‘Tonight will be a great feast’: My mountain rescue in Croatia

In our third travel encounter, the writer is battered by a blizzard in the Velebit mountains but saved by Tomaš and his homemade wine

The blizzard hit me about two hours after I’d started climbing the mountain. A furious wind drove through the pine trees, making their trunks writhe and groan, and an icy spindrift erased all trace of the landscape below: the foothills of the Velebit mountains and Croatia’s many-islanded Adriatic coastinwinter.

From lower ground, the snow had looked like a decorative touch to the mountaintops, and stupidly I had never expected to find myself inside it. But now I was in the midst of a snowstorm, shocked by the violence of the air, watching the trail ahead of me rapidly vanishing into whiteness.