When a Texas man decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with his girlfriend, he wanted to find the perfect isolated spot in the Colorado mountains to pop the question. He certainly wasn’t expecting this to happen next.

Joshua Mason, 27, and his girlfriend, Katie Davis, 28, flew from Denton, Texas to Boulder last Friday. The next day, they set out on a hike at the Fourth of July Trailhead to Jasper Peak on the Continental Divide. It turned out that Joshua had some very special plans that day that Katie was not aware of.

“Mason was hoping to find an isolated scenic location ‘away from any other people’ to propose to Davis,” the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said. “They found exactly such a location, and Davis happily accepted the surprise proposal.”

Once they had hiked over 8.2 miles and ascended 3,000 feet to the nearly 13,000-foot summit, things took a dangerous turn.

“As it started getting dark, there’s no trail to see. It’s not clearly marked,” said Boulder County Sheriff Mountain Deputy Dan Walter.

The couple was not dressed in warm clothes, had very little water, and were not prepared for high terrain. Joshua and Katie ended up being “disoriented” and lost until about midnight, when a camper hiking in the area heard their screams.

“They had come down a ridge line and cliffed-out. They came to a cliff and couldn’t go any further and were yelling for help,” Walter said. “By the grace of God, (the camper) happened to be hiking by where he could hear them.”

The man who found them led them to his friends, who were camping by a lake, and they noticed that Josh and Katie were showing signs of altitude sickness and severe dehydration when he discovered them.

“One of them recognized this is a serious situation that they were in,” Walter said.

The situation was so dire that one of the campers hiked down to her car in the dead of night to call police. Rescue crews got to the couple around couple 4:30 a.m., and walked the two of them down to the trailhead by 6:30 a.m. on Sunday.

“Mason acknowledged that he did not allow enough time to complete the hike before dark, and they did not carry enough water or food,” the sheriff’s office said.

Despite this harrowing ordeal, Josh and Katie still plan to get married.

“Last thing I said, ‘So is the engagement still on?'” Walter recounted, “and she said, ‘oh yes.'”

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