Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  That boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. That’s their nature. It did the only natural thing it could do. It was set up, but it was waiting for you. Without you coming along and pulling it, it would still be stuck where it had been for who knows how long. You did this, Aron. You created it. You chose to come here today; you chose to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. You chose not to tell anyone where you were going. You chose to turn away from the women who were there to keep you from getting in this trouble. You created this accident. You wanted it to be like this. You have been heading for this situation for a long time. Look how far you came to find this spot. It’s not that you’re getting what you deserve—you’re getting what you wanted.

  Understanding my responsibility for my circumstances placates my anger. My despondency remains, but I stop striking out against the rock. One thought in particular circulates over and over in my mind: “Kristi and Megan were angels sent to save me from myself, and I ignored them.” Everything happens for a reason, and part of the beauty of life is that we’re not allowed to know those reasons for certain, though on this question, my conviction grows. They might not have had wings and harps, but Kristi and Megan came into my life to fulfill a purpose. They were trying to spare me from my accident. I am convinced that they somehow knew what was going to happen to me. Again and again I think about Kristi’s last question—“What kind of energy do you think you’ll find down there?”—and about their repeated urgings, but my stubbornness and ambition had closed my brain in a lock. I did get myself into this. Somehow, in some convoluted way, it’s what I’ve been looking for in my life. How else did I come to be here? We create our lives. I don’t fully understand why, but little by little I get that somehow I’ve wanted something like this to happen. I’ve been looking for adventure, and I’ve found it.

  I remember the conversation Megan and I had about a time when she’d gotten lost on Cedar Mesa, a region of southeastern Utah littered with canyons and ancient cliff-dwelling ruins. She and a friend had huddled over a fire of juniper branches through the long night. In return, I told her the story of when I, too, got lost on Cedar Mesa, coming out from a canyon after dark. Unable to find the footprints we’d counted on following back to my truck, my friend Jamie Zeigler and I had stumbled around disoriented for an hour. By a stroke of luck, we found my vehicle on the open mesa top. Then I told Megan about an episode in February when my friend Rachel Polver and I attempted a twenty-mile circuit of Chute and Crack canyons in the San Rafael Reef of central Utah. Fifteen miles into the loop, we came to a sandstone slide that Rachel couldn’t ascend. For an hour, I tried boosting her, coaching her, pulling her, even letting her stand on my back, but she couldn’t get up the ten-foot rise in the slot. We went back the way we’d come until we found a 150-pound log that we then carried two hundred yards back up the canyon to use like a ladder. The entire conversation about being stuck and lost in canyon country had been an unwitting presentiment of my entrapment. After all that talk, I should have known that I was jinxing myself and gone with Kristi and Megan.

  Such thoughts are ridiculous, but the fatigue of being awake for thirty-two hours has assuredly started to cloud my mind. I feel sluggish and stupid, the sleep deprivation exaggerating my depleted condition. Before I slip into some sorely needed perversion of a nap and hurt my arm, I clip my daisy chain into the rap ring suspended on the anchor and adjust it to take the weight off my legs again. The numbers on my watch silently change to 2:45 P.M.

  I don’t know if I was purposefully waiting for an occasion to pull out my mini-DV camcorder and record some videotape, but just after three P.M., I decide to video myself for the first time. Using my now-standard procedure for taking off my backpack, I slip the strap through its friction clasp and swing the ruck around to my knees. Besides the burritos, my cameras are the only useful items left in the pack. I still have the CD player, the battery collection, and the empty CamelBak reservoir jumbled in the bottom, but everything else is in use. Turning on the palm-sized unit, I flip the digital screen around so I can ensure that I’m in the viewfinder and press the record button before setting it on top of the chockstone.

  Just start at the beginning. Assume whoever sees this will find it after you’re dead. You can leave it out on top of the rock with an etching in the wall, “Play me,” and an arrow or something pointing at the camera. Maybe it will be separated from your body in a flood. Tell them everything.

  I begin. “It’s three-oh-five on Sunday. This marks my twenty-four-hour mark of being stuck in Blue John Canyon above the Big Drop. My name is Aron Ralston. My parents are Donna and Larry Ralston of Englewood, Colorado. Whoever finds this, please make an attempt to get this to them. Be sure of it. I would appreciate it.”

  I take long blinks and rarely check the camera’s screen. I’m un-kempt from four days of scruffy facial-hair growth since the last time I shaved at home in Aspen. But what really makes me avert my glance is the haggard look in my eyes. They are huge, wide-open bowls reflecting the harrowing stress I’ve been through in the last day. Loose rolls of flesh sag and tug at my lower eyelids.

  My slurred words come listlessly between labored breaths. I struggle to enunciate clearly.

  “So…I was hiking Blue John Canyon yesterday…Saturday…at about two-forty-five to three, somewhere in there, I got to where the lower section of Blue John slots up again. Did some free downclimbing…not too bad…got to the second set of chockstones. And that’s where I am still right now. Because one of the chockstones pulled out as I was pulling on it, climbing off of it, and it slid down, smashed, and trapped my right hand.”

  Picking up the camera, I point it first to where my forearm and wrist disappear in the horrifyingly skinny gap between the chockstone and wall. Then I pan the camcorder up over the pinch point to get a view down on my grayish-blue hand.

  “What you’re looking at there is my arm, going into the rock…and there it is, stuck. It’s been without circulation for twenty-four hours. It’s pretty well gone.”

  I swing the camera up to the anchor webbing and rap ring.

  “The ropes you see are set up to give me a seat so I don’t have to stand up all the time. I was not rappelling at the time of the accident, although I did get my harness on afterwards, and I’ve been sitting.

  “I’ve been putting a lot of effort into staying warm. I have very, very little water. I had less than a liter when I got here. I have about a third of a liter now. At that rate I will be out before morning.”

  Another breeze sweeps over me, and I shudder uncontrollably for five seconds.

  “My body’s having a difficult time controlling its temperature.

  “Unnhhhh…I’m in deep stuff.” I wince, grimace, and choke on the weight of my words.

  “Nobody knows where I am except for two girls that I met yesterday while hiking Blue John. Kristi and Megan of Moab…with Outward Bound there. They went out the West Fork of Blue John, and I continued on.

  “I had ridden my bike, which is still parked and locked—the keys are in my pocket here—about a mile southeast of Burr Pass, at a tree that’s about a hundred and fifty yards off the side of the road, the left side of the road as you’re heading southeast. It’s a red Thin Air, Rocky Mountain. It’ll still be there.”

  The breeze picks up, and I squint into the gust, trying to keep grit out of my eyes. Wind noise obliterates my voice on the tape, so I stop recording. After gathering my thoughts, I start the tape again to explain my options.

  “So the way I see it…there’s kind of four things happening. Ummm, I’m shuddering. Unnhhh…I tried to move the rock with the rigging. I set an anchor and put some foot lines in so that I could stand in them and try to move the rock. It wouldn’t budge.”

  Shaking my head in defeat, I yawn, battling the fatigue that comes in waves.

  “I tried chipping away at the rock. The progress I made in twenty-four hours, with a lot of work, it would be a hundred and fifty hours, if ever. I think par
t of the problem is, is that my hand is actually supporting the rock. Which means every time I chip away part of the rock, it moves a little bit and settles onto my hand again. I can’t feel it happening, but microscopically, it seems to be, because the little gap over here between the rock and the wall—right there—is actually, well, at least I think it’s gotten smaller as I’ve been working on it. So, there you can see the chip marks under the rope. I removed a lot of that rock where the rope is right now. And even some you can’t see anymore because my arm is now covering it. Again because the rock moved.”

  Pausing to lick my dry lips, I try to swallow, then give a long and despondent sigh. When I rehash my situation, I hear the downheartedness in my voice. The failure of my options trounces my spirit into dejection.

  “So, those two things out, the third thing left was to cut my arm off.”

  I grimace. My face wrinkles into a contortion that takes ten seconds to straighten out before I can continue with a wholeheartedly dejected explanation.

  “I worked a tourniquet up and got into place a couple times with all my plans and what I was going to do…but it’s pretty much suicide. It’s, uh, four hours from here to my vehicle. It would be…if at all possible—because of the fourth-class climbing involved—to go back out the way I came in, it would be about four hours that way, to where I don’t have a vehicle, well, I have a bike, but…um…To go out the West Fork, it would be a couple hours later…er, less…two hours, maybe two and a half hours, but again, fourth-class climbing, which would probably be impossible with one hand. Between the blood loss and my dehydration, I think I’m ruling that out. I think I would die if I cut off my arm.

  “Umm, the fourth thing that could happen is someone comes. This being a continuation of a canyon that’s not all that popular, and the continuation being even less so, I think that’s very unlikely that that will happen before I retire from dehydration and hypothermia.

  “It’s odd…The temperature is sixty-six degrees, at least it was yesterday at this time; I think it’s a degree or two colder than that now. It got down to fifty-five overnight, which wasn’t bad. I spent a lot of time shivering, though. When I would wake up, I would chip at the rock…I didn’t really wake up, I sat and I tried to sleep.”

  I begin my familiar recitation of the most likely rescue scenario.

  “So, either somebody notices I’m missing because I don’t show up at the house for the party on Monday night or I don’t show up for work on Tuesday, but they don’t really know anything more than I went to Utah. I think maybe my truck will be found. I think it will be Wednesday, Thursday, at the earliest when someone figures out where I might be, what I’ve done, and gets to me. That’s at least three days from now.

  “Judging by my degradation in the last twenty-four hours, I’ll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.”

  I know with a sense of finality that I’m saying goodbye to my family, and that regardless of how much I suffer in this spot, they will feel more agony than me. After a long pause, I stumble through an explanation, trying to apologize to my family for what I know they will go through because of my disappearance and demise.

  “I’m sorry.”

  With tears brimming, I stop the tape and rub the back of my knuckles across my eyes. I start the tape once more.

  “Mom, Dad, I love you. Sonja, I love you. You guys make me proud. I don’t know what it is about me that’s brought me to this. But this is…what I’ve been after. I go out looking for adventure and risk so I can feel alive. But I go out by myself and I don’t tell someone where I’m going, that’s just dumb. If someone knew, if I’d have been with someone else, there would probably already be help on the way. Even if I’d just talked to a ranger or left a note on my truck. Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

  I stop the tape for the last time and I turn off the camcorder, then pack it away. As I said on the tape, my best option is to wait for a potential rescue. My strategy shifts. I need to stay warm, manage my water intake, and most importantly, conserve my energy. Rather than trying to actively extricate myself, I am now waiting to be found.

  Winter Rhapsody

  Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who didn’t think enough of themselves to make something of themselves—people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.

  —MARK TWIGHT, “I Hurt, Therefore I Am”

  I WAS NEVER LUCKIER than in the twelve months following my retirement from corporate life.

  For our 2002 Denali expedition, I was privileged to join the elite adventure racers of Team Stray Dogs—Marshall Ulrich, Charlie Engle, and Tony DiZinno. I assisted our team leader, Gary Scott, with everything from early trip preparations, food orders, and flight reservations, to cooking and cleaning after meals, building shelters, carrying loads, and making decisions during the climb. Besides being an ultra-fit team of people who were flexible and learned quickly about high-altitude glacier climbing, the Stray Dogs taught me valuable lessons about group dynamics. From my experiences on that trip, I easily figured out that I enjoyed leading groups and teaching people about the outdoors.

  When I was back in Colorado after the Alaska trip, my interest in mountain guiding solidified. I especially enjoyed showing off the wild places of the West. I led a camping and peak-bagging trip near Aspen with two of my less experienced friends from Chicago. Friends from Florida saw wilderness for the first time when they came with me to the Utah desert of the Escalante. I carried equipment on an expedition with the renowned Colorado landscape photographer John Fielder, an ambassador of the wilderness who takes people places through the medium of his pictures. He instilled a desire in me to take people there in person.

  I decided I would go back to Denali in 2003 to climb the West Buttress with some of my friends from New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Gary Scott, our team leader in 2002, holds a record for the fastest ascent of the mountain; in 1985 he climbed from Kahiltna Base Camp at 7,200 feet to the 20,320-foot summit in eighteen and a half hours. I knew I could move fast on the mountain, and after I had climbed with Gary, the siren lure of his record called to me to go even faster. I put together a plan to follow our 2003 team’s climb with an attempt at a solo speed ascent, hoping to complete the first sub-twenty-four-hour round trip on the mountain. I spent the next year getting into the best shape of my life.

  In November 2002, I moved to Aspen and immediately found a sales job at the Ute Mountaineer. When I wasn’t telemark and cross-country skiing, mountaineering, or snowshoeing, I was talking about telemark and cross-country skiing, mountaineering, and snowshoeing at the Ute with customers (but always saving the best stories for my colleagues and managers). Besides having a home base from which I would train for and climb nine of the most challenging fourteeners in the state that winter, I was surrounded by an entire town of like-minded friends.

  One of the enjoyable challenges of my winter was maintaining a balance between going out on the town, going out to dinner parties, going out to see music, and keeping up my training. Fairly often, I would squeeze in a three-hour cross-country ski session between my split shift, skin up one of the four ski mountains of Aspen/Snowmass on my telemark skis before work, or head out on an evening snowshoe run after work, then catch up with some friends at a club until late. When the music wasn’t happening in Aspen, my friends and I might head to Vail or pull a big drive down to Denver or Boulder and back in the same night. There was never a routine, nor a dull moment.

  I was loving the ski-town life. My townie friends and I would make almost daily references to “living the dream.” We employed all sorts of tricks, favor exchanges, and bartering to ensure a high quality of life in Aspen, despite our meager wages in a place that has one of the most expensive costs of living in the world. We had free two-day-a-week ski passes from our jobs, but we figured out how to ski five days a week by earning our turns—hiking to the upper lifts where
passes weren’t scanned. I quickly learned where I could go to find untracked snow when I couldn’t be the first one out on a powder day. “If you can’t ski first, you gotta ski smart,” I would say to folks I met riding the chairlifts before squirreling off into the trees to a favorite stash.

  Outside the ski areas, boundless public lands yielded infinite opportunities for free outdoor recreation. While it’s hard to beat free, we scored discounts and deals wherever we could in town: pro deals on top-quality gear, cafeteria pals we could count on for a “good-guy discount,” friends who would organize lavish dinner parties, bouncers and bartenders who would give us the nod for the familiar-face freebie. It didn’t hurt that we were getting the best snow in five years.

  As soon as winter officially began, my attention narrowed, and I focused on my upcoming solo fourteener climbs. The routes and mountains started at an advanced level and got more and more desperate as the winter progressed. Besides the blessings of my job, my roommates, my friends, and the social and musical scene, I was also lucky to have a guardian angel who apparently didn’t mind putting in some long hours when I traveled into the backcountry.

  My climbing efforts commenced on the day after Christmas, when I scaled and skied two adjacent fourteeners—Castle and Conundrum peaks—twice taking what backcountry guru and guidebook writer Lou Dawson calls “the journey through the valley of death.”

  Avalanche exposure increased significantly over the New Year, so by January 9, camped below the north face of the picturesque North Maroon Peak, I had to change my itinerary from the standard route on North Maroon. Instead, I climbed Pyramid Peak by its West Face route, despite a storm that blew dangerous amounts of fresh snow into the steep-faced west amphitheater at 13,800 feet. Avalanche hazard was at volatile levels, waiting for a human trigger named Aron to step onto the wrong part of the slope.