> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thequietmile.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Lost Above Donner - URL: https://www.thequietmile.com/lost-above-donner/ - Published: 2026-10-18T20:33:44.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-25T15:49:47.000Z - Description: Three summers ago, above Donner Lake, I lost my phone, my route and almost my nerve. What brought me back was paying attention. - Author: Jason Bates At the bottom of the snow slope, I reached into the zipper pocket at the back of my shorts for my phone. The pocket was open. The phone was gone. I looked back up. Somewhere in that eighth of a mile of melting July snow was my map, my way to call anyone, and the only record of where I was supposed to be. It was getting late in the morning, it was getting hot, and I was running out of water. ## The plan It was July 1, 2023\. I was staying in a little A-frame near Donner Lake, and the night before I’d mapped a loop: about twenty miles from lake level, up to a pass near 9,000 feet, along the ridge and back down. New trails, a hard day, and the route loaded in Strava on my phone to keep me on it. I went to bed stoked for the morning. I left the cabin a little after eight with everything I thought I needed. What I didn’t have was my Garmin satellite messenger, or any way to filter water. Hold onto that. ## Up The climb was everything I’d hoped for. Early on, the route crossed the train trestle, the line that threads through the Sierra on the drive up to Tahoe, and I stopped to take photos I was really happy with. I kept climbing, following the route on my phone, sucking air as the trail went up. I could feel the altitude, but I felt good. Near the top there was still snow. July, in the Sierra, and snow on the peaks. It was energizing. I couldn’t stop grinning at it. ## The ridge At the top, the route turned to cross the ridge, and the trail disappeared under the snow. I did my best to follow the route on my phone until I noticed what I was actually standing on: what, in winter, would have been a cornice. The thought arrived very clearly. If this lets go, I go with it. So I left the route. The way off was down, a long slope of melting snow that I took more or less like a sledding hill. That’s where the phone went. Standing at the bottom, I made a call I still think was right: don’t go back. I could spend an hour searching that slope and never find it. I knew roughly where the trail was. I knew the direction and the distance. I’d figure it out. ## Lost I didn’t figure it out, at least not right away. Below the ridge the brush was thick, and every step seemed to push me further down the wrong side of the mountain. At some point I stopped and looked out, and all I could see was the Sierra. Ridge after ridge, and nothing else. The temperature was somewhere in the eighties. I was nearly out of water. And a very quiet voice in my head said: this is how it ends. This is exactly how people get lost out here. Heat, no water, no phone, nobody who knows where you are. What came next wasn’t panic so much as accountability. I had put myself here. Nobody else was responsible. I thought about the people who depend on me, my daughter, my work, and all of it echoed back the same word: stupid. I could feel the anxiety starting to climb, and I knew what it would do if I let it. So I stopped to breathe. Slow, deliberate breaths, meditation breaths. Not because breathing would change the situation. It was exactly as bad as it was. But giving in to the fear wouldn’t help, and the breathing got my attention off the story of how bad it could be and back onto the ground in front of me. Once I could see the ground again, the next thing showed up. A stream. I filled both bottles and drank, no filter, because the choice in front of me was water now or a problem later. Then I worked my way back up through the brush to the ridge, because a ridge is something you can follow. ## Civilization For miles there was no trail. I was going by my best sense of direction, and for all practical purposes I was lost in the Sierra. It felt heavy the whole time. My watch shows those as the slowest miles of the day: from around mile ten to mile fourteen, I was barely moving. Then I saw the top of a chairlift. Sugar Bowl, still several miles off. I thought: that’s civilization. I just need to get to that. I aimed for it and made it to the top of the lift. It felt like it took forever. From there it was all downhill, a hot, dry ski run with no snow left on it, but down instead of up, and that felt good. At the bottom, a crew was cleaning up after a wedding from the night before. I filled my bottles with fresh water. It felt like being saved. Then the road, and the long way back to the cabin. Twenty-one miles. Six hours. 0:00 /0:20 1× ## The faucet My friend Bryan Lundquist was supposed to meet me at the cabin. Yes, the same Bryan I paced at the Quicksilver 100K this spring. He’d come by hours earlier, found nobody, and started texting. No answer, which wasn’t like me. He called the hospitals in the area. When he finally got to the cabin, two things didn’t add up: the front door was unlocked, and the faucet was running. He couldn’t make sense of it. I had left it on. I was so focused on getting my head into the run ahead that I walked out with the water still running. I miss details like that sometimes. I got back just before he returned. When he pulled up and saw me, he was so happy and so relieved. I was safe. I was sound. We had a good rest of the weekend. A few weeks later, the bill for that stream arrived: giardia, the worst case of anything I’ve ever had, with a little Covid mixed in. I was sick for a long time. ## What I carry Lying there, I asked myself whether I really needed to keep doing this. Why I keep putting myself through it. The honest answer is that I love it. I love being out there, I love these trails, and that was just a really bad day. I got through it, and it made me stronger. The practical lessons are short. Carry a satellite messenger. Carry a water filter. Zip the pocket. The other lesson took longer to see. Below that ridge, the real danger wasn’t only the heat or the brush or the missing phone. It was the story my head started telling, the one that ended in a headline. The day only turned around when I stopped listening to it and paid attention to what was actually in front of me: a stream, a ridge, a chairlift on the skyline. Each one was small, and each one was enough to get me to the next. The phone never came back. It’s still up on that mountain somewhere, under where the snow was, with the photos of the trestle on it.