A Night Near Death

Around a month ago today, I left on a cross-country road trip where I spent weeks camping whilst visiting national forests, parks, and even a few national monuments. Just around a minute ago today, I decided to actually write about my experience surviving a night alone in sub-zero degree weather in the middle of Bighorn National Forest, Wyoming. If you’re more interested in hearing about the rest of the trip, feel free to check out my next blog post about it! For now though, this post is going to focus on this one night.

Hours out from our last destination of Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands National Park the day beforehand, my road trip comrade and I decided to stop on the side of the road to take in the sights. While standing up through the sunroof I had spotted a gigantic cloud in the background and commented on how majestic it appeared. After staring for a few more seconds my friend and I turned to each other and thought the same thing at the same time, it was a mountain. As the hours passed we just got closer and closer to the Bighorn Mountain Range, dumbfounded and awestruck at how big they really were. Finally into the mountain range, we were looking for Muddy Guard cabin, which was a forest service cabin built in 1903 but now rented out to travelers in the middle of an isolated national forest in a state with pretty much more cows than people. Sets up the scene pretty nicely, doesn’t it.

Upon seeing the sign to the cabin, and about an hour outside of service, we finally arrived in the small parking space around 6:30pm. According to the woman on the phone we were to “Go down 2/10 of a mile and see the cabin on your left.” Unfortunately it had just snowed the night before, so it was hard to see the path but you could just make out a car gate up ahead. Unable to drive there due to the snow, my friend and I started to get ready to bring our stuff to the electric cabin. It just so happened to be that at the point my friend was going through her womanly time of the month. That being the nauseating case at hand for her, she told me to see how far it was and to tell her whether or not she could do it with the shoes she brought. In under 15 minutes I was up and out of the car, ready to find the cabin for the night.

Funny enough, I had actually stopped a few dozen feet out from the car wondering if that was the way or not and turned around to look at my friend for reassurance. She gave me the thumbs up and I was off. When I got to the gate not too far down I figured I would just walk slow and enjoy myself in what was the first time I actually had to myself in this entire trip. Energized by the universe I was off into the wilderness and ready to enjoy my time in this truly untamed land. After walking down a few minutes I found myself staring at an old authentic teepee skeleton, amazed at the carvings and the age of the wood displayed through the minutely defined ridges. Mesmerized by this experience I continued down another few minutes it what only seemed like a few inches of snow, looking up at the tall trees like skyscrapers, towering even to a person from New York like me. Approximately 15 minutes after leaving the car and slowly exploring my way down, I had stopped to look for the cabin and only saw traffic signs pointing downwards for cars and the lovers who had carved their names into the trees. Not seeing any other signs for the cabin, I figured normally, we would be driving down this road and it would be 2/10 of a mile from a car entrance I saw. It only took me a few minutes to see that I had gone too far down the mountain.

I distinctly remember, like nothing I’ve ever remembered before, looking up the mountain and taking my first step up. It was with this step that my world fell through and I stepped into snow that was all the way up to my knee. Instantly, I was thrown into a state of panic where I knew how physically exhausting it would be to get back up. Coming down, I had only put enough pressure on my feet to go through a few inches of snow but it was on the way back up that I had to put enough weight to go 2+ feet deep into the snow. Unbeknownst to me, the layers of snow had melted due to the air temperature and then had been snowed on top of in a continuing cycle that started likely sometime in Fall. At this point in time, I find my sympathetic nervous system taking over, grabbing me and shaking me awake to tell me that this situation had gotten dangerous enough for me to be of heightened awareness. With this intense sensation of anxiety pouring over me, of course came some heavy breathing, which only got compounded in the 20 degree weather and over 5500 feet of elevation. In addition to the 40 pound bag that I was carrying, I knew that I had to really, really think about my next decisions. My options boiled down to either trying to find the cabin, getting back to the car, or sleeping outside. With the latter of those sounding pretty much impossible as the sun was going down, I figured the logical choice was to find the cabin. Going left off the trail multiple times had left me tired, but there were a few clearings where it felt like a cabin would be. Now around 7:30, I could see the edge of the sunlight receding up the mountain cliffs like a dark curtain over the vast pine forest. Not going to lie, it was pretty beautiful.

It didn’t take me long to realize that finding the cabin was going to be impossible without being able to get out of the mountains and back into service. Knowing this, I decided that it was time to make it back to the car at the top of the mountain trailhead, something I had been fearing the entire time. Every single step felt like an entire workout, but I was ready. In my head I had reassured myself that I had trained for this. My entire life of exercising and being healthy running, lifting weights, and doing calisthenics felt justified and I felt an energy inside me that was ready to deal with this. Lifting my feet out of the snow I began to feel a real sense of purpose in each step. Astute and intentional. My mind was racing like a man on the precipice of being a father, trying to get his wife to a hospital in time. Time was ticking and I was hyper focused. More focused on my surroundings than I had ever been in my entire life, yet still somehow looking back on my entire life up until that very moment.

Within half an hour I started to lose coherent thought. The only thing on my mind was “Up. Mountain.” and I couldn’t have thought of anything else literally for the life of me. It was a constant battle between sweating, overheating, and having to rest. Resting was routinely followed by an intense and sharp awakening of pure cold. I had nowhere to lay but in the seemingly soft snow surrounding me. Face-planting into the snow, my head was a battleground of thoughts of different things I could do in the situation: part of me imagined climbing up and just setting up a hammock site in the trees and safe from animals roaming the night or even just creating a small igloo for myself and insulating it with my hammock, backpack, and tarp. Eventually, I just couldn’t find it in me to trust my ability to survive the 4am dip in weather and decided once and for all that I could not survive a night sleeping outside. It was simply just too cold. -5 degrees to be exact. At this point my green tea I had bought just that day had started to slush over and I realized that I was burning through too much energy to make it back up the rest of the way, I needed to change something about what I was doing; I wasn’t going to make it like this.

Knowing exactly where the car was and how far it was, I had decided to ditch my 40 pound bag and use the last bit of my energy to get to the top. It took me no longer than 10 minutes after leaving my backpack behind, only 2 and a half hours after leaving the car, to be wholeheartedly drained of all life energy my body possessed. That was all I had. Never before had I experienced this level of lethargy and torpor, it was almost as if my body told me that it was utterly done working for me. On strike. Unable to take even a single step more, I collapsed onto the snow-covered road, and rolled over to a tree up the hill a bit just to get a place to rest my overly weary head. Losing heat fast and watching the sun set into the distance, I realized I wouldn’t just be able to lay under this tree and wake up in the morning. Instinctively, I decided to burrow a hole into the side of the mountain where the snow had to at least reached 3 feet tall, given that I was able to completely encapsulate myself in this snow-den.

Lonely, cold, nothing but the clothes on my back, I was yelling for help in the middle of these frigid mountains trying to keep myself calm from overwhelming my lungs with freezing air. Admittedly, I was scared. Honestly… terrified. It feels weird saying it now because looking back at the moment I was being so brave. I was being brave for myself, but in reality I was just suppressing my anxiety and distress to levels that were beneficial to me. Beneficial to the extent that I could survive the night. For the first time ever anxiety had made sense to me: this age old process by which our nervous system stimulates the synapses in our brains with electrical energy and readies us to take on what is facing us in the world. Instead of getting anxious for tests or interpersonal relations, I was anxious for the right things: ensuring that my body was safe and warm. Doing my best to curl up into a ball in the snow and listen to my anxiety, I quickly covered the hole to the burrow and went into deep thought.

At this point I began to experience what I could only describe as direct communication with my body. Naturally, we all listen to our bodies. Whether you’re hungry, or tired, your body will give you signs that it is not at homeostasis and it’ll tell you what it needs by triggering physical responses in our body that necessitate us doing the thing our bodies want. For me, in this snow-hole in the middle of a gigantic national forest, I actually experienced my body communicate with me verbally via my thoughts. It told me word for word “Justin, go to sleep. The rest of you will be cold but your heart will stay warm. Sleep.” In awe that I was listening to myself talk to myself, I started to trust my body on a level I never had before. Sluggishly my eyes began to close, and my body eased into itself. I felt the anxiety melting away into the pitch black night like a flame to my frozen soul.

There was a split-second in the middle of my impending free-fall into sleep that I abruptly opened my eyes and realized that I was going to die in that hole. I felt it deep, deep in my soul. I also felt it in my pants and long johns as they were beginning to harden as they froze over and I knew that was going to lead to hypothermia. Not knowing if or when help was coming, sleeping with hypothermia would have spelled out certain death. Recognizing and truly grasping the entirety of my mortality helped me boil everything in my life down to two choices: life or death. I could have chosen death by just staying where I was, slowly freezing over, and passing in my sleep. Simple. The other choice was to choose life. To be completely truthful, this was a hard choice to make. Life entails making many difficult decisions, giving your energy, experiencing irreconcilable pain, distress, and sadness. Choosing life wasn’t easy, but I did. With more resolve and more consciously than ever before, I chose to live.

At the top of my list of firsts for the day was a near-death adrenaline rush.With the path before me clearer than ever before, I explosively stood up from my burrow with adrenaline coursing through my veins. It was as if I felt my body using 100% of everything it had, nothing held back. I began to sprint through the forest, admittedly bawling my eyes out knowing that this was the last bit of substantial energy my body would be able to produce for the night. Engulfed in pitch black darkness, I was blindly sprinting through the snow plowing through like a mad boar looking for my backpack. Recognizing that this was my last chance, I drew upon a primal energy deep within me to sustain me. Looking through the forest with levels of anxiety like I never even knew were possible, only with my phone light in hand, I searched through the forest next to the road where I left my bag. Too bad for me my backpack was black.

Unable to find my backpack I began yelling again, hoping with all my heart that someone would respond back. No one did. It was just me on this mountain and my adrenaline was running out quick. With the last bit of steam leaving the top of my head, I decided it was time to sit and accept whatever stream of fate I had been plunged into. As I was about to sit, I tripped over something and wouldn’t you know it. It was my backpack. Ecstatic and crying tears of happiness, I give my backpack the biggest hug I had ever given any inanimate object. Immediately I had regained a sense of hope and was able to bring myself back down to Earth. In high-gear survival mode, I immediately got off the road as I realized there weren’t any places to set up shelter. Around 9:30pm now I was looking around for the absolute best place I could to survive the night and I came across a colossal pine tree. Slightly more gargantuan than the surrounding trees, the trunk had stopped the snow at a certain angle allowing for me to sit closer to the ground than in the road. Seeing that the snow had even weighed down quite a number of large branches on this pine to create a natural covering from the elements. Immediately I ran over there and took out my collapsible shovel to remove the snow from around the area and with that I jumped under this natural shelter.

First things first, I had to deal with my wet clothing. Between my sweat and the snow that had melted all over me, I needed to change. Having brought a change of clothing with me in my bag, I was ready to strip and put on something dry. However, as I began to do this my body gave me a clear “Nope, no thanks.” on this one. Feeling that I would have serious convulsions upon the removal of my clothes, I decided it was time for a fire. That way I could simultaneously provide heat for myself and dry off my clothing. Being as prepared as I was, of course I had toilet paper and a lighter! There was nothing else in the area for me to grab given that it had just snowed, so I figured I could just make a small fire and feed it things I didn’t need from my bag and try to get a couple of sticks burning. Upon holding the lighter to the toilet paper, I started to cry and laugh at the same time. The toilet paper wasn’t burning, it was simply too cold. After unsuccessfully burning toilet paper, I realized that I had paraffin cubes! What a lifesaver.

Rummaging through my bag I found my lunchbox which had a pot, emergency grill, and paraffin cubes inside. Impatiently ripping it from the plastic wrapping I immediately took my lighter and held it to it. As if thing weren’t bad enough, the lighter was out of gas. With not a single ear in range I just yell out at the top of my lungs “YOU GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME.” Yeah, that’s right. The lighter was out of gas, so I sat there. Flicking the lighter over and over. There was no other way for me to make fire in those extreme conditions, I absolutely needed that lighter. What feels like centuries pass by, and I just don’t stop. Flicking. The. Lighter. Almost ready to lift my finger off the gas again, I looked down and realized that it had lit. In a miracle-esque fashion, the lighter stayed on for 10 seconds. Just enough time for the paraffin cube to get lit. After wiping the tears from my eyes and digging a small hole in the ground to clear out the snow, I placed the paraffin cube down and immediately started looking for things to put in the fire. Devoid of any sticks around me, I was even searching through the snow for dry sticks. That’s when I decided to look up, and there were a bunch of dead, small branches on the pine tree above me. Only taking pieces small enough to burn in a few seconds, I swiftly gathered a large pile.

Fire blazing, I took my hammock from the bag and immediately “pied” myself over the fire, using the hammock like a pie cover to trap any heat from escaping. Warming up quick, I stood directly over the fire and I saw the steam starting to rise from my pants. After about 10 minutes of this I felt dry enough to finally enter my sleeping bag liner, which I promptly jumped into my sleeping bag with, and then I wrapped myself with the hammock like almost a second sleeping bag. In complete fetal position around the trunk of the giant pine tree, I took out my hand warmers I bought the night before and threw them in my sleeping bag. I even had my electronic hand warmer that I put on my heart, to ensure that even if I fell asleep for hours that my heart wouldn’t freeze over. Finally, I felt warm and safe. Warm and safe enough to look up at the magnificent night sky. Warm and safe enough to appreciate the stars in a way I never did before. I then proceeded to go in and out of consciousness every few minutes, alternating between feeding the fire, warming whatever body part started to feel a bit cold, and then sleeping because my body was past exhausted.

It was the sound of a snowmobile. I’ll never for the rest of my life forget that sound. Looking towards the road I finally saw a light and a man calling out “Hello? Justin?”. Emotionally overwhelmed with the thought of being saved I immediately jumped out of my little campsite and this man must have been aghast to see someone running out of the forest at him like that. Greeting me at the edge he walked over with me to where I was and the first thing he said was “Nice little campsite you have going on here, looks comfortable.” Slightly blushing, I got back into my bag and he started to ask me about what I did and where I got the stuff. He first commented on my solar lantern that was tied to the trunk of the tree. Apparently, at some point during my going in and out of consciousness I was logical enough to be conscious of the fact that the search and rescue wouldn’t have seen me from the road without a sign. Thankfully, he saw it and it made him stop. Within minutes a few more snowmobiles made their way down the mountain. Unable to take me back up due to the terrain and my big bag, they told me to get ready because a special vehicle was coming to get me. Took me no longer than 20 seconds to get all my stuff together and I was up. Seemingly right on cue, a giant vehicle was coming down the mountain. Now, if I could possibly describe what this looked like; think of a glorified ATV that had a baby with a tank. At 1:30am, 7 hours after leaving the car, I knew I was finally saved.

Jumping literally two feet from the forest and onto the trail I landed right in the back and told them I was ready to go. Dumbfounded that I had that much strength left, the men sort of just stared at me for a few seconds. The man driving the vehicle said “It kicks up a lot of snow bud, make sure to cover your face.” Smiling from ear to ear, I put my backpack in front of me and we were off. Crying couldn’t really encapsulate what I was doing in the back of that rescue vehicle. It was something like that though, because I had never been so filled with gratitude, appreciation, humility, and pure happiness to still have my life. It took us about 30 minutes to go half a mile back to where the car was. At the top of the mountain the men told me I had gone down about 2 miles and came up about 1 and a half. Extremely impressed by not only my physical condition, but my survival skills as well, the men began asking me questions. In what I thought would end up being a lecture by the head park ranger, I was praised for being prepared. Filled with pride and a feeling of deep accomplishments, I shook the hand of every man, asked their name, and looked into their eyes to thank them from the bottom of my heart.

It only took two knocks on my friends window before she was up and out of the car. I hugged her like I had deprived of hugs my entire life. Holding her tightly, I thanked my friend Maria for doing the right thing and calling the police. Speaking of, she told me that a family had stopped by for her on the road and called the ranger when they got back in service outside of the mountain. Ends up being that the family had actually invited me to their house to sleep. After being cleared for not needing any medical attention at all, we drove an hour out of the mountains and into the home of quite possibly one of the warmest families I had ever experienced. This woman, Teresa, hugged me when I walked in the door. Wet, cold, scared, and shaking she hugged me and let me take a warm shower and even sleep in her extra bedroom. Once again overwhelmed with appreciation, I cried. I cried and went to sleep.

Of course the story doesn’t end there, but that experience ends just like that. Happily, thankfully. I guess the moral of the story, if I had to pick one, would be to always be ready. Without all of the things I had bought beforehand, the training I had done, and my wits, I would have most certainly died out there. Ever since that day I have been exceedingly thankful to live that life that I have. Not taking any of the small things for granted, I’m typing this out in hopes that you, the reader, can also feel this deep sense of gratitude through me. Daily desensitization numbs us to what we have, but even something as simple as being safe and warm might be something you miss one day.