The days of firefighters climbing trees to rescue cats are mostly in the past, but on Thursday officers from the Camas-Washougal Fire Department completed the increasingly rare animal rescue.
The department was alerted early Thursday morning that a dog was barking from somewhere downhill from the intersection of Northwest Ostenson Canyon Road and Northwest 18th Loop in Camas. They arrived around 9:30 a.m. and after two hours, pulled the dog to safety using a makeshift harness.
“We don’t have equipment specific to a dog as far as harnesses,” said James Tierney, one of two officers with the department who went down into the steep canyon to rescue the animal. “We had to improvise to make a harness for a dog out of some webbing. We would’ve have more resources and more ropes going down (for a person).”