Life has a funny way of teaching us lessons when we least expect it. For me, one of these lessons came at 13,000 feet in the Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan. Chase and I were there to hunt Dagestan Tur. This was two years after we hunted Dall sheep in the Alaska range, and we were anxious to get into the mountains.

After a day or two eating delicious, and wildly inexpensive food in Baku, we were climbing grass the covered mountains. We expected to be near the top where the Tur escape predation, bugs, and the heat of summer.

The first day was what we expected. We set up our tiny Stone Glacier SkyAir ULT tarp tents and headed out. Only a mile or two from camp we walked up on a large heard of tur feeding. There were so many animals it was difficult to pick one out. And a thick fog started moving in further complicate the matter. The sun went down and we were soon sleeping in those little tarps. That night, the clouds and fogs brought thunder, and lightning, and heavy rain with it.

With only five days to hunt, we spent two of them stuck in those tarps, waiting out the rain and fog. The weather was brutal. Each morning looked the same as the last – just gray clouds and more rain. Our world had shrunk to the size of those tents, and I started wondering why I’d come all this way. It was looking like our hunt would end without opportunity.

But on the third evening, we got lucky. The clouds broke just enough for Asiman, our Azeri guide, to spot what we came for – a young Dagestan tur. At that point, this ram fit the bill and I made a solid shot on the animal.

The next morning, our last day on the mountain, everything changed. We woke up to clear skies for the first time in days and headed out to look for the large herd. As we climbed higher, something incredible happened. Those same clouds that had kept us trapped in tarps started filling the valleys below us. Soon we were standing above the clouds, looking out at what looked like a sea of white cotton stretching as far as we could see. The mountain peaks above 12,000 feet or so broke the surface of the clouds like island atolls in the middle of a vast ocean.

A few years before this I bought into the value of meditation and gave it a shot. I downloaded a popular meditation app and set a timer for 10 minutes and proceeded to think about nothing. And when I’d think about something, I’d pay attention my thinking about it, and move on. This lasted for a week or two before I lost interest. But one of the lessons the app taught was that no matter how dark and rainy the sky is, the sun is always shining brightly above it.

And that morning on the mountain this lesson hit me hard. While we’d been stuck under those clouds cursing the weather, the sun had been shining up here the whole time. We just couldn’t see it. If we were in base camp at the bottom of the mountain, it would be a shitty day like the last several. But we were on the peak. We were above the clouds and the day was beautiful. Chase shot a tur a few hours later and we wrapped up a successful, albeit painfully slow hunt.

That’s how life works sometimes. When you’re in the middle of tough times, it’s hard to see anything else. Problems feel huge and endless. But there’s always a bigger picture – you just might need to climb a little higher to see it. Sometimes you have to wait it out. Sometimes you have to push harder and climb higher. Either way, the sun’s always shining somewhere above those clouds. You just need to keep going until you find it.

I didn’t expect to learn this lesson while hunting in Azerbaijan. But standing on that mountain, watching those clouds roll through the valleys below, I finally got it. The difference between feeling trapped and feeling free is often just a matter of perspective – and having the grit to keep going until you find the view you’re looking for.