Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  After graduating at the head of my class and receiving my B.S. in mechanical engineering—with a double major in French and a minor in piano performance—in May 1997, I took a job as a mechanical engineer for Intel Corporation, in Ocotillo, Arizona, a far-flung suburb at the southeastern edge of the mega-sprawl of Phoenix. I would eventually transfer first to Tacoma, Washington, in March 1999, and then to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in September of that same year. But it was in 1997, right after graduation, when my long-dormant passions for the wilderness environments of the western U.S. began to blossom. Before I moved to Arizona, I wanted to reward myself for my successes in school and for having found what I anticipated would be a good job, so I planned not just a vacation but a super-vacation. It was to be the Road Trip to End All Road Trips. I would start driving my 1984 Honda CRX north, first to the Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks, then on into Canada, to tour the Banff National Park and Icefields Parkway, over to Vancouver and down into the Cascades, Olympic, and Rainier national parks, finishing the circuit with Crater Lake, Yosemite, and Zion national parks. Thirty days, six thousand miles, ten national parks.

  As it turned out, I didn’t get very far. Since it was only late May, the snow levels were still high, which confined me to lower-elevation backpacking trips at first. My early-season venture into Phelps Lake in the Tetons rewarded me with a top-rate campsite beside the lake, where at dusk the first night, a cow moose trotted her silhouette in front of the sunset. I saw a pair of bald eagles soaring above a waterfall the next morning, then spied a grizzly bear in the forest near the road the day after that. I drove around and took photographs of the Tetons reflected in the broken windows of abandoned farmhouses in Antelope Flats. That same afternoon, I planned my next excursion, a two-night trip to Bradley Lake, where I intended to place a base camp for an attempt at climbing the Middle Teton, the easiest technically of the major peaks in the park. When I asked the backcountry ranger at the permits station how I could climb one of the Tetons, his disconcerted look foreshadowed the adventure I would have. It was a look that said, “If you have to ask, it’s against my better judgment to tell you.” He showed me how to get to Bradley Lake on the map under the Plexiglas countertop and explained that the trails were under several feet of snow, concluding with “If you don’t have snowshoes, you’ll be post-holing up to your waist.” I didn’t know what post-holing was, but I filled out the permit and kept quiet.

  In the early afternoon, I set off hiking with my pack loaded for a three-day solo trip—my first overnight trip alone. I had my camping gear and clothing in my main pack, and my food and cooking supplies in a small purple school pack that I wore on my chest. About a mile in from the Taggert Lake Trailhead, the snowpack was already deep enough that I wallowed with every footstep. Without other bootprints around, I was obviously the first hiker to access this trail in a while, perhaps all winter. I struggled under my heavy pack. Deeper and deeper the snow became as I gained in elevation and moved up onto the rounded moraines left behind from the ice age glaciers. After an hour of slow-moving progress, I was approaching the forest at the crest of the moraine and a significant snowdrift. As my boots sank down several feet with every stride, the jagged ice crystals of the middle snowpack increasingly abraded my shins. In another fifteen minutes, with snow packed in my boots and up my pants legs, I lost sensation below my knees, and the cold wet abuse became less bothersome. After dropping into the snow several dozen times, I changed strategy and crawled up the last twenty feet to the spine of the snowdrift and plopped myself astride the compacted lip of snow. Breathing heavily from the exhausting effort, I looked back over my left shoulder at the series of deep holes I had left and understood then what post-holing meant.

  I checked my map and saw that I had about a quarter-mile distance to cover before I reached the south side of Bradley Lake, and then about three quarters of a mile to hike around the lake to get to my campsite. I was at the edge of the forest, where the snow looked to be firmer. There was a short downhill on my right that I slid down on my backside. I stood up only to plunge in up to my waist when I took my first step. “Ohhh, this is going to be a long mile,” I said aloud, thinking snowshoes would indeed have been smart, even though I’d never used them.

  It took over two hours of toil to reach a short footbridge on the north side of Bradley Lake, fighting my way through the waist-deep snow. Clouds hung above the treetops, and I could see only a few hundred vertical feet up the mountainside to the west, where the evergreens disappeared into the vapors.

  A couple hundred yards past the bridge, I found a campsite sign-post mostly buried in the snow, twenty feet from the lakeshore. Relieved to have arrived before dark, after the unexpected four-hour slog, I set up my green two-person tent just beyond the sign, on a small patch of dirt and frozen pine needles. My feet ached with the cold. I sat in the doorway of my tent and unlaced my sodden hiking boots. A deluge of melted snow splashed from each boot when I removed them. I was sufficiently tired that I didn’t care that my socks dripped water in the tent as I peeled them off my pruned feet. Rubbing the pads of my waterlogged toes, I gave a start at a nearby sound, the breaking of a branch. I listened intently and heard splashes in the lake, coming from the other side of some thick bushes a dozen yards to my left. Maybe it would be another moose coming out at dusk, like I’d seen at Phelps Lake. Intrigued, I leaned forward to peek around the flap of my tent and watched a medium-sized black bear wade out from the foliage hanging a few feet offshore over the shallow lake. He looked to be about two hundred pounds, not over a few years old, and all black.

  Hurrying, I grabbed my camera out of my backpack and took a picture. The flash reflected off the bushes, and I worried that it would scare the bear off before I could see him clearly through the brush. However, rather than being startled or running away, he coolly altered course, straight for my tent. One step, two steps, three steps; he was definitely heading for my tent. “Whoa, bear!” I meekly stammered. “Hey, hey, heyyy!” He kept coming, passed the bushes, stepped out of the water, and was closing the distance to my tent. I thought maybe I had been downwind and he hadn’t smelled me yet. I tried whistling to alert the lumbering beast of my presence, but I was too frightened to purse my lips properly and only managed to spray spittle onto my camera.

  Now just twenty-five feet away, I knew this bear could see me and wasn’t coming to pay a social visit. He was looking scrawny and wanted my food for his first big post-hibernation dinner. I had dropped my little purple pack at the tent door and, looking at it there, straight in the sights of the bear, I realized what I had to do. I grabbed the food pack and, escaping the tent with the bear only fifteen feet away, dashed off to my right. My bare feet beat the hard ground as I scampered around the back of the tent and, leaping over a downed tree, landed directly in a snowbank where first my left foot, then my right, punctured the icy crust. Pain seared across my left foot, and when I extracted it from the snow, I saw that I’d cut my arch on a protruding branch of the fallen tree. A glance over my shoulder told me I had no time to spare for first aid. I bounded off into the snowy forest, abrading and numbing my feet as I went.

  Scouting the nearby trees for possible food-hanging positions, I didn’t see anything that was at least eight feet off the ground, five feet from a trunk, and strong enough to catch my bag if I tossed it up on a branch. Normally, I would use some string and haul the bag over a high, sturdy limb, but I didn’t have time for that tactic now. I circled around clockwise and ended up in front of my tent, then off a few paces to the west. The bear followed my every move in the forest, and I never put more than thirty feet between us. I finally noticed a large tree that had toppled some years ago, leaving a tangle of thick roots jutting into the air. They weren’t high enough to be out of reach, but I could at least lash my bag to the roots by the straps and go put on my boots before coming back to find a better spot for the food. I rushed over to the upended tree, wrapped the straps around three gnarled roots protruding four
feet in the air, and twisted the bag down behind another root so the bear couldn’t easily get to it. I then gingerly pranced back to the tent on my numbed feet.

  Sitting in the tent doorway, I briefly checked the cuts on my left foot before cramming on my sopping-wet boots and lighting off to the downed tree once more. In the thirty seconds of my absence, the bear had taken my food bag in his teeth and, yanking it back and forth, shaken the straps off the roots. As I watched the bear easily snap the root to which I had tied the most securely attached strap, I understood I was in dire straits. I had dipped deeply into my energy supply to get to my campsite, and I needed nourishment before I could even attempt to retreat to my car. If the bear made off with that bag, I would be stranded. The bear was already twenty feet along the length of the tree’s horizontal trunk, with the purple pack in his jaws, when I came to the conclusion that, with my life possibly at stake, I had to get that bag back—by whatever means necessary. I broke off a yardstick’s length of tree root, held it like a club in my left hand, hopped up on the trunk of the fallen tree, and waved my weapon over my head, roaring at the top of my lungs, “Give me my food back, bear!” I’m not sure what response I was expecting, but my body trembled with fear when the bear stopped, turned his head back over his right shoulder, then spun on his hind feet to face me at ten paces. I’d gotten his attention, all right, and now we had ourselves a showdown.

  I snarled and shouted, waved my stick in the air, and yelled again, even louder, “Give me back my FOOD!” Like a dog questioning his master’s order, the bear tilted his head quizzically to the left, and I thought I could see his forehead wrinkle. At his pause, I gathered my courage and began stomping on the log. Shouting anew, I took a pounding step toward the motionless bear, then another, and a third, commanding, “You picked the wrong hungry hiker to steal his food—DROP IT!” At the last word, I jumped up and slammed both my boots down on the tree trunk. The bear dropped the food bag, lumbered off the side of the log, and started off into the forest. I could hardly believe it. I yelled after him, “Shoo, bear!” and went over to my purple backpack. Before I picked it up, I threw my broken root after the bear; it crashed into some pine branches over his head, and he scampered off to the west.

  Five minutes later, I had my camping stove heating a pot of lake water. I anxiously waited for it to boil, imagining that the bear would return any minute. Two minutes after the water finally boiled, I’d set a personal record for the fastest-ever consumption of a bowl of ramen-noodle soup. I inspected the little rucksack while I packed my food, bowl, and stove into it, and saw four distinct holes from the bear’s teeth. By the time I had hoisted the pack into a safe location, night had fallen, and I cowered back at my tent, the bear winning some revenge via my psychological taxation. With the darkness blinding me, I lay in my sleeping bag, fear provoking paranoia every time the faintest forest sound reached my ears. For seven hours, whenever a leaf fell to the snow, a pine needle dropped into the lake, or a tree creaked in the breeze, my imagination launched like a screaming dragster, accelerating from zero to death-by-bear-mauling in a split second. Splash, a fish jumped in the lake, and instantly my mind responded, “OhmyGodthebearisbackhe’sgonnaeatmeI’mgonna die!” as I held what I was certain would be my last breath. The terror didn’t ease until well after three in the morning, when I finally caught some uneasy shut-eye.

  After starting late the next morning, I managed to wade through the hip-deep snow up Garnet Canyon to an elevation around 10,500 feet. The ever present rain clouds obliterated the landscape. I knew I was in the cirque where I had to make a critical route-finding decision, and I couldn’t see a single landmark. It was too late in the day to find my way by trial and error, so I went down in the trench I’d excavated on my ascent. Two hours later, I arrived at the edge of Bradley Lake and tramped in the rain back to my campsite, where I faltered at the sight of the wreck that had been my tent. The rain fly had been ripped off, two of the four poles were snapped, the front access flap was torn completely open, and my sleeping bag was floating in the lake. “What in the hell?” I exclaimed, inspecting the contents of my tent, thoroughly soaked and slimed with mud. “That bear,” I thought. “He came back while I was climbing and ransacked my stuff trying to get to my food.” But the food pack was untouched in its spot in the tree, beyond the bear’s reach. Standing over the wreckage, I could only think that the bear had done all this out of spite. I got the purple food pack down, fished my sleeping bag out of the lake with a branch, and packed away my gear. With everything soaking wet, I couldn’t stay the night, and it would be dark by the time I hiked back to my car—but that’s what I would have to do. With seventy pounds of sodden gear weighing me down, my food pack on my chest like the day before, I started on my way out and immediately noticed the bear tracks overlying my old footprints. Mr. Bear had followed me into my campsite like a hunter on the scent.

  At the far side of the little footbridge, where the snow was deeper, I could see how the bear had intersected my post-holes from the north. With my eyes, I retraced his tracks as they went up a thirty-foot-high hill…to where the bear was sitting next to a pine tree, watching me. “Ho-ly shit…” My voice trailed off as the reproachful anger I’d pent up against the bear in the last half hour switched back to the familiar strain of terror. All I could do was keep hiking, hope I didn’t founder in the snow, and pray that the bear would leave me alone. I pulled my drenched map from my pocket and held it with my compass in my left hand: no room for mistakes now.

  I left the trail after about fifty feet and stumbled to the hilltop south of the bear. He hadn’t yet moved. I imagined he was sitting there grinning as I struggled to escape him. I surveyed the snowpack from the hill, and it seemed to be shallower to the east; I reasoned I could make an off-trail shortcut directly to the highway and avoid wallowing in the drifts at the top of the moraine. Crossing the ridgeline of the hill, I descended to a hollow in the forest and looked back over my left shoulder. The bear was gone. He’d dropped off the other side of the hill toward the lake. Relieved, I walked about fifteen paces, then checked behind me again, just as the bear sauntered over the hillcrest in my tracks, a mere thirty feet away.

  For ten minutes, I blazed a heading to the east, alternately glancing at the compass, orienting the map to my surroundings, and peering over my left shoulder at the bear. He closed in to within twenty feet behind me a couple of times, and I was ever more nervous about finding my way, avoiding deep snow, and trying to guess what the bear would do to get at the food bag strapped to my chest. Navigating in such stressful circumstances was very difficult, and I shortly became disoriented; the terrain no longer matched what I was expecting from my judgment of the map. It took me a minute to get back on the correct bearing, compensating for the declination between true north on my map and the magnetic north shown on my compass. Then, surmounting a short rise, I found myself looking down at a lake. I wasn’t counting on a lake. But there, between my position and the snowy lakeshore, were some footprints. Aha! My spirit leaped at the discovery. Navigating would be no issue, and I might even find some other people to help me scare away the bear. I tromped through the snow to the boot track, and then it hit me: “Those are my footprints…and this is Bradley Lake…I’ve gone in a complete circle!” My heart sank in disappointment.

  The bear was ten paces behind me; to this point, he had stopped when I stopped. But now he came down the hill toward the trail and my stance. I felt like giving up, throwing my food bag to him—damn the regulations not to feed the bears—and, most strongly, I wanted to cry.

  The bear was only fifteen feet away when again something changed in my demeanor: My despair turned to anger. “Leave me alone!” I shouted right in his face. Again he stopped. Recalling the most visceral threat I’d ever heard in a movie, I adapted a few lines from Pulp Fiction and continued, “I’m gonna get some hard pipe-hittin’ rangers to come out and get medieval on your ass! They’re gonna tranquilize you and ship you off to Idaho!” I resorted to wa
ving my arms over my head and growling, but this was old news to the bear. He cocked his head like he’d done the night before during our standoff on the log. Spying an exposed stone in the conical dip surrounding a pine tree a few feet to my left, I reached into the tree well and grabbed the softball-sized rock to carry for self-defense, then hurriedly moved to the south, retracing my old tracks.

  The bear followed me, too closely now, stalled only at intervals by my shouting. I figured I would hit the bear with the rock if he came within ten feet of me. I wouldn’t be able to throw it much farther than that with the packs and their straps confining my range of motion. I focused on keeping myself upright, though the snow got deeper and was noticeably weaker than it had been the day earlier, due to the rain that was still falling. At one point, I broke through the crust and sank in up to my hips. I was good and stuck and couldn’t pull myself out. The bear seemed to understand his opportunity and narrowed our separation to a mere twelve feet from my head to his snout. As I groped for purchase in the snow, my arms flailed, and my feet stayed stuck. I twisted left at the waist and rolled onto my back over my right shoulder, popping my legs out of their holes. Like an upturned turtle, I was weighted down by both the packs on my torso. I was frightened the bear would attack and maul me while I was on my back; I was very vulnerable. Shakily standing on the unstable crust, I faced the looming bear and raised the stone projectile to my shoulder like a shot put and, with a heave, let fly my only defense. The bear and I both watched its lobbing arc end in a snowy crater to the right of his left shoulder. I had missed. The bear stayed put.

  I checked the closest tree well and found two smaller rocks. Rearmed, I made for the moraine, lunging fifteen steps along the trail in my day-old post-holes, until I broke through again at a spot that had previously held my weight. We repeated the same routine—I flopped onto my back, the bear got way too close, I stood up and threw a rock at him. This time, however, my rock found its mark on the animal’s rump, and like a rocket, he launched up the nearest pine tree to his left, bounding in three dynamic leaps to thirty-five feet. My jaw sagged, and my eyes rolled up in their sockets; I’d never seen a large animal move so athletically in my life. At that display of power, I knew I would sooner pin the Ultimate Warrior in a wrestling match than outfight this bear if he attacked. But I also realized I’d bought some time. I reloaded with the same rock and turned south once more. After thirty seconds, I heard branches cracking and looked back to see the bear coming down the tree. Immediately, I plunged back into the snow, and we established what became our little ballet. My part: fall, roll, stand, throw; the bear’s part: climb, wait, descend, follow. Time after time, we repeated our dance. As I got closer and closer to the moraine, I added shouts and curses to intimidate the bear, hoping to buy myself more time in the deeper snow. The bear, of course, had no issues with the snow at all, his four paws distributing his weight more broadly on the snowpack’s crust than my two ever could.