. Using a J-hook, they attached one rope to the sled and a second one to a strap they had carefully wrapped around his torso, just behind his front legs.
“Think of it as having two handles on your grocery bag,” Dr. Crocker said.
The team would pull him a few feet, reposition the slide, and pull him a few more, leapfrogging their way up the grade. At the very top, there was a sharp, vertical 2-foot rise. Before they tried to hoist Chaco over it, Dr. Crocker gave him a small dose of a short-acting sedative. The rescuers were in a precarious position and could have been endangered if he struggled.
They mustered all their energy to lift him over, and when they did, cheers erupted. But there was still more work to do.
The first responders moved the sled away from the cliff to a wider, more solid stretch of trail. Then they unwrapped the netting and removed other equipment from the board.
Dr. Crocker placed Chaco in the sternal position—on his chest, with his rear legs splayed out behind him and his front legs stretched out in front. This would make it easier for him to get up when the drugs wore off. When he came to, all it took was a one-arm assist to help him get back on his feet.
He took a few steps, wobbling like a newborn colt. He had no broken bones—just a cracked tooth and a scratched cornea. But there were still three miles to walk. The sun was setting and the horse was exhausted. They weren’t sure he would make it.
By this point, Vern had taken Rabba back to Five Brooks Ranch, the Dunhams’ base camp during their visit to the seashore. He waited in their horse trailer, with an unopened six-pack of Pacificos by his side and no way of communicating with Karrie. He was unsure if she would return before sunrise.
But at around 9 p.m., he heard a car pull into the camp. It was Ms. Gould, from the Bolinas Volunteer Fire Department. She had heard the radio traffic when the team finally pulled Chaco all the way out of the ravine—a feat that struck her as a miracle after what she’d seen hours before.
“He’s out!” Vern heard her shout.
They drove back to Palomarin and started up the trail to meet Chaco, who was making his way a few careful steps at a time with Karrie, Dr. Crocker and three first responders casting light with their headlamps.
The horses met about a mile from Palomarin, at a bridge that Chaco was reluctant to cross—until Rabba led him over. When they arrived at the trailhead, they packed the horses into the trailer, counted their blessings and headed to Petaluma, where Dr. Crocker arranged for a vet to treat Chaco.
At Petaluma Equine, Chaco was hooked up to an I.V. and his vitals were monitored overnight. When he was stabilized, the Dunhams drove their trailer to the Whole Foods parking lot, got a few hours of sleep and a free cup of coffee.
By last Thursday, they were back in Penn Valley. They spent the weekend processing their ordeal and shedding more than a few tears. Vern, who is 71, and Karrie, who is 65, have been married for 45 years. He worked for PG&E as a gas man for three decades and she spent her career working with developmentally disabled young men. They’ve owned Chaco and Rabba for eight years, and only learned after purchasing them that the geldings shared the same grandfather.
The Dunhams are very happy to see their boys back together, and they are grateful to the first responders who made their reunion possible.
The team attributes its success to training. Several members had trained with ResQFAST and the HALTER Project, which prepare first responders for complex scenarios involving large animals, and had practiced at the Morgan Horse Ranch last August.
“Here we were, applying that training in the real world, and we really had a great foundation for sorting out our options, the tools at our disposal and how to ensure everyone’s safety,” Ms. Frisbee said.
First responders at the scene praised the Dunhams for keeping their cool throughout the ordeal. “The horse did nothing wrong. The riders did nothing wrong,” said Ms. Gould, who is a professional horse trainer. “Horses often stop to drink there. There needs to a railing there to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Chaco will need some work on his tooth, she said, and some Lasik surgery for his eye, but his prognosis looks good.
“He’s going to be a very brave boy and get back out on the trail, though never again in Point Reyes,” Karrie said.