Following a month frantically searching for his lost dog, Alma resident Larry Osborne acknowledged that he had given up hope of ever finding Chloe after she disappeared on popular Colorado 14er Mount Bross.
As the owners of the nearby South Park Saloon, he and his wife, Anouk Patel, put the entire town on alert that the 14-year-old lab-pit bull mix went missing the fourth week of August. The year-round population of about 300 people kept an eye out, but as the five-week mark passed since she vanished, no one expected that they’d ever see her again.
“I’d told our son the dog had died,” said Osborne, who held a memorial for Chloe in late-September. “I mean, how the hell could anyone survive that?”
But remarkably, on Sept. 22, she finally made it home. The 90-pound hound had dropped nearly two-thirds of her body weight, her nose had gone white and her coat pale, but it was definitely Chloe. She was rescued by an Alma couple who had learned she was missing after reading a post on .
“It was a pretty emotional moment,” said Osborne of the first time he and Patel saw the dog. “Even when she’s sitting next to me on the couch now, it’s still crazy to look at her, like, ‘How did you manage to do that?'”
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