“He was funny because I couldn’t see her without my binoculars, and he said he knew the ‘dot’ was an animal because he’s never seen that dot there before.”
An elderly man was having his morning coffee outside his motorcycle shop one day when he noticed something unusual on a cliff in the distance. He quickly concluded that the tiny speck he was seeing was actually a stuck animal in need of help, so he contacted the Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region (HSPPR), and they sent two animal law enforcement officers to check it out.
The officers couldn’t see the dog without a little extra help, but the man never had any doubt that she was there and desperately needed help.
“He was funny because I couldn’t see her without my binoculars, and he said he knew the ‘dot’ was an animal because he’s never seen that dot there before,” Officer Kailie Barker told The Dodo.
The dog was stuck on a small ledge about 150 feet above a creek. They weren’t sure how long she’d been there and immediately started coming up with a plan to rescue her.
“It took two and a half hours total to be able to find out exactly where she was, how we were going to get to her, obtaining the equipment and formulating an exact plan,” Barker said.
The officers were able to obtain some climbing gear, and once they were ready, Barker rappelled down to the stuck dog — who was so excited that someone had finally come to help her.
“She was obviously very scared. She had her body pressed into the dirt, she was wagging her tail quickly and was trying to crawl towards us when she very first saw us,” Barker said. “The dirt kept sliding out from under her, but she kept trying. When I was down on the cliffside with her, she tried crawling towards me again. When I finally got to her, she kept licking my hands and face.”
Once the dog had been brought to safety, they read her collar and discovered that her name was Jessie Lee. They took her back to HSPPR, where the staff was able to find her family’s contact information. It turns out she had been missing for two weeks and was found only a few blocks away from her home. Her family had searched for her every single day and was absolutely overjoyed that someone had found her.
Luckily, Jessie Lee wasn’t injured after her ordeal and was able to head home to her family shortly after being rescued. It was the perfect happy ending, all thanks to the officers who rescued her — and the man who knew that tiny speck in the distance was actually a dog.