Sally Menke, Quentin Tarantino’s longtime film editor, was found dead early Tuesday after her friends alerted police when she failed to come home from hiking with her dog. She was 56.

Menke is best-known as the award-winning editor of such Tarantino movies as “Pulp Fiction,” “Kill Bill” and “Jackie Brown,” and has been credited as a major factor in the innovation of the unorthodox narrative structure that helped make those films famous.

Unnamed sources told the LA Times that Menke was found at the bottom of a ravine in Los Angeles’ Bronson Canyon with her dog waiting by her side, after an hours long search conducted by the LAPD that involved search dogs, an LAPD helicopter and patrol officers.

Her time of death was marked by an intense heat wave that sources close to the investigation believe incapacitated Menke contributing to her death, though no cause of death was immediately reported and no conclusion has yet been reached by the coroner’s office.