by Aron Ralston
I rest, and then I surge again against the rock. Again nothing. I re-plant my feet. Feeling around for a better grip on the bottom of the chockstone, I reposition my upturned left hand on a handle of rock, take a deep breath, and slam into the boulder, harder than any of my previous attempts. “Yeearrgg…unnnhhh,” the exertion forces the air from my lungs, all but masking the quiet, hollow sound of the boulder tottering. The stone’s movement is imperceptible; all I get is a spike in the already extravagant pain, and I gasp, “Ow! Fuck!”
I’ve shifted the boulder a fraction of an inch, and it’s settled onto my wrist a bit more. This thing weighs a lot more than I do—it’s a testament to how amped I am that I moved it at all—and now all I want is to move it back. I get into position again, pulling with my left hand on top of the stone, and budge the rock back ever so slightly, reversing what I just did. The pain eases a little. In the process, I’ve lacerated and bruised the skin over my left quadriceps above the knee. I’m sweating hard. With my left hand, I lift my right shirtsleeve off my shoulder and wipe my forehead. My chest heaves. I need a drink, but when I suck on my hydration-system hose, I find my water reservoir is empty.
I have a liter of water in a Lexan bottle in my backpack, but it takes me a few seconds to realize I won’t be able to sling my pack off my right arm. I remove my camera from my neck and put it on the boulder. Once I have my left arm free of the pack strap, I expand the right strap, tuck my head inside the loop, and pull the strap over my left shoulder so it encompasses my torso. The weight of the rappelling equipment, video camera, and water bottle tugs the pack down to my feet, and then I step out of the strap loop. Extracting the dark gray water bottle from the bottom of my pack, I unscrew the top, and before I realize the significance of what I’m doing, I gulp three large mouthfuls of water and halt to pant for breath. Then it hits me: In five seconds, I’ve guzzled a third of my entire remaining water supply.
“Oh, damn, dude, cap that and put it away. No more water.” I screw down the lid tight, drop the bottle into the pack resting at my knees, and take three deep breaths.
“OK, time to relax. The adrenaline’s not going to get you out of here. Let’s look this over, see what we got.” Amazingly, it’s been half an hour since the accident. The decision to get objective with my situation and stop rushing from one brutish attempt to the next allows my energy to settle down. This isn’t going to be over quickly, so I need to start thinking. To do that, I need to be calm.
The first thing I decide to do is examine the area where the boulder has my wrist pinned. Gravity and friction have wedged the chockstone, now suspended about four feet above the canyon floor, into a new set of constriction points. At three spots, the opposing walls secure the rock. On the downcanyon side of the boulder, my hand and wrist form a fourth support where they are caught in the grip of this horrific handshake. I think, “My hand isn’t just stuck in there, it’s actually holding this boulder off the wall. Oh, man, I’m fucked.”
I reach my left fingers down to my right hand where it is visible along the north wall of the canyon. Poking down into the small gap above the catch point, I touch my thumb, which is already a sickly gray color. It’s cocked sideways in the space and looks terribly unnatural. I straighten my thumb with the fore and middle fingers of my left hand. There is no feeling in any part of my right hand at all. I accept this with a sense of detachment, as if I’m diagnosing someone else’s problem. This clinical objectivity calms me. Without sensation, it doesn’t seem as much my hand—if it were my hand, I could feel it when I touched it. The farthest part of my arm I can feel is my wrist, where the boulder is pinning it. Judging by appearances, the lack of any bone-splitting noises during the accident, and how it all feels to my left hand, I probably don’t have any broken bones. From the nature of the accident, though, there is very likely substantial soft-tissue damage at the least, and for all I know, something could be broken in the middle of my hand. Either way, not good.
Investigating the underside of the boulder, I can touch the little finger on my right hand and feel its position with my left hand. It’s twisted up inside my palm, in a partial fist; my muscles seem to be in a state of forced contraction. I can’t relax my hand or extend any of my fingers. I try to wiggle each one independently. There’s no movement whatsoever. I try flexing my muscles to make a tighter fist, but there isn’t even the slightest twitch. Double that on the “not good.”
Nearer to my chest along the wall, I can’t quite get my left forefinger up to where it can touch my right wrist from below. My little finger can barely slide into the space between the boulder and the wall, brushing my arm at a spot on the lateral side of the knob of my wrist. I withdraw from prodding around and look at my left wrist and estimate that it is three inches thick. My right wrist is being compressed to one sixth its normal thickness. If not for the bones, the weight of the boulder would squeeze my arm flat. Judging from the paleness of my right hand, and the fact that there’s no blood loss from a traumatic injury, it’s probable that I have no circulation getting to or from my trapped hand. The lack of sensation or movement probably means my nerves are damaged. Whatever injuries are present, my right hand seems to be entirely isolated from my body’s circulatory, nervous, and motor-control systems. That’s three-for-three on the “not good” checklist.
An inner voice explodes into expletives at the prognosis: “Shit! How did this happen? What the fuck? How the fuck did you get your hand trapped by a fucking boulder? Look at this! Your hand is crushed; it’s dying, man, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you don’t get blood flow back within a couple hours, it’s gone.”
“No, it’s not. I’ll get out. I mean, if I don’t get out, I’m going to lose more than my hand. I have to get out!” Reason answers, but reason is not in control here; the adrenaline isn’t wholly dissipated yet.
“You’re stuck, fucked, and out of luck.” I don’t like to be pessimistic, but the devil on my left shoulder knows better than to keep up any pretenses. The little rhyming bastard is right: My outlook is bleak. But it’s way too early to dwell on despair.
“No! Shut up, that’s not helpful.” Better to keep investigating, see what I learn. Whoever is arguing from my right shoulder makes a good point—it’s not my hand I need to worry about. There’s a bigger issue. Stressing over the superficial problem will only consume my resources. Right now, I need to focus on gathering more information. With that decision made, a feeling of acceptance settles over me.
Looking up to my right, a foot above the top of the boulder on the north wall, I see tiny wads of my flesh, pieces of my arm hair, and stains of my blood streaked on the sandstone. In dragging my arm down the wall, the boulder and smooth Navajo sandstone acted like a grater, scraping off my skin’s outer layers in thin strips. Peering at the bottom of my arm, I check for more blood, but there is none, not even a lone drip.
As I bring my head back up, I bump the bill of my hat, and my sunglasses fall onto my pack at my feet. Picking them up, I see they’ve gotten scratched at some point since I had them on in the open sunny part of the canyon an hour ago. “Not like that’s important,” I tell myself, but still I take care to put them on top of the boulder, off to the left side.
My headphones have gotten knocked off my ears, but now, and in my calm, I hear the crowd on the live CD cheering. The noise evaporates as the disc winds to a stop, and the sudden silence reinforces my situation. I am irreversibly trapped, standing in the dimly lit bottom of a canyon, unable to move more than a few inches up or down or side to side. Compounding my physical circumstances, no one who will suspect I am missing knows where I am. I violated the prime directive of wilderness travel in failing to leave a detailed trip plan with a responsible person. Still eight miles from my truck, I am alone in an infrequently visited place with no means to contact anyone outside the fifty-yard throw of my voice.
Alone in a situation that could very shortly prove to be fatal.
My watch says it’s 3:28 P.M.,
nearly forty-five minutes since the boulder fell on my arm. I take an inventory of what I have with me, emptying my pack with my left hand, item by item. In my plastic grocery bag, beside the chocolate-bar wrappers and bakery bag with the crumbs of the chocolate muffin, I have two small bean burritos, about five hundred calories total. In the outside mesh pouch, I have my CD player, CDs, extra AA batteries, mini digital video camcorder. My multi-use tool and three-LED headlamp are also in the pouch. I sort through the electronics and pull out the knife tool and the headlamp, setting them on top of the boulder next to my sunglasses.
I put my camera into the cloth goggles bag I’d been using to keep the grit out of the components, and drop it in the mesh pouch with the other gadgets. Except for the Lexan water bottle and my empty hydration pack, the remaining contents of my pack are my green and yellow climbing rope in its black zippered rope bag; my rock-climbing harness; and the small wad of rappelling equipment I’d brought to use at the Big Drop rappel.
My next thought is to brainstorm every means possible that could get me out of here. The easy ideas come first, although some of them are more wishful than realistic. Maybe other canyoneers will traverse this section of slot and find me—they might be able to help free me, or even give me clothes, food, and water and go for help. Maybe Megan and Kristi will think something’s wrong when I don’t meet them like I said I would, and they’ll go look for my truck or notify the Park Service. Maybe my Aspen friends Brad and Leah Yule will do the same when I don’t show up for the big Scooby-Doo desert party tonight. But they don’t know for sure that I’m coming, because I didn’t call them when I was in Moab yesterday. Tomorrow, Sunday, is still the weekend—maybe someone will come this way on his or her day off. If I’m not out by Monday night, my roommates will miss me for sure; they might even notify the police. Or my manager at the shop where I work will call my mom when I don’t turn up on Tuesday. It might take people a few days to figure out where I went, but there could be a search out by Wednesday, and if they find my truck, it wouldn’t be long after that.
The major preclusion to rescue is that I don’t have enough water to wait that long—twenty-two ounces total after my chug a few minutes ago. The average survival time in the desert without water is between two and three days, sometimes as little as a day if you’re exerting yourself in 100-degree heat. I figure I’ll make it to Monday night. If a rescue comes along before then, it will be an unlikely chance encounter with a fellow canyoneer, not an organized effort of trained personnel. In other words, rescue seems about as probable as winning the lottery.
By nature I’m an impatient person; when a situation requires me to wait, I need to be doing something to make the time pass. Call me a child of the instant-gratification generation, or maybe my imagination was stunted from too much television, but I don’t sit still well. In my present situation, that’s probably a good thing. I have a problem to solve—I have to get out of here—so I put my mind to what I can do to escape my entrapment. Eliminating a couple ideas that are too dumb (like cracking open my extra AA batteries on the boulder and hoping the acid erodes the chockstone but doesn’t eat into my arm), I organize my other options in order of preference: Excavate the rock around my hand with my multi-tool; rig ropes and an anchor above me to lift the boulder off my hand; or amputate my arm. Quickly, each option seems impossible: I don’t have the tools to remove enough rock to free my hand; I don’t have the hauling power needed, even with a pulley system, to move the boulder; and even though it seems my best option, I don’t have the tools, know-how, or emotional gumption to sever my own arm.
Perhaps more as a tactic to delay thinking about self-amputation and less as a truly productive effort, I decide to work on an easier option—chipping away the rock to free my arm. Drawing my multi-tool from its perch above the boulder, I extract the longer of the two blades. I’m suddenly very glad I decided to add it to my supplies.
Picking an easily accessed spot on the boulder in front of my chest and a few inches from my right wrist, I scratch the tip across the boulder in a four-inch line. If I can remove the stone below this line and back toward my fingers about six inches, I will be able to free my hand. But with the demarcated part of the stone being three inches thick in places, I’ll have to remove about seventy cubic inches of the boulder. It’s a lot of rock, and I know the sandstone is going to make the chipping tedious work.
My first attempt to saw down into the boulder along the faint line I’ve marked barely scuffs the rock. I try again, pressing harder this time, but the backside of the knife handle indents my forefinger more readily than the cutting edge scores the rock. Changing my grip on the tool, I hold it like Norman Bates and stab at the rock in the same spot. There is no noticeable effect. I try to identify a fracture line, a weakness in the boulder, something I can exploit, but there is nothing. Even if I focus on a small crystalline protuberance in the rock above my wrist where I might be able to break out a chunk, it will be many hours of work before I can remove even that tiny mineralized section.
I hit the rock with the butt of my hand, still holding the knife, and ask out loud in an exasperated whine, “Why is this sandstone so hard?” It seems like every time I’ve ever gone climbing on a sandstone formation, I break off a handhold, yet I can’t put a dent in this boulder. I settle on a quick experiment to test the relative hardness of the wall. Holding my knife like a pen, I easily etch a capital “G” on the tableau of the canyon’s north side, about a foot above my right arm. Slowly, I make a few more printed letters in lowercase, “e-o-l-o-g-i-c,” and then pause to measure the space with my eyes and lay out the rest of the letters in my mind. Within five minutes, I scratch out three more words, then touch them up, until I can read the phrase “Geologic Time Includes Now.”
I have quoted mountaineer and Colorado Thirteeners guidebook author Gerry Roach, from his “Classic Commandments of Mountaineering.” It’s an elegant way of saying “Watch out for falling rocks.” As most people who live on fault lines are well aware, the processes shaping and forming the earth’s crust are current events. Fault lines slip, long-dormant volcanoes explode, mountainsides turn to mud and slide.
I remember trekking with my friend Mark Van Eeckhout through a field of boulders and coming upon a house-sized rock. We said to each other, “Wow, look at the size of this one!” We’d imagined what a spectacle it would be to see something that size separate from a cliff a thousand feet above and fall, spawning rock slides right and left, crashing with apocalyptic force.
But cliffs don’t just form in the middle of the night when no one’s watching. I’ve seen riverbanks collapse, glaciers calve and let loose tremendous icefalls, and boulders plummet from their lofty perches. Gerry Roach’s commandment reminds climbers that rocks fall all the time. Sometimes they spontaneously break away; sometimes they get knocked loose. Sometimes they fall when you’re so far off you can’t even see them, you only hear a clatter; sometimes they fall when you or your partners are climbing below them. Sometimes one will pull loose even though you barely touched it; and sometimes one will fall after you’ve already stood on top of it…when you’re using it for a handhold and it shifts…when your head is right in the way and you put your hands up to save yourself…
It’s rare. But it happens. Has happened.
This chockstone pinning my wrist was stuck for a long time before I came along. And then it not only fell on me, it trapped my arm. I’m baffled. It was like the boulder had been put there, set like a hunter’s trap, waiting for me. This was supposed to be an easy trip, few risks, well within my abilities. I’m not out trying to climb a high peak in the middle of winter, I’m just taking a vacation. Why didn’t the last person who came along dislodge the chockstone? They would’ve had to make the same maneuvers I did to traverse the canyon. What kind of luck do I have that this boulder, wedged here for untold ages, freed itself at the split second that my hands were in the way? Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, it seems astronomically infeasible that this hap
pened.
I mean, what are the odds?
Beginnings
Mountains are the means, the man is the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man.
—WALTER BONATTI, Italian climber
IN AUGUST 1987, when I was twelve, my family was preparing to move to Colorado from Indianapolis, Indiana, to follow my dad’s career. While visiting with a friend of our family in rural eastern Ohio that July, I found an encyclopedic book about the fifty states and looked up my future home. At the time, I had never been over ten miles west of the Mississippi River in my life. Facing this imminent displacement to the West, I wanted to find out what was in store for me. I admit I was prejudiced—I had preconceived images of horseback riders, skiers, and so much snow that it covered the state year-round.
What I found in the book not only reinforced those notions, it terrified me. There was a photo of Pikes Peak, the view from which inspired the song “America the Beautiful,” according to the caption. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the peak was so rugged that it seemed a caricature of ferocious nature. I didn’t know at the time that there are both a railway and a road to the top of the peak, ending in a parking area beside a restaurant and gift shop. At that point in my life, the great outdoors was a concept limited to the woods behind my house, the dirt-bike course over on the lot near my friend Chris Landis’s house, and Eagle Creek Reservoir on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In my world, the outdoors did not include mountains. And it especially did not include mountains fourteen thousand feet tall. Intimidated, I turned the page.