For the past 15 years, I have been operating back country tours for snowboarders and skiers in the rugged Hakkoda mountain range in Japan’s north-eastern Aomori Prefecture. The work is exhilarating, but also a sober responsibility. Adventure-seeking tourists put their lives in my hands, trusting me to get them up and down the mountains safely. I always spend the long commute up the mountain praying for wisdom and spiritual guidance, as well as for protection for each person in that day’s tour group.

In February 2007, seven Australian skiers hired me to be their private guide during their ski trip here. The first morning I was eager to get a quick start. A storm was rolling in, and if we didn’t head out soon, we’d be stuck in the ski lodge for two days waiting for it to pass.

Usually I have eight mountains to choose from, but due to the approaching storm, only one mountain was close enough to hike to and ski down before the ski resort closed for the day. We were the first group out of the cable car station near the peak.

As we prepared to climb to a higher, more remote area, another guide stopped to warn me that it would be very windy at the top. Having beaten many storms before, I told him I thought we would be fine.

With the wind at our backs, it took us little time to get to the top for the main run of the day. As usual, I called the lodge on my cellphone just before we started our descent, and told them where and when to pick us up with the bus on the other side of the mountain.

The moment I put my phone back in my pocket, a gale-force wind hit us and we were in total white-out conditions. Knowing what imminent danger we could be in, I told my team that the open bowl route I had planned was now too dangerous to go down. We would have to backtrack to a ridge, where the wind would keep new snow from accumulating, and descend from there. We turned and headed into the biting wind.

As we inched our way down the ridge in blinding conditions, my job was to count seven heads over and over again. I desperately prayed that each man could see the one ahead of him, that they could all hear my instructions, and that they would heed my warning about not going down into the bowl. I also prayed for God to have mercy and get us down safely. I’m sure it was due to those prayers that very little snow broke away beneath us as we descended, but it was slow going. I stopped to take a GPS reading to double-check our position, and saw that a trek that usually takes five minutes had taken us half an hour.

Halfway down the mountain, I saw another group in the distance and realized that something was wrong. “Do you need help?” I called out in Japanese.

A cry of  “Please help us!” sent shivers down our spines.We knew that they had been caught in an avalanche. God had helped us make it safely that far down the mountain, but now I realized that He had something more in mind. The seven skiers I was guiding were all experienced ski patrolmen, and each carried full avalanche gear in their backpacks. Combined, these men had 75 years of experience in dangerous situations.

We skied down to the other group, pulled out our shovels, and started digging out half-buried people. After an initial assessment, I called an emergency CQ on my radio and relayed a message to the police—our position and the conditions of the Japanese skiers who had been caught in the avalanche. Of the group, two were dead, six were too seriously injured to be moved, and one was still missing.

We formed two groups and did a patterned search for the missing person with our avalanche probes. Miraculously, not only did we find him buried under the snow, but even after being buried for an hour, he was still alive. Apparently his helmet had created an air pocket around his head so he could breathe, and the cold had slowed his metabolism so he needed less oxygen. And it wasn’t his time to die.

While the blizzard raged around us, we performed first aid and CPR on the injured and built snow shelters around them to keep them from freezing to death.

From the time of my CQ, it was three hours before police and army rescue teams could reach us. When they finally did, we helped lift the injured onto snow boats that the police had brought up. As the blizzard raged on, they were taken to ambulances parked at the base of the mountain, amid a media circus.

After seven hours on the mountain we boarded the bus that would take us to the ski lodge.

The next two days were non-stop newspaper and TV interviews, and one point that came up over and over was how any other group of skiers I’ve guided would have been totally helpless in such a situation, as most people bring no avalanche gear and have no experience. Only God could have arranged for our team of experienced skiers to get together on that day, on that mountain, in order to help those stuck in the avalanche. And only through a miracle of God did we find the last person alive after he’d been buried under the snow for so long. As one commentator put it, we were “the hand of God on the mountain that day.”

Simon Bernard is a member of the Family International in Japan.