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A Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office K-9 named Archie, known as “Arch,” is being credited with locating three children who wandered away from their family’s campsite near Buena Vista, Colorado. The children, a nine-year-old and two six-year-olds, were part of a large family group from the Denver area camping near the Midland Bike Trail when they went missing around 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 26, 2026.
The family searched for about two hours on their own without success before contacting law enforcement around 11 a.m. Chaffee County Search and Rescue scaled up the response quickly, deploying multiple drones, a helicopter, and several foot patrol teams to search the rugged terrain.
Archie was brought in as well, and almost immediately caught a scent at the campsite using one of the children’s stuffed animals, then began leading searchers into the backcountry.
Arch led his handler and two deputies downhill to a sandy wash, where they found the children’s footprints roughly 1.5 miles from the campsite.
All three kids were found safe and uninjured around 2 p.m., about five hours after they’d first gone missing. “The teams worked amazingly quick and effective to bring these kids back to their worried families,” said Chaffee County Sheriff Andy Rohrich, who also credited the department’s volunteer search and rescue team for the outcome.
My thoughts: What stands out is how much ground, and how much technology, it took to do what Archie’s nose ultimately did.
Drones and a helicopter covered the area from above, but it was a dog working a scent trail from a stuffed animal that actually closed the distance to the children’s footprints.
Rugged backcountry terrain like this is exactly the kind of environment where a K-9’s sense of smell outperforms visual search methods, since dense cover and uneven ground can hide three small kids from the air far more easily than they can hide from a trained nose.
Source: Outside, with additional reporting from Hoodline, KKTV, KJCT8, Denver7, and the Denver Gazette, based on information from the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office
