About finding one's way

The happiest I’ve ever felt was seeing the view from the height of the Hidden Cabin. The journey there nearly cost me my life but the sense of accomplishment that followed was one of the purest feelings of gratitude for the beauty of the world that I have ever experienced.
Piatra Craiului literally means the “Prince’s Stone”, and the name is well deserved. The mountain ridges in the area resemble a crown of stone from afar, and most people stay away from treks there if they lack fitness or experience. These mountains are famous in Romania for being among the most difficult to navigate even with proper guidance and equipment. There are many ways to get lost in the area, the most common occurring when people attempt to climb a portion that seems accessible and discover that they cannot go down the same way they went up. The fact that it is possible to climb for hours before getting stuck makes rescue difficult, and many have died of cold after nights spent in the open waiting for rescuers to find them or from falling while attempting to descent unsafe paths.
Traveling as novices to the area, we were lucky to befriend a school teacher of math, who’d been trekking through the area every summer for over a decade. Seeing we were somewhat familiar with mountain ways, he suggested we take a route that did not appear on tourist maps, to a place called the Hidden Cabin, 1700m above sea level. The trek, he said, was of medium difficulty.
‘Medium’, it turns out, meant four hours of climbing through mud, rain and rubble, up cliffs and along paths barely wide enough for the soul of a single boot, with smooth rock to one side and a 30m drop on the other. My near escape happened on a portion known as “jgheabul” or “the gutter”. This was a sloped path between two cliffs, which had filled with gravel over time. It was, essentially, akin to climbing up a mountain of pebbles, with your back to a steep cliff. About half-way through the climb, one of my feet began to slide, tilting me to one side and dislodging more pebbles around, until I slid completely out of control. Having been in such situations before, I kept enough composure to flip over and plant my heels firmly in the gravel, forming a pile beneath my boots, and slowing to a halt within sight on the edge.
The scenic photo taken at the end of that climb serves as my desktop background to this day, as a reminder of how rewarding a journey one strives for can be.