“If my foot slips ... what if we can’t find our way out? What if no one finds us?” Christy Martinsen, a senior from Eureka, Nev., thought.

It was Saturday, October 29, Martinsen’s birthday. She and a few friends left the house that morning at 4 a.m. She was excited about going on the day-trip to the Darby Ice and Wind Caves.

They packed peanut butter sandwiches, granola bars, and plenty of water, extra batteries and gloves. They felt prepared to go hiking through the caves.

“You go in the ice caves and come out the wind caves,” Martinsen explained. “One of the guys had been before, so I wasn’t too worried.”

So, equipped with long underwear, fleece jackets and wind-breakers, they set out.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. Two or three hours into the hike, the group realized they were lost.

There were six repels on the hike, some of which were 30-40 feet, one of which was sheer ice, and once you get to a certain point there is no backtracking, Martinsen explained, “We had no way of getting back up, we couldn’t go back the way we came in.”

“We just kept back-tracking to the point we thought we had gotten lost, and trying a different way,” Martinsen said. “It was at the point where we could just sit and wait, or we could keep trying. We decided to keep trying to find our way out.”

The lights went out for Martinsen only a few hours into the hike. Her flashlight went out, not because she didn’t have extra batteries, but because the bulb burned out.

Things were getting increasingly worse.

The food and water the group had packed ran out around hour 11 or 12.

“The backpack I took was old and broke several times on the trip,” Martinsen said.

There is a point on the hike where hikers have to wade across what is called Crotch Lake.

The group knew this ahead of time and planned in advance.

Martinsen brought sandals to wade through with. She was confident she would have dry shoes to put back on her tired feet at the other side of the lake, so she tied her shoes to her backpack and started wading at hour 14.

On the other side of the lake, Martinsen realized her backpack had broken mid-lake, and her shoes were gone. She would have to wear her wet sandals for the duration of the hike.

“We were stemming [climbing along ravines] for hours and hours. We prayed a lot, and at first I thought ‘We’ll get out of here, we’ll be just fine,’ but as the hours went on, I realized that there was nothing special about us.”

Martinsen began to ponder on death, a thought that she had never before been faced with.

Without food, water, light or shoes—she went on.

Finally around hour 14 “one of the guys recognized a spot. We knew that from there we could find our way.” It took them two hours to reach the mouth of the cave.

What should have taken eight hours took Martinsen and her group 16, and it still wasn’t over.

“There hadn’t been much snow at all when we went in, but it had been snowing most of the day and there was about a foot and a half on the ground.” Still in sandals, Martinsen made her way to the vehicle an hour and a half later.

It had been 21 hours since they had left the safety of the car. Martinsen arrived at her apartment, 6 a.m. Sunday, completely exhausted.

Her roommates woke up to go to church, and woke her to see if she was going. She tearfully explained the ordeal to them, and they all agreed she needed to go to the hospital.

At the hospital, Martinsen was treated for pneumonia, hypothermia and nerve damage in her toes.

She also had extremely high enzyme levels that made kidney failure a “very real possibility,” Martinsen said.

Normal enzyme level is about 215, but due to overexertion her muscles had begun to break down and release enzymes, the doctor explained, Martinsen’s enzyme levels were at 7000.

The enzymes were flushed out, and Martinsen stayed in the hospital for a few days. She’s back in school now, and doing better.

“At first it really shrunk my comfort zone. I was afraid to go outside or do anything,” Martinsen said.

“Now I’m grateful for the opportunity I have to live. A lot of things that were important before aren’t now. I’m grateful I was given the added strength I needed to get through, because I couldn’t have done it on my own,” she said.