On August 13 a group of volunteers successfully returned from a trip to rescue a dog that had been abandoned on Mt. Bierstadt. The rescuers included Scott Washburn, Amanda Washburn and Christoph Tomford, a fourth year environmental science student at CMU.

“I was surprised to find her alive, frankly,” Tomford said. “The entire way down I imagined this not going the way that we wanted because it had been so long. She had seemed restless and somewhat aggressive, but we gave her some water and food and she relaxed a bit.”

The owner of the dog is Anthony Ortolani, who left his dog after bad weather caused hikers to veer off the mountain.

“Hi all, I am the owner of the German shepherd girl found on Mt. Bierstadt,” Ortolani said on 14er.com. “I called 911, the sheriff’s office and search and rescue and I was told that it was too risky for them to send rescue crew up there for a dog.”

Amanda Washburn and her husband Scott were hiking the 14,000-foot-high mountain near Guanella Pass on August 11 when they came across a German shepherd they would later find out was named Missy.

In an attempt to help her off the mountain, Scott and Amanda discovered her paws were badly injured and she was too big to carry. They turned to 14er.com, a website for those interested in hiking Colorado’s 14,000 foot mountains. In the message they noted that the dog was “injured and appeared to have been there several days.”

Immediately, the thread gained attention and support. A group of eight volunteers formed and after an attempt to find her Sunday proved unsuccessful, they were able to get her off the mountain the next day.

The dog was wrapped in tarp, secured in a backpack and carried down the mountain through a blizzard. She was taken to a local veterinarian after the nine-hour recovery.

Tomford and the rest of the volunteer rescue group started calling the dog Lucky, “because we were lucky, lucky to find her alive,” he said.

The owner played no part in the rescue and faces criminal charges for leaving Missy stranded on the mountain.

“I’ll admit that while trying to get off of the mountain I was not as concerned because I was focused on making it safely off of the mountain,” Ortolani wrote. “But once I was safely at my car I was overwhelmed with the loss, and the decision to leave her there,”

Ortolani now faces animal cruelty charges by the Cedar Creek County Sheriff’s office and is set to go to trial October 16.