‘Holy Cow, That’s the Dog:’ California Family Finds Lost German Shepherd Stuck in a Tree

After searching the forest for their lost German shepherd, a California family spotted their missing pup stuck several feet in the air in a tree.

Luna, the 10-month-old puppy, went missing around 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 3 after she failed to return from playing with two other dogs outside her family’s home in Lotus, California.

“We looked for her all day, driving around the mountain and calling for her,” Brian Spies, Luna’s owner, told KCRA-TV. “We were worried that she was injured. She would be out all night in the cold so that’s why we searched until dark.”

As Spies lives near the woods, he said he was worried that a mountain lion or a bear had gotten to Luna first. Spies recruited some friends to help him search into the night, but they had no luck finding the pup.

More than 24 hours after Luna went missing, family friends Luka Bogdanovich and Jared Johnson tried a different approach: looking up.

At about 10:30 a.m. on Dec. 4, the friends found the dog stuck in a pine tree.

"I'm just driving down the road and look left. I'll be darned. I see something in the tree, and I went, 'Holy cow, that's the dog,'" Bogdanovich told the outlet.

The pine tree was growing from the ground at an angle, but it is estimated that Luna had gotten stuck up about 25 feet from the ground. Spies, who works in construction, brought a 24-foot ladder to rescue the dog while his friends held the ladder steady and set up a sleeping bag as a crash mat in case the rescue went wrong.

“I had to bear hug her and walk down the ladder with no hands,” Spies told the outlet. “We felt like firefighters.”

Spies believes that Luna may have gotten stuck in the tree after chasing a squirrel, “and then realized, ‘I made a ginormous mistake.’”

He said once she got sufficient rest, Luna is now back to playing around at home. Spies told KCRA-TV that if she ever gets lost again, “We’ll look up because she can climb trees.”