Molly the yellow Lab fell down a bluff in Adams, Tennessee while on a walk with a member of her foster family. She broke away from 16-year-old Jackson Lightner, who immediately got help contacting a neighbor and mountain climber, Matthew Kautz.
Luckily, Kautz had all the materials necessary to rappel down the cliffside and lift Molly up to safety.
Kautz had never used his mountaineering skills to rescue anyone before, but there’s a first time for everything. He lowered himself down what he estimated to be a 65–70-foot cliff to find Molly unharmed and waiting to be brought back up.
“When I got down there she was kind of hiding under that overhanging rock and just kind of waiting, ready to leave,” he told WKRN.
He described the hardest part of the process, which was getting Molly back up the cliff:
That was the real struggle, that was the hardest part of it all. I would have to kind of pick her up and put her up higher than me, and then I would have to keep a hand on her and I would climb up to where she was and then I would have to pick her up again and just keep moving her up forward.
Molly is a miracle pup, and she came out of her ordeal having only lost her dewclaw. Kautz suspects it was silt that broke her fall and probably saved her life—but Molly disagrees! She was more than happy to cover her rescuer in kisses as a way to say thank you.
