Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I didn’t know it, but that sunrise was a dream come true for Betty, one she never counted on seeing because of the thousands of miles of challenging travel it involved for her to get to the canyon. She taught me something that I must have learned despite my bratty crankiness, for I have returned to that spot and dozens of others across the West just to watch a sunrise. It wasn’t all I would learn from Betty; her positive attitude and zest for life was so instilled in me that I developed a passion and urgency to experience and discover the world that borders on obsession.

The Grand Canyon is a distant memory now. Because I’m stuck down in this hole, I’ll miss the sunrise. During a break around seven P.M., I set the knife on top of the boulder where my scratched sunglasses have been perched. I lift my shoulders, stretch my left arm above my head, shake out my stiff hand, and sigh. Flexing my fingers, I look at my left hand with a degree of awe-my hand and fingers are swollen to nearly twice their regular thickness from the crushing blow they received during the accident, when the boulder smashed my left hand before ricocheting. The swelling has so disfigured my fingers that my knuckles no longer rise above their constituent bones. There are no veins visible on the back of my hand, just this balloon at the end of my arm. Perhaps the strangest thing is that I don’t feel any pain from the injury, but it could well be that my situation is distracting me. So many other things are wrong with my circumstances that the swelling isn’t important enough to warrant attention.

My left thigh hurts more than my swollen hand, and after I inspect under the leg of my shorts, I understand why. The skin covering my lower quadriceps is bruised and abraded in a dozen places above my knee. These injuries happened while I was struggling to lift the boulder right after I became trapped. There are a few small clots but no active bleeding. I ripped through my shorts in five places where they were pinched between my leg and the underside of the boulder. The lower right corner of the pocket is ripped open enough that I can see the loop of my half-inch-diameter bike-lock key ring protruding through the fabric.

It seems important that I keep track of those keys. If, by whatever miracle gets me out of here, I end up back at my bike, I’ll need to be able to unlock the U-lock through my back tire. I reach to take the keys out of the torn pocket and put them in my backpack, but in the second before I withdraw my hand, the ring snags on my pocket lining and I fumble the keys. They fall into a hole between the rounded rocks near my left foot. “Damn!” I shout. They are not only out of my limited reach, but they’ve slipped down a narrow crack where it would be difficult to retrieve them even if I were free.

I roll my shoulders to the left, maximizing my extension, but I can only barely touch the top of the rock by my left sneaker. Dropping my feet down into the sand downcanyon of the rounded stones, I can touch this same rock more easily, and I see a faint glint of the odd-shaped keys in the sandy hole. Still, my trapped wrist prevents me from moving the planted rock or reaching into the hole. At that moment, a vague memory of a TV program that showed a man with no hands using his toes to type at a keyboard gives me the idea to use my bare foot to reach in under the rock and extract the keys. Once I get my running shoe and sock off my left foot, I step back down into the sand and begin dredging short twigs, desiccated plant stems, and other debris out from the space under the left side of the rock near the wall.

Even cleared out, the hole is too small for my size-ten foot. But I’m not discouraged; this challenge takes on an added significance. The goal of getting my keys back symbolizes the larger struggle against my entrapment. I seize upon another idea. I retrieve one of the longer sticks that I pulled out from the rocks. It’s a sagebrush stem about two feet long, thin and brittle, and with a convenient bend near the skinny end that might allow me to hook the key ring. I turn on my headlamp to cast some extra light into the hollow and dip the hooked end of my stick down into the hole. The stick easily catches the keys, but it flexes and snaps when I try to fish them up through the gap. Kerplink! The keys jingle against each other as they land back in the sandy fissure. “Damn,” I mutter.

Without the hook, I can only swat at the keys with the broken end of the stick, but I manage to flick them a few inches closer to my toes. I still can’t quite reach the ring with my foot, so I insert the stick between my big and second toes and thread it into the hole from the side. Peering down into the hole with my headlamp, I guide the stick with a series of delicate, jerking movements until it pokes about two inches through the ring loop. Tugging, I extract the keys with the stick until they slip off the end. They’re not all the way out, but I’ve moved them close enough to the crevice’s exit that I can drop the stick and claw at the sand with my toes, grasping the keys in a foot-fist. Not wanting to accidentally drop them again, I lift my left leg until I can reach under my foot with my left hand. Success! It’s the first victory of my entrapment, and it is sweet. I tuck the keys into an accessory pocket on the right side of my shorts and zip it shut.

After I put my sock and my shoe back on, not bothering to tie the laces, I decide to try a new approach to pecking at the boulder with my knife. Selecting a softball-sized stone from the pile below my feet, I maneuver it to the top. Now that it’s in reach, I stretch and grab the rock-not without a spike of pain from my trapped wrist-and set the ten-pound stone on top of the boulder next to my knife. I’ve already discounted the idea of smashing a smaller rock directly against the chockstone, as all the available rocks are of the softer pink sandstone, like the walls. Instead, I plan to use the rock to pound my knife into the chockstone, like a hammer and chisel.

In preparation, I balance my knife so the tip fits in the slight groove I’ve carved in the concavity on the upper right side of the boulder, just above my right wrist, and lean the handle against the canyon wall. I grip the hammer rock tightly to ensure I will accurately hit the head of the knife and bring the hammer down in a gentle trial tap. I’m afraid the rock will kick the knife off the backside of the boulder or down into the rocks beneath my feet. My chiseling setup is as stable as I can manage, but it doesn’t instill much confidence, so I tap the knife carefully a second and third time just to test if it will skitter away. It stays put, but I need to hit harder.

Here goes…I drive the hammer rock into my knife with ten times more force than that last tap. Karunch! The rock detonates in my hand, splitting into one large and a half-dozen smaller pieces, leaving me with a handful of crumbling sandstone as shrapnel flies up into my face. The force of the blow knocks my knife off the chockstone, and it bounces off my shorts, hitting the sand half a yard in front of my right foot. “I can’t win here, nothing’s working,” I think, but my thin discouragement is thankfully fleeting.

I lick my lips and taste the coating of pulverized grit that has stuck to the dried sweat on my face. My knife is out of reach for my left hand, and nudging it with my foot only buries it in the sand. (At least I know I can get it back.) Taking note of the crushed rock that’s all over the chockstone and my right arm, I sigh. I drop the rest of the hammer rock in front of my feet, attentive to my knife. I take off my left shoe and sock again, grab the multi-tool in my outstretched toes, and retrieve it easily.

“Come on, Aron, no more stupid stuff like that,” I chastise myself, knowing I won’t be trying the hammer-chisel approach again. “That’s the last thing you can afford, to lose your knife.” Somehow I know it will be vital to my survival. Even though I’m certain it’s far too dull to saw through my arm bones, I might need it for other things, like cutting webbing, or maybe making my backpack into a kind of wearable jacket to keep me warmer at night.