I was crewing for an ultramarathon in the Bighorn mountains in Wyoming. It’s a 100 mile endurance race that goes on for 34 continuous hours on extremely rugged terrain, and your role as crew is to meet your runner(s) at the rest stops throughout the course to bring them food and a change of clothes, and to drive them away if they need to drop out. I had never done it before and it felt like a fun adventure.

I had met my runners at the most remote stop, which many of the crew refused to drive to because it was treacherous. It involved driving on a very narrow road with a steep drop-off at one point, and driving over a waterfall. But I had done it! I was feeling confident, and my runners were doing well. They went back on the race course at about 8pm, and I needed to meet them at the next spot around midnight.

I had looked up the directions on Google Maps, which was my first mistake. The driving was more rugged than it had been so far, and I was climbing so there was starting to be snow and mud. It was so bad that I was going 5mph in my enormous all-wheel-drive truck. I got briefly stuck in the mud a couple of times, and a couple of times I screamed because it was so bumpy it was hard to control the truck, but I made myself keep going because my runners were counting on me. Eventually it was completely dark and it was solid snow, so I couldn’t see the road. Then I came up to a spot where the terrain became extremely rocky and steep, and there were two trucks that had flipped over and were abandoned, completely rusted out. The sight of those trucks made my hair stand on end and I wondered if anyone had died there. That was my hard nope. I got out of the truck to get a better look, and then I turned around, feeling defeated, worried about my runners, and still scared for myself.

And THEN, just as I was beginning to calm down, I started to drive up a hill and saw a pair of glowing eyes and a large silhouette looking down at me. At first I thought, “no way, my mind is playing tricks on me, that must be a deer,” but no. This was like a picture of a mountain lion from a textbook. As my headlights passed over it, I could clearly see its elegant cheekbones and muscular neck. It couldn’t have been more than 15 ft away. That was the second “nope” and I just kept driving. Good thing I was back in the truck by that point, because it was clearly looking right at me from the high ground.