6 minute read
Teamwork Unleashed: Caroline Upton '88
In 1996, a massive slab of granite plunged down a steep cliff in Yosemite National Park, creating a blast of air that leveled surrounding trees and kicking up a huge dust cloud that darkened the sky. The landslide, which remains one of the park’s worst natural disasters, triggered an extensive search and rescue effort. Caroline Upton ’88 was among those who responded. She had been called out to such operations before, including during a snowstorm on El Capitan, but this landslide marked a significant milestone in Caroline’s search and rescue career. It was the first time she worked with a team that included search dogs.
Today, Caroline is the deputy K-9 coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Search and Rescue Task Force based out of Menlo Park, California. With her black lab, Wawona, and yellow lab, Tulla, she trains two to three times a week in rubble piles, green waste, and other environments to prepare the dogs for potential rescue operations. “It’s truly amazing having a dog as your partner,” she says. “It keeps your ego in check.”
Caroline has been working with search and rescue dogs for about five years, training with and evaluating K-9s and their handlers across the country. Wawona is certified as a “live find” dog, meaning she is trained to find people who may be trapped under debris but still alive. Tulla is certified as a human remains detection dog. Dogs can only be trained in one specialty or the other. Wawona has been with Caroline the longest, but only Tulla has been called to action. “Some dogs may never deploy, even though you train as hard as you do,” Caroline says. “Sometimes that can be a hard pill to swallow, but you make sure that you’re always ready and that your dog is always prepared, strong, and healthy.”
At the Menlo Park training facility, Caroline and her fellow canine handlers take turns hiding among piles of rebar, cars, and an overturned bus, waiting in head-totoe protective gear for the dogs to sniff them out. In some scenarios, the person is in a specific, confined space. In others, they are buried and the dog has to pick up their scent and tunnel in. “I know it sounds crazy, but I like the confined spaces,” Caroline says. The dogs enjoy the work as much as she does. She describes them as hardworking, outgoing, fearless, and just plain happy. “I’m so lucky I was able to get these two dogs and take them through the system,” she says.
Caroline relentlessly pursued the search and rescue life. After earning a bachelor’s degree in education from University of the Pacific, she started working at Yosemite as an environmental education instructor. She also earned certification as an emergency medical technician, and later as a paramedic, and became trained in wilderness medicine. With these skills in her back pocket, she sought out a place on the Yosemite search and rescue team but was turned away because she didn’t have any climbing experience. “If I hadn't had strength of character and perseverance, maybe that would have been it,” Caroline says. But undeterred, she spent the next year and a half going to every open training available. “Finally the team members said, ‘She shows up to these meetings more than we do, let her on,’” she recalls. And they did. Caroline says the all-girls environment at Santa Catalina helped foster that drive within her. “Catalina provided a super strong base from which to leap and take chances,” she says. “It’s in my nature to not give up easily, but the environment of support allowed me to develop my strengths … and helped that process along.”
Caroline has also volunteered for international relief organizations, including Relief International, for which she provided medical care after the tsunami in Sri Lanka, earthquakes in Pakistan and Peru, and Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. “I found that the bigger the disaster, the bigger the chaos, the more patients that needed assistance, the better I was. That’s where my strong suit was,” Caroline says. The Pakistan earthquake, in particular, hammered home how much she values being in the first wave of disaster response. She says her two teenage sons have adopted the same proactive stance toward disasters. “If they see a disaster that happens on television, instead of just saying, ‘Oh, that’s horrible,’ they will sell cookies or do a lemonade stand to raise money,” she says. “They feel like they have the power to respond and do something. That’s my proudest moment as a parent, seeing my children learn from me.”
The call to service is something Caroline says she developed at Santa Catalina. One of her first memories of community outreach was handing out food baskets at Thanksgiving. “I found it so rewarding, stepping outside of yourself,” she says. “Catalina set me on that path, which has kept getting bigger and bigger.” Another value she carries with her is teamwork—in fact, it’s her favorite part of search and rescue. Caroline played field hockey, soccer, and tennis at Catalina, and participated in theatre productions. These experiences taught her about the give and take of a successful team. Reflecting on her time with Yosemite search and rescue, she notes that as experienced climbers taught her how to climb, she was able to teach them about field medicine. Teamwork, she says, is about creating “a safe environment to show your areas of weakness” so that everyone can support each other.
In that same spirit, Caroline is passionate about welcoming more women into the search and rescue world and hopes to model for them that it can be done. “I think inherently the women that choose this type of career put a lot of pressure on themselves to make sure they’re not only performing at the level that everybody else is performing, but also at the top of their game,” she says. “… If someone comes up through the ranks, I want to be supportive of them.”
Cover photo by Wise Kg Photography
