Dog rescues after fall off cliff
Published: January 19, 2007
A rock-climbing firefighter rescued a dog from a quarry ledge after it fell off a cliff while hunting raccoons with its owner.
The coonhound named Slick had been tracking a raccoon near the edge of the quarry Saturday when he fell over the side, said the dog’s owner, Albert Ashcraft of Mooresville.
Cloverdale Township Firefighter Doug Ehman, an amateur rock climber, brought his equipment to the site north of Cloverdale, about 40 miles west of Indianapolis. He descended the sheer face of the quarry wall when, about 12 feet down, he stumbled onto a small ledge with a narrow crevice extending into the wall. Inside the crevice was Slick, a bit bewildered but uninjured.
The ledge had stopped Slick from falling about 50 feet to the bottom of the quarry.
“He was pretty happy to see me,” Ehman said.
Ehman used rope to fashion a makeshift harness for the dog and tie it to his own body before other firefighters hoisted the pair back up to the cliff.
Ashcraft and Slick are headed to Alabama next month to compete in a hunt.
“When you have one of these dogs since they’ve been a pup, they become part of the family, he said. “If he had fallen all the way down, I don’t know if he would have made it.”
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