Floodwaters Trapped Dozens of Pets Inside Abandoned Homes — Then a Rafting Crew Waded Through Quicksand to Reach Them

Ryan Dudgeon came up out of the quicksand to her waist, her raspberry-pink drysuit caked in desert mud, still hauling a 14-foot inflatable raft behind her.

This was not a river. It was a street in Farmington, New Mexico, on October 23 — the morning after historic flooding tore through the Four Corners, swallowing neighborhoods, pushing homes off their foundations and forcing thousands of people to flee. Most of them had gotten out. Many of their animals had not.

For a few frantic days, the people who came for those animals were not a government agency or a national charity. They were a small crew of whitewater guides from a summer rafting business that had already closed for the season. And by the end, the strangest emergency shelter in San Juan County was holding more than 45 dogs — until the water came looking for it too.

The Off-Season Crew Nobody Called First

Ryan, 41, and her husband Cody, 46, own Desert River Guides, a Farmington company that runs trips down the Animas and San Juan Rivers from May through October. Both have lived in Farmington their whole lives. Neither had ever seen anything like this.

“We aren’t used to natural disasters here,” Ryan told Outside. “None of us know what to do because we’ve never dealt with something like this.”

The numbers explain why. The Dudgeons usually float the San Juan at around 500 cubic feet per second. During the peak of the flood, it surged to 33,500 in Farmington. Longtime residents compared it to the great floods of October 1911, and the water rose so violently that rumors spread through town that a dam had broken. None had. The rivers had simply exploded.

What the couple did have was 20 years of swiftwater experience, drysuits and boats. “We are the only ones in the county qualified to do anything like this, aside from Search and Rescue,” Ryan said.

Their first instinct was people. They set out to reach a grandmother and her baby who were stranded on a roof, according to KOAT, but by the time they got there the pair had already been evacuated. Others, Ryan told reporters, had been up on rooftops for what she believed was more than 12 hours. “We need to just go get a raft and go see if we can go get them,” she said. “If it was me and my children, I would want somebody to try.”

Locked Doors, Rising Water

Then, that afternoon, the phone calls changed. Families who had escaped were calling about the pets they had left behind — dogs shut inside houses, animals in corrals and kennels with the water climbing.

“People needed help,” Ryan said. “People were scared. They left their homes, but they also left their pets locked inside their houses, which is why we went out.”

So they went. Where the water was deep, they paddled. Where it wasn’t, they walked the flooded streets and towed the raft behind them, through mud, debris and the kind of ground that grabs a leg and won’t let go. “We hiked over, sucked in quicksand,” she told KOB 4. “It was quite treacherous to get there, but we’re able to get the animals out and then up to their owners.”

Not every call ended well. Ryan remembered trying to reach a goat farm, close enough to hear the animals bleating in the distance. The crew could not get to them, and the herd drowned. Dead pigs, horses and goats drifted through the streets alongside wrecked furniture and logjams.

“There were dead animals everywhere,” she said. “People were calling us, and we went out with our boats and gear, and we spent two days trying to rescue animals in rafts and float people out. Just as much as we could help, just as much as we were allowed to do.”

A Rafting Shop Turns Into an Ark

The rescued animals needed somewhere to go. With guidance from the Farmington Regional Animal Shelter and the City of Farmington, the Dudgeons cleared out their commercial warehouse — the place where the rafts and gear live — and filled it with crates.

At one point, Ryan said, more than 45 dogs were inside, along with a handful of chickens, rabbits, cats and other animals. One pet owner called it “Noah’s Ark-ish, minimal style.” Ryan put it more simply: “We have kittens and puppies all over the place.”

Then, at about 10 p.m. that Friday, just as everything was finally in order, officials called. The shop was under an immediate flood watch.

“We moved out all of our rafts onto the bus, and started moving animal crates in,” Ryan said. “And then all of a sudden, after we got everything perfectly set up, officials called us around 10 p.m. on a Friday night.”

The animals had already been carried out of one disaster. Now they had to be evacuated again.

The Night the Town Showed Up

What happened next is the part Ryan keeps coming back to. Friends and colleagues called, then simply arrived, and helped move every crate and every animal to another building on higher ground. The city brought in a berm and sandbags around the warehouse.

They were right to hurry. The next morning, Ryan said, up to four inches of rain fell in about ten minutes. “I have my whole life in that building,” she said. “Rain was just pouring down the hills, all toward our shop and river. The river was breaching its banks.”

The berm held. The building stayed dry, Ryan told KOB 4 — and the animals were already safe somewhere else.

“It was just the most incredible community involvement, and I will never be able to thank these people enough,” she said.

Some of the rescued pets have since gone home to their families. Others are still waiting while their owners dig out homes buried in mud. The Farmington Regional Animal Shelter has asked for pet food, supplies and volunteers to walk the dogs. “For right now, we’re here as long as there’s a need,” a shelter representative, Galt, told KOAT.

“Best Float of My Life”

When she isn’t pulling dogs out of floodwater, Ryan is a fourth-grade teacher and a mother of two, and when school reopened she had a different job in mind. “I’m just going to try to make my kids’ lives feel as normal as possible,” she said.

“It’s a rafting company, and now it’s a rafting company turned into an animal shelter,” she said. She has not yet talked Cody into adopting any of the displaced animals. But the river that wrecked their town has already changed their business: after studying how the flood reshaped the channels, Desert River Guides plans to launch four-day trips on the San Juan from Shiprock to the Four Corners next summer.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, the couple found time to do the one thing river people do. They took a boat out on the Animas at its record-breaking flow, just for fun.

“I will tell you,” Ryan said, “best float of my life.”