Just up the road from Mono Lake, Bodie State Historic Park is an incredible place to visit. Bodie’s cemetery is full of monuments, but park staff have always known that there are many more graves than those that are still marked. The Bodie Foundation recently brought forensically-trained dogs to Bodie to find unmarked remains, as shown in this short Animal Planet video.
The dogs are trained to sniff for human remains and indicate the locations of those remains to their handlers. After the dogs have done a search the sagebrush landscape near Bodie’s cemetery is dotted with small flags. As ranger Terri Geissinger says, “Those people matter. They matter just like we do today.”
The Bodie Foundation is the partner non-profit for state parks at Bodie, Mono Lake, and Grover Hot Springs. They recently stepped up to implement a fee collection strategy at Mono Lake’s Old Marina, which helped get Mono Lake’s state park off the closure list!
That’s wonderful!
Thank you, brilliant doggies, for helping make history come alive.