Olivera Bogunovic will make her way up Mount Lafayette Friday, walking the same trail where her daughter died two years ago.

Bogunovic moved to Massachusetts in 2006 and had visited the White Mountains once or twice to ski. She was never much of a hiker. That was Emily’s passion.

Emily Sotelo was nearly done with the 48 New Hampshire 4,000-foot peaks when she went missing. She was attempting an eight-hour hike up Lafayette in November 2022 – but the cold temperatures were more threatening than she’d anticipated, and she hadn’t prepared appropriately. After a three-day search, the rescue team found her body on her 20th birthday. She had died of hypothermia.

Sotelo’s parents hope to stop anyone else from suffering the loss they did. They started the Emily M. Sotelo Safety and Persistence Charitable Foundation, and the last two summers, they’ve hosted a “Hike to Save a Life.” It’s a fundraiser that encourages people to venture into nature – safely. This year, anyone can participate by doing a fundraising hike between July and September, or by joining the family at the Tuckerman Brewing Company this Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m.

“It’s a lost life. We can’t bring her back,” Bogunovic said. “But we can try to prevent it from happening again.”

After their daughter’s death, Bogunovic and her husband didn’t get much time to grieve. They have another daughter who needed them, and Bogunovic’s job as a psychiatrist meant that she could only take so much time off. People were depending on her.

Six weeks later, she went back to work.

Returning was a welcome imposition – knowing that she was positively impacting people made everything a little easier.

Perhaps that was why she started the foundation. For Bogunovic, the potential to help people was like a candle in the darkness.

Sotelo had been the same way. She regularly volunteered between classes at Vanderbilt University to aid the opioid crisis. During the pandemic, she and her mom spent time in Shiprock – a community on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico – helping those who had been hit particularly hard by COVID-19. At the time of her death, Sotelo had been working as an EMT.

It was something that brought mother and daughter together. Now, Bogunovic carries the torch for both of them.

If Bogunovic had never gone near a mountain for the rest of her life, it would have been understandable. But that’s not how she does things. Hiking made Sotelo happy, and now it makes her mother happy, too.

Sotelo’s love of nature started early. “She was a little nerd, and the outdoors were something she really enjoyed,” Bogunovic said. “I still find little pressed flowers in her old books.”

Hiking brought Sotelo a sense of peace and connection to nature that Bogunovic knows is important.

“We’re humans, we depend on the nature,” she said. “But we’re not in tune with it anymore.”

Bogunovic discovered hiking brings a sense of connection to her daughter.

When she hikes, she often does so with her husband, and they wonder aloud what might have gone through Sotelo’s mind on the same trail. They pass young hikers that evoke fond memories of their daughter. It’s an overwhelmingly positive experience.

For Bogunovic, hiking isn’t the enemy. Underpreparedness is.

And now that it’s been almost two years, she has the capacity to think bigger.

“Initially, in the first year – you really just want to get through the first year,” she said. “Now I can actually take a breath and think a little bit more about what I want to do”

In addition to fundraising for search and rescue teams, she has been working with high school seniors to develop a safe hiking course to be rolled out in the fall. They stress the essential supplies all hikers should have in their backpacks before hitting the trail – supplies that might have saved Emily’s life.

“Rather than kind of lamenting – because yeah, it’s pretty bad,” she said, “I’m going to try to stay connected to her and think, ‘What else would she want us to do?’ ”

Sofie Buckminster can be reached at sbuckminster@cm onitor.com.