The lake is completely frozen, except around the edges. The only sound we can hear is the soft creaking of the small sheets of ice scuffing up against each other. Actually, it’s more like a soft ringing sound. We get a bit closer and see that this friction forges tiny crystals, standing straight up, like miniature ice peaks rising up from the lake. We feel like we’re in the Antarctic, instead of the Sierra Nevada.

A small gust of wind picks up the fresh snow and twirls it up into the air. Other than that, it is quiet, silent even. A lot of snow has fallen in the past couple of days. Almost every afternoon, around three o’clock, clouds start coming together, only to unleash rain and thunder a few hours later. Usually, we see it coming just in time to set up camp but sometimes, like when we were climbing Mather Pass, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Dark clouds quickly come together and there’s no shelter we can see anywhere. “Bang!!” The deep, loud thunder in the distance rolls over the rocky plains. We haven’t seen any lightning yet. In front of us, far ahead, is what looks like an amphitheater of mountains, which amplifies the sound of the thunder. It’s deafening and extremely humbling. It feels like we’re small, naked, and alone in this immense open landscape. There’s not a soul in sight. At the top of the resonating mountains we see the pass. Lian stops, looks at it and asks, “Shall we go on and take the pass or try to find emergency shelter somewhere?” Thick snow starts coming down from the sky and sticks to my pants. “I don’t know… It will take us an hour-and-a-half to get to the pass, and who knows what the conditions will be up there tomorrow,” I say doubtfully. It would be wise to find shelter here, but we’re high up in the mountains and we don’t see a safe place to make a shelter anywhere. “Bang!!” Out of nowhere, the overwhelming loudness of the thunder takes us by surprise. Like cannon fire it blasts right through us. Visibility starts to wane, which makes us even more cautious.

“This is no place to put up a tent. If it turns into a full-scale thunderstorm we’ll be blown to smithereens,” I say as I scan our surroundings. “There’s not even a ditch or a snow mound anywhere.” We’ve seen plenty of safe places to hide in the past few days, but there’s a fierce wind on this plain. Lian searches with me, her eyes fixed on the ground. “The snow is too thin to build our own wall,” she says. She looks at the map. “There are lots of ditches on the other side of the pass. It’s a lot steeper down there, and even further down there are trees. Maybe we can find a safe place there?” Our eyes lock and I nod in agreement. We decide to keep going. It doesn’t feel completely right, but it’s definitely not an option to stay here.

It doesn’t take us long to reach the foot of the wall and we keep climbing up towards the pass. The wind picks up even more. Bang!!! This time it’s ear-splitting and right next to us. Are we doing the right thing? The first lightning bolts shoot down from the sky. Until now, we hadn’t noticed the strange deep-pink-grey color of the clouds around us. My warm down-filled beanie is covered in snow and the warmth of my head is making it melt, so the down is getting wet. Why didn’t I think of that sooner? I pull the hood of my raincoat over the beanie. And it’s a good thing I do, because we haven’t even come halfway up the wall and the snow is coming down like crazy. We can’t call it a blizzard just yet, but the snow is flying into our faces horizontally now. I’m still not sure about this. We can’t see the pass anymore. “What do you think? Should we turn back?” I ask. Lian is carrying the altimeter; she looks at it and shakes her head. “No, if the height on this thing is still accurate, we’ll reach the pass in about half an hour,” she says. I like the sound of that, and with our raincoats pulled closed tightly around our bodies we climb the last few feet up to the pass.

Quickly, we make our way over the pass and it’s true: this side is steeper. The only problem is that there is a thick layer of snow here. On the other side we could still see parts of the trail, but here it’s nowhere to be seen! We turn on our smartphone and open the GPS app. Lightweight hiking is always about finding a balance between weight and necessities; it’s a matter of compromise. If we had been in the mountains guiding a group, there’s no doubt we would have brought more stuff. Like professional GPS equipment, that can always show us where we are, even in a deep crevasse that’s sealed off by plants and trees. Now we have no choice but to put our faith in a cell phone. The app is thinking… a detailed area map is loading… no signal yet… we wait… and there it is, finally, the red arrow. It’s found us, even under the thick snow-filled clouds, great! This probably saves us from making an emergency shelter in some shallow ditch. Just to be sure, we compare what’s on the screen to the shape of the terrain; it matches.

Nevertheless, we can’t see much in the snow, and it turns out that it’s not so easy to follow the trail with only an app to guide us. “I don’t like this at all,” I say to Lian. “What do you mean?” She turns around, her backpack facing the wind and walks closer to me. “I may be ‘Old School’ or whatever, but I prefer a map and compass to find my way in these circumstances. I’d rather rely on the contours of the terrain than on a red arrow pointing to a trail I can’t see.” She stays quiet, waiting for me to continue. “Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. I’ll draw lines on the real map, and that way I can lay out a course through the terrain using waypoints. I can’t really do that with this app. All I can do is follow the arrow and hope we’re following the trail. It’s not getting us anywhere and it’s draining our phone battery.” Lian knows exactly where I’m going with this and answers, “Let’s do that then.” I nod, draw the coordinates from the GPS onto the map and lay out a course. We’re heading for the tree line, that isn’t visible yet in the dense snowfall. My arm is stretched out in the exact direction we need to go. I hold the compass in my open hand, I look over the top of it and see Lian ahead of me. With my other arm I show her which way to go. She moves from side to side and when she’s perfectly aligned with my compass bearing, I signal her to stop. I walk over to her and we repeat the same process. It’s slow, but it feels right. It’s something we’ve done before, and we know it works well.

“What did you say?” Lian shouts to me from a distance. I look up from my compass. “I didn’t say anything!” I call back. She stops and listens, and suddenly she raises her head up. “I hear someone yelling!” My arm drops. Yelling? Now? In this weather? It must be the wind. I don’t hear anything. She points and says, “Over there!” I make a big cross in the snow with my feet, hoping I might find it again when we come back. Together we go in the direction she’s pointing. Now I hear it too, a faint call in the distance. We look around and from far away we can just make out a young woman running down the mountain. She keeps on screaming and shouting, and she’s coming straight towards us. There’s a terrified look on her face when she finally reaches us; her pupils are dilated, she’s sweating and panting and cries out, “I’m so happy to see you!” She’s completely wet from the melting snow and the sweat. Her open trail-runners aren’t waterproof, so her feet are soaking wet and she’s freezing cold. “What’s your name?” Lian asks.  “Sweetums,” she answers, her face as white as a sheet. “Hi, Sweetums, we didn’t expect to run into anyone out here in these conditions. Are you okay?” Lian asks, putting her arm around the poor woman. “I’ve been looking for you for so long! I’m all alone and then the lightning started. I got so scared and didn’t know what to do. I found your tracks in the snow and started running like crazy to try to catch up to you.” Her words fall out of her mouth like a runaway train. She takes a quick breath and continues, “But after the pass, I lost your tracks. I couldn’t find the trail either and just decided to walk down, hoping to find you. I’ve been calling out to you for about half an hour.”

She’s clearly very upset. Lian talks to her and tries to comfort her. In the meantime, I’ve picked up my compass again. I’m never going to find my cross in the snow, so I lay out a new, more direct course down to the trees. I want to get her out of this weather as soon as possible. Together we make our way down, this time just winging it with the compass in my hands. It’s less accurate, but it’s a lot faster.

After about an hour we reach the tree line, and we soon find a nice semi-circle full of man-high pine trees. It’s still snowing quite heavily, but the trees break the wind, so it’s a good place to set up camp. Sweetums is exhausted, so we help her with her tent. She is a textbook example of an ‘ultra-light-weight-hiker’. Someone who covers super-long distances, carrying only the bare minimum. “It’s always sunny in California, so I left lots of things at home,” she tells us. It sounds a bit naïve to us. Warm sunny plains and beaches have nothing in common with the mountains. The mountains have their own weather systems, so you can never rule out snowfall in summer, especially at this altitude. We decide not to tell her this, because it wouldn’t do her any good right now.

She’s still very cold and she’s having trouble getting warm in her sleeping bag. A sleeping bag doesn’t produce any heat, it’s an insulator. It only captures the warmth that your body generates. When you cool down too much, or when you’re weak, you can still freeze to death in a good-quality sleeping bag. Her feet are ice-cold. She tried to save weight by not bringing any cooking equipment, so she’s living primarily on protein and granola bars. There’s nothing in her backpack to warm her up. I look at her; she looks exhausted, confused, freezing and she keeps falling in and out of consciousness. If I don’t do anything now, she might not make it through the night.

I use our own cooking gear to warm up a cup of coco for her, and she ends up drinking three of them. Immediately, she feels better. Her body is warming up, and her state of mind is definitely improving as well. Lian and I wait – in the falling snow – in front of her tent and make sure she keeps talking. She’s comfortable now in her sleeping bag, that’s getting increasingly warmer. She even laughs at my cheesy jokes and slowly she falls asleep. I wait a little longer, for my own peace of mind, until I hear her breathing regularly. Then I also go to bed.

The next day, she hikes down with us until we reach the snow line. We take a long break, dry out all our wet gear, and hang out our sleeping bags until they’re all fluffy again. After the break, Sweetums feels like herself again. In high spirits and with a big smile on her face, she parts with us. Her pace is clearly a lot higher than ours and we never run into her again on the trail. I wonder if she made it to the end.