Oct 30, 2025 3 min read

COLD MOUNTAIN MUSIC

In the dark of night, these thoughts of mine keep me up all night
Got my heart on ice, don't die, don't die
(Ooh, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive, ooh)
On this hopeless night, came a thousand miles to see you smile tonight
Your smile tonight

Good (Don't Die) - Kanye West/Tyrone Griffin Jr.

In February 2024, The San Francisco Chronicle interviewed 34-year-old skier Mike Petkov, who had found himself stranded high on a ridge he had traversed in the snowy terrain of Kirkwood Mountain Resort, located within the Eldorado National Forest south of Lake Tahoe, California. Alone after sunset, he waited for hours for help before being informed by rescuers via text that he would have to make camp for the night so they could carry out a safe rescue the following morning.

Later that freezing cold night, Petkov couldn’t sleep, desperate to keep warm by any means necessary. It was reported—perhaps hyperbolically by the press—that music saved his life that night: he played the album Vultures 1 by (Kan)Ye West and Ty Dolla $ign on his phone to keep up his morale. Two songs in particular, “Beg Forgiveness” and “Good (Don’t Die),” helped him stay focused as he contemplated his predicament in the freezing conditions, doing whatever he could to avoid frostbite at any cost.

"The lyrics that kept circling in his head were especially resonant: 'You’ve gone too far and you should hang your head in shame' and the refrain 'Don’t die / don’t die.' Petkov struggled to sleep through the night, but the song was a constant. 'I kept singing that to myself all night, kind of as a humor thing more than a worrying thing,' he added." — Complex Magazine (Feb 2024)

It makes sense that both songs from Vultures 1 would help keep him sane during his anxious wait for rescue. Good (Don’t Die), with its creative use of Donna Summer’s classic track I Feel Love, especially carries a cold, haunting sound like a body in algor mortis (coldness of death), its warm 808s & Heartbreak-style thumping beat pulsing like a life-support machine, symbolising the fragile determination to come back to life.

This got me thinking: what would I choose as my Cold Mountain Music? Probably Wagner’s Die Walküre Act 3 or Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5, but there is a real cinematic quality to Petkov listening to Good (Don’t Die) and Beg Forgiveness on repeat like mantras in the dark that is kind of irresistible.

Good (Don’t Die) is actually a song written by (Kan)Ye about the death of his mother, who died after surgery that went wrong, and though she didn’t make it, the song feels like that moment suspended between life and death, when her son would have prayed for her not to die. The Donna Summer–appropriated sample would have been a reference to a song from a time when his mother, Donda, was still a young woman, and its use could almost be interpreted as being like that of some Greek muse, by way of 1970s disco music, calling her back from the underworld to which she succumbed.

The following morning, Petkov managed to hike his way down the mountain near Silver Lake, where he was finally picked up by a CHP helicopter and flown to safety. Sustaining no injuries, Petkov was lucky, but he also acknowledged the power of music to help him through a lonely, cold night in that space where life and death coexist until the dawn.