This post was written by Monica Schael-Isenor.

Expat living in Malaysia is generally a tepid experience, with daily routines settling in almost as easily here as they did back home. Monica Schael-Isenor saw all that vanish in a heartbeat on the day her husband found himself among many trapped by a deadly earthquake on Malaysia’s highest peak.

“I’m not worried,” I told my mother in Canada during a phone conversation about a week before my husband, Brett Isenor, left for a trek up Mount Kinabalu in Sabah. Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia’s highest mountain and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stands at 4,095 metres and draws as many as 196 hikers every day.

In 17 years of marriage, I’ve grown used to my husband’s outdoor enthusiasm. His backcountry résumé includes everything from canoe camping and hiking trips in the Canadian Rocky Mountains (including close encounters with bears) to deep sea fishing near Alaska and ocean kayaking on Vancouver Island. I thought we had both undertaken more risky challenges in our home country than climbing Mount Kinabalu, so I felt completely comfortable with what Brett and eight of his coworkers from his Kuala Lumpur office set out to do – until my cell phone rang on the Friday morning after his departure. I answered, and didn’t recognize the voice or the name of the person. I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying until I heard, “…earthquake on Mount Kinabalu this morning.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I understood what you just said. Can you please repeat?” I asked. I had understood perfectly well, but couldn’t believe what this stranger was saying. I thought perhaps one of my husband’s coworkers was playing a bad practical joke on me. Finally, I learned that my husband was fine, and I would receive another update shortly. I ended the call, and started frantically surfing the news headlines. It was true. That morning at 7:15, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake had hit Mount Kinabalu. From the scarce information I found online, the situation on the mountain didn’t seem that bad, yet I was still nervous when I phoned both my parents and my in-laws in Canada to explain what happened. I continued my day with my three young kids, distracted and uneasy.

Meanwhile, my husband and his climbing friends had started down from Lowe’s Peak 15 minutes before the earthquake hit. Brett first thought there had only been a rockslide on the mountain. As the ground shook and he watched two different peaks crumble away, he knew it was a quake that triggered the slide he saw. He walked over to a nearby gorge and watched the air fill with dust. His first impression was amazement before realizing that other people had likely been injured or killed further down the trail.

For the next 10 hours, my husband and more than 100 hikers from more than 16 different countries were stuck on Mount Kinabalu. With the threat of more rocks falling from the continuous aftershocks, and no safe route down, climbers and guides were terrified. Jagged peaks loomed above them, and there didn’t seem to be any safe place for them to seek shelter.

As the expedition leader for his group, Brett felt a responsibility to keep everyone’s spirits up. They told jokes to keep each other entertained, and worked together. They managed to build a shelter with a few flags they had brought to the summit for photo ops and gathered firewood for a small campfire. The stranded climbers had limited food and water, and they were tired and cold. They had started their day at 2:00am at Laban Rata Rest House – about 2.7 kilometres from the summit – to watch the sun rise over the majestic mountains. They hadn’t eaten a proper meal since 4:30pm the day before. Helicopters tried dropping emergency supplies to the stranded climbers and missed as everything landed in a nearby valley. My husband said he witnessed a very “un-Malaysian” display of anger at that moment.

They finally decided the safest way back to Kinabalu Park was to hike there with the help of their guides. They started hiking at about 5pm, and arrived at Timpohon Gate at 1:30am. During their descent, they hiked through a rockslide area that destroyed about two kilometres of the trail. Everything had vanished – the path and the steps to guide climbers. Sadly, this is where Brett and his friends saw a few of the adults who were killed when the earthquake rocked the mountain. His team also stopped at Laban Rata Rest House. A giant boulder the size of a beach ball had broken through a door and lay inside the hut where they had slept just hours earlier. The hut’s wall was punctured with holes the size of dinner plates by rocks crashing down the mountain. Brett earned a newfound appreciation for the power of nature as he took in the devastation.

My husband says he learned a lot about himself that day, and how to handle stress in a difficult situation. The most impressive thing he noticed during his ordeal was how resilient people were – they pushed themselves physically and mentally. They each willed themselves to get off the mountain with the help of their guides, crossing paths with a severely injured young boy being carried down by guides on a makeshift stretcher. As soon as they reached the gate and emergency services, several people collapsed from exhaustion.

On June 5, 2015, fourteen climbers and four mountain guides died on Mount Kinabalu. My husband and I may never truly know how lucky we are that he came home the next day. Not everyone did, and it’s a sobering reminder of how precious our time here really is.

Read This: Climbing Mount Kinabalu: What You Should Know

Source: The Expat magazine July 2015