For two days, Kirsten Frost had tracked the radio-collared female cheetah through the stony hills of Rogge Cloof Nature Reserve, the coldest place in South Africa, and now the snowstorm was intensifying.

Straining his eyes through the falling flakes, he glimpsed the wildcat’s face, the rest of her body lost in the whitewashed landscape.

“It felt surreal: Am I really viewing a cheetah in the snow at the southern tip of Africa?” Frost, a Cape Town-based wildlife photographer, told National Geographic by email while on the road. “I realized this was a moment few have ever experienced and a moment in nature I’ll never forget.”

His resulting photographs, taken in August of a female nicknamed Mona by conservationists and two