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Preparing to ski out the next morning

This is the story of the nearly deadly snowstorm

It’s dusk and I’m clawing my way out of the snow. I have just fallen off of the trail to neck-deep snow and I am using my ski to make stairs so that I could climb out of this pit of snow back onto this narrow trail and I could hardly see where I’m going because it’s winter, and Valentine’s Day, to add to that. The sun is setting, and this is the first Valentine’s day with my then girlfriend. We were in Montana, and so, as every good survival tale, the story starts with the comedy of small errors.

We had decided to join our friends on a weekend trail to the fire tower. We only had touring skis, so we had to go through the long way, that is, to ski around the mountain. We were going to meet our friends as they would be getting there ahead of us. We drove to the starting point of the trail, and when we got there, we realized that the boots we had rented for my ex were two left boots! We did not turn around at this point as it would cost us a lot of time, so we headed on and continued to the trail.

Just before we had gotten out of cell service, that was when we realized we had no map with us. We quickly downloaded the map on one of the phones with us and it was amazing that we got the app just before we lost cell service. We were, however, limited by the battery life of the phone where we got the map on.

It started as a beautiful sunny day, but pretty soon a snowstorm rolls in. It starts snowing, more like a warm snow which started sticking at the bottom of the ski. Instead of covering five to eight miles an hour, we went to half a mile an hour! We had been at it for six hours, and the sun started to set, and the phone battery started to die, with no spare batteries at hand. We didn’t even have head lamps. All these little dumb errors make this sound like a not-so-great adventure at this point.

The amazing thing about the trip was that we weren’t fighting. We just kept moving up and figured our way to get there. Finally, we get to see the light of the light tower and saw our friends. It was such a relief when we got there.

Looking back, it is such a ridiculous story, we could have been so much better prepared, yet we survived and made it through! It was a wild and crazy adventure experience.

Let me know if you’d ever had a crazy survival story or what we call “type two fun!”