Some trips begin with a boarding pass. Others begin with a memory that refuses to fade, and this year, twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, that memory feels closer than ever. This one starts at a reflecting pool in Lower Manhattan, where nearly 3,000 names line the bronze edges, and where, if you listen closely, you can almost hear paws on rubble from two and a half decades ago. Long before this plaza held fountains and swamp white oaks, it held smoke and twisted steel. Roughly 300 search and rescue dogs worked here with their handlers, and they came from Texas, Nova Scotia, California, and dozens of towns in between. They searched for survivors day after day, then kept searching for remains once hope for survivors ran out. Twenty-five years later, their story still counts as a travel story worth telling. It carries you from a training field in Texas to a canyon of debris sixteen acres wide, and finally to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum that will soon mark this milestone anniversary.
Remembering the Ground Zero Search-and-Rescue Dogs
Bretagne’s First Deployment
If you can, arrive at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum early, before the crowds grow larger. While there, you can take in the morning light as it slides across the pool names. Visitors pause here and there, tracing letters with a fingertip. Somewhere near this spot, in the days after September 11, 2001, a golden retriever named Bretagne (Britney) stepped off a bus with her handler, Denise Corliss, a volunteer firefighter from Cy-Fair, Texas. Bretagne was only two years old, and Ground Zero marked her very first major deployment. Therefore, for 10 straight days, she and Corliss worked 12-hour shifts side by side. She searched the wreckage without a leash, so she could slip into tight spaces no human could reach. That detail changes how you see the plaza now. Every gap between the stone panels starts to feel like a doorway a dog once had to enter.
Riley and the 60-Foot Basket
Walk south along the pool, and you reach the spot where Pennsylvania Task Force 1 once staged its equipment. This is where you meet the golden retriever Riley, at least in memory. He was a four-year-old golden retriever who worked with firefighter Chris Selridge. Their shift began the evening of the attacks and stretched all the way through September 19. Riley trained as a live-find dog, thus his entire purpose centered on locating survivors, not remains. Rescuers lowered him in a Stokes basket over a 60-foot pit of debris, and photographers captured the moment. That image became one of the defining photographs of the recovery effort. Rescuers pulled the last living survivor from the rubble 27 hours after the towers fell. Riley kept searching anyway, still hoping for another miracle, yet none came. He helped locate the remains of several firefighters instead, a job no one had trained him for, yet he did it without hesitation.
Trakr’s Race Against the Clock
Head toward the museum’s underground pavilion next, where rescue dogs from across North America once converged. Trakr, a German shepherd from Halifax, Nova Scotia, traveled south with his handler, police officer James Symington, and the pair arrived only hours after the collapse. Trakr had spent six years working police cases before September 11. His nose led rescuers straight to Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor found alive in the wreckage. Symington and Trakr stayed on site until September 14. Smoke inhalation and exhaustion finally forced them to stop. Trakr later returned home to Canada and kept working for years, helping recover stolen property and locate missing people across the country. His story proves something important. The dogs of Ground Zero did not vanish after one tragic week. Many of them carried that training into full careers spent finding people who could not find their own way out.
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Inside the Museum: Instinct Over Statistics
By midmorning, the museum grows busier, so you head inside toward the permanent galleries. The dedicated exhibit on the canine response, K-9 Courage, ran as a temporary show. It has since closed, so you won’t find it staged today. Even so, artifacts from that story remain part of the museum’s permanent collection, and photographs, harnesses, and handler accounts still surface throughout the galleries. Roughly 300 dogs deployed to the site, yet fewer than half held formal certification for a disaster of this scale, according to the American Kennel Club. Most had trained for earthquakes, avalanches, or wilderness terrain, not collapsed skyscrapers. They adapted anyway, learning new footing and new hazards in real time. Some dogs cut their paws on jagged metal and kept working through bandaged feet. Handlers recall dogs freezing over certain debris fields, a signal that something below needed attention. Other dogs grew visibly discouraged as the days wore on and live scents grew scarce, so rescue teams began staging mock finds to keep morale from collapsing among animals trained to expect success. If you want a fuller look before or after your visit, the memorial’s online archive of past exhibitions still walks through K-9 Courage in detail.
New Temporary Exhibit Opens September 12, 2026
A new exhibit focuses on the legacy of service inspired by first responders. In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11 Inspired Service will open on September 12, 2026. At this time, it is not clear if you find any information on the search-and-rescue dogs at this upcoming exhibit,
Sage, Charlie, and Willow
That detail stops you in your tracks. The emotional toll on these dogs mattered just as much as the physical toll, and handlers understood this instinctively. You move through the next gallery and learn about Sage, a Labrador retriever who earned FEMA certification at 18 months old and ranked among the nation’s top 50 search and rescue dogs before her deployment to the Pentagon. Her first real mission tested every hour of that training. Nearby, you read about Charlie, a patrol dog trained to detect human scent. You also read about Willow, a five-year-old Labrador who joined the recovery effort in its later stages. Each name adds another thread to a story that already feels enormous.
What Came After
Eventually, you step back outside into the plaza. City noise returns all at once: taxis, tourists, the low hum of nearby construction. The trees planted here hold a stillness the surrounding blocks do not share. You start wondering what happened to these dogs once the work ended, because that part of the story deserves attention too. Bretagne went on to help during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Ivan before she finally retired at age nine and spent her final years as a reading companion for first-graders at a Texas elementary school. That job counted as rescue work too, just a gentler kind. Bretagne died in 2016 at nearly 17. Firefighters and rescue workers lined the sidewalk outside the animal hospital and saluted as she passed by. She held the title of last known living search and rescue dog from Ground Zero.
Riley sadly died in 2010 at age 13. Researchers later studied dogs like him to understand the long-term health effects of working in such toxic conditions. Their findings offered some reassurance. Dogs deployed to Ground Zero showed no significant difference in long-term health outcomes compared with dogs who stayed home. That research, born from tragedy, still shapes how search and rescue teams train and protect their dogs today.
A Bond That Never Really Ended
Before you leave the memorial grounds, you circle back to the pool one last time. Water falls into darkness at its center, steady and quiet. Travel usually means chasing something new, yet this particular journey asks you to sit with something old instead. The dogs who worked here never chased headlines or tried to build a legacy. They simply did the job their training and their handlers asked of them, one debris pile at a time, one scent at a time, for as many hours as their bodies allowed. No medal changed that. No headline mattered to them at all.
You walk back toward the subway, past tourists photographing the towers’ twin footprints. You carry a slightly different understanding of this place now than the one you arrived with. Ground Zero stands as more than a monument to loss. It also stands as a testament to loyalty, the kind that asks nothing in return and shows up anyway. If your own travels ever bring you to Lower Manhattan, give yourself an extra hour at the memorial. Let the story of these dogs walk beside you. Some journeys end at a destination. This one ends, fittingly, at a bond that never really did.
Related: 25 Years Later: A Traveler’s Guide to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum
About The Author
Randy Yagi is an award-winning writer who served as the National Travel Writer for CBS from 2012 to 2019. More than 900 of his stories still appear in syndication across 23 CBS websites, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco. During his peak years with CBS, Randy had a reported digital audience reach of 489 million and 5.5 million monthly visitors. Additionally, his stories have appeared in the Daily Meal, CBS News, CBS Radio, Engadget, NBC.com, NJ.com, MSN.com and Radio.com. He earned a Media Fellowship from Stanford University and is a Bay Area Travel Writers (BATW) member.
