A “Relentless” Inner Nudge

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Guest Post by Dennis Ernst

If you want to be good at anything in life, you must become a good learner. This includes learning to listen when the lessons come, learning to trust what you know and what you’ve learned, then demonstrate your learning by taking action. Enter the snowstorm and the “relentless” inner nudge…

We each have our own ways of learning, and it may vary for different learning goals. One of my life goals was learning to listen, and very often the lesson would come only as a nudge. It was so easy to let these nudges slip by, not pay attention, or even if I did notice something, be too busy to take action.

Most of the time the insights that would come were not that critical, but one day an experience came that really struck me hard. Life would have been different for me and another person if I hadn’t listened.

It was the first Thanksgiving after my first divorce. Several friends had offered invitations to join them for dinner but, for some reason, it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I wondered about this as normally I would have enjoyed the good food and good company.

The morning was cold and damp, and a series of storms were dumping heavy snow in the Siskiyou Mountains just south of Ashland, Oregon. I thought of going cross country skiing, but the weather report said that Interstate—5 was closed due to several ice related accidents. It would be hours before they could get the road open and traffic moving again.

Around 10 a.m. I got a nudge: I needed to take my skies and go to Mt. Ashland Ski Resort. That was strange as the highway was closed. I tried to ignore it, but it was a persistent nudge and just kept getting stronger. Finally, around 11 a.m. I started gathering my skies, cold weather gear, some hot coffee, and some extra food and water. This could turn out to be a real adventure, and I knew I needed to be prepared.

The only way to get to Mt Ashland with I-5 closed would be to go up the old winding two-lane highway. Undoubtedly, it would not be plowed and have deep snow from the night before. As I prepared for my adventure, I kept thinking that I must be crazy to be doing something like this, as no one would know I had gone or to where. The nudge was urgent now: Just go and go now!

By the time I left, it was snowing in Ashland, and I chained up my pickup just outside of town. I was right about the old highway having deep snow. By the time I got to the pass where the road leaves the highway and follows a ridge for 15 miles to the ski resort, it was over my front bumper.

There were no car tracks on the road to the resort, and I knew I’d better keep my speed up to clear the drifts that covered the road. It was hard to believe my trusty old pickup could make it, but finally I could see the parking lot for the resort. The resort had closed the day before due to heavy snow. There were no lights on or any vehicles in sight. I decided to go a little further to the cross country parking lot where I spotted only a single mound in the snow that could be a car.

At this point I was thinking, this is really crazy. I need to head back home before I get stuck in here for a day or two. Now the nudge was very insistent: “Get your skies on and get going!”

Go where?

The favorite place to ski was a road that ran along the ridge line. A couple miles past the parking lot was a log shelter for skiers. OK, I’ll see if I can even find my way out to the shelter, but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

It was slow going. I was breaking trail in waist deep snow. It was now snowing so hard I could hardly make out the roadway. I knew up ahead there was a meadow and, if I got there, there would be no trees along the edge of the road to guide me. Go, go, go my inner guidance was saying.

Almost by luck, I did finally find the log shelter and was happy to get out of the deep, cold, wind-blown snow. It was a white-out by now, and visibility not much past the end of my skies. I am crazy to have come this far, I told myself, and if I’m smart, I’ll build a fire in the stove in the shelter and wait out the storm.

Oh no, the nudge was even stronger, now insisting that I needed to go on. Very reluctantly, I put on my skies, promising myself I’d only go 20 minutes, so I could turn around and follow my tracks back to the shelter before they were lost in the snow.

The wind was howling and blowing snow sideways so hard it was difficult to stay on my skies. I tried to find and follow the road but that, too, disappeared in the whiteness. Now there was only the nudge driving me on a little further and a little further. I finally stopped and said this is enough. 

I knew it was going to be very difficult to find the shelter again,  and I really didn’t want to have to snow camp in a storm like this. I knew I needed to just stop and center myself and start making some sense out of what was going on. I huddled under a snow-covered fir tree and sang HU to calm myself. In a few moments, I was feeling much calmer.

Suddenly, I thought I heard something. I listened carefully, and it almost sounded like someone crying or moaning.  What in the world? Sure enough, now I was certain I had heard something. In the storm it was hard to identify any sound, much less determine where it was coming from. Maybe it was just a tree groaning in the wind.

I decided to ski some circles around the tree I had huddled under, that way I could find my tracks again. I did some concentric circles and about the third pass I heard the sound again. I followed it a short distance and discovered a man huddled under a fir tree shivering and moaning. He was as shocked to see me as I was to see him!

I had an extra coat with me and a thermos of hot coffee. A few sips of coffee and a warm dry coat helped calm his shivers a bit. I knew I needed to get him to the shelter, as he was already developing hypothermia. He said he wasn’t sure he could go on, but he would give it all he had.

My tracks were now almost gone. It was now time to rely on my inner guidance to get us to the shelter. It seemed like it took forever, but I finally found it. I knew I had skied past it a couple of times as it was a total white-out.

Once at the shelter, I got a fire blazing in the stove and started drying and warming the fellow. He told me he had come early thinking he could get a short ski trip in before the storm hit. It had come in quickly, and he hadn’t found the shelter.

He said he wasn’t religious, but he had prayed that somehow he would survive. He knew that he only had a short amount of time left when I had found him, and he was already getting drowsy. He thanked me repeatedly and could hardly believe someone would act on a nudge to rescue him.

It had been a real test for both of us, and there would be tears in his eyes every time I met him in Ashland after that. I was very grateful that Spirit didn’t give up on me and kept driving me to follow it’s guidance.

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Dennis Ernst is a retired Professional Land Surveyor who now devotes his time to sharing the natural beauty he finds on his many treks through photography, blogs, and poetry. Please visit his website, Dennis Ernst Photography, for a glimpse into his fascinating world.