Gothic Basin — Sunday, Jul. 27, 2025

Warning to young female backpackers in small groups:

My sister and I backpacked up to Foggy Lake and spent the night there. The next morning, we left our tent and nonessentials behind to hike toward Gothic Peak. Going up to the peak I wore my polarized sun glasses, little snow was up there. 

We were gone for about 2 hours. When we got back to the tent, we had some downtime and decided to take a nap.


Within an hour, we both woke up with intense burning in our eyes — so bad we couldn’t even open them for more than one second at a time . We flushed them the best we could, but the pain continued. Our eyes became extremely light-sensitive, and our eyelids swelled like we’d been exposed to some kind of chemical irritant.

We ran through all possible causes. We had our bear spray with us and the safety was on and nothing else we had could have caused this. There was no smell and it only burned mucus membranes and not our skin. We contacted family through our Garmin, packed up, and struggled to hike down and out of the area.

That night, we ended up in the ER with what doctors said appeared to be a chemical irritant to our eyes. We both had iritis, conjunctivitis, and ulcers. Our vision was so bad we couldn’t make out the top lines on the eye acuity chart.

We’ve reported this to the ranger station — in case this was malicious