Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Despite my failed equipment, we reached the summit, and I was even longing for more, wishing the climbing weren’t already over. At the top, Mark introduced me to his favorite summit ritual of kippered fish and crackers, a tradition that we continue on every shared mountaintop. We took photos together, my beaming smile through a mouthful of half-chewed fish was a genuine expression of how giddy I felt to be at the top with my best friends, having overcome fear that day.

When my sister started college in the fall of 1998, she moved to a part of northwest Texas that could give a prairie dog a case of the doldrums. Wanting to share the exhilaration I was discovering through the outdoors, I invited her to come with me to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen-the waterfalls of Havasupai Canyon, just southwest of Grand Canyon National Park. In the language of the native peoples who have lived in the canyon for a hundred generations, Havasupai means “people of the blue-green waters,” for the waterfalls of the lower canyon. There are four major falls, the tallest of which leap over two-hundred-foot cliffs into deep turquoise pools filling the canyon from wall to wall.

My sister and I arrived at the trailhead on Thanksgiving Day, 1998, and hiked ten miles down from the plateau into Havasupai Canyon to pass the village of about two hundred residents. Since there is no road to the village, everything is brought in on small helicopters and trains of pack burros. The Havasupai village has the distinction of housing the only post office in the United States that is still served by burros. Residents have a community landline phone, plumbing, and sufficient electricity to power the reggae music that pushes past Bob Marley tapestries hung in the windows of every third government-issued trailer home. Most of the younger residents forgo the subsistence farming that the overgrown plots in front of their homes suggest their parents and grandparents pursued.

Beyond the village and Navajo Falls, the least dramatic but widest of the four waterfalls, we came to the Havasupai Falls and camping zone in the early afternoon. Havasupai is the trademark waterfall that pours its luminous flow over a 150-foot drop of maroon travertine draperies into a deep pool warmed by the sun. It’s a magical place that sees a heavy load of traffic from hikers and campers, though the Havasupai manage the use to concentrate the impact upstream of the largest of the cascades, 220-foot-high Mooney Falls. We chose a campsite in the middle of the zone and left our packs and gear to explore farther downcanyon.

Within minutes of venturing beyond our camp, we came to the brink of Mooney Falls, its beauty and flamboyant color freezing us in our tracks. It was a full minute before either of us even muttered “Wow.” We looked down on islands of lush green grass, towers of brilliant yellow cottonwood leaves reflecting the dazzling sun, sandbars strewn with bleached white tree trunks, and the uniquely flowing rock formations of cherry-red travertine that decorate the canyon in hanging curtains under a wall-to-wall cerulean sky.

Below Mooney, which we descended by a system of tunnels, chain ropes, and downclimbing, a faint trail disappeared into tall thickets of grasses that sprang from the sandbars. We waded down the streambed for another three miles and came to Beaver Falls, a group of interlaced and terraced pools that receives only a small fraction of the visitors as the upper falls. Here the travertine builds up dams across the stream that form horseshoe-shaped pools, each spilling over into the next. The falls drop about fifty feet and are spread out along a two-hundred-foot-long corridor in the canyon. They reminded me of the thermal pools my family had visited in Yellowstone almost a decade earlier. Five miles past Beaver Falls, the creek drops into a narrow channel where the turquoise waters of Havasupai spill directly into the often muddy-brown torrent of the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. My sister and I didn’t have time to go all the way to the river, so she sat on a rock above Beaver Falls while I balanced my way across the dams to reach the west shore of the creek. In my wet sandals, my footing was unsure, but I made it over to a rock shelf alongside the dams that was guarded by a barrier of prickly-pear cactus. I needed to go upstream on the shelf, somehow bypassing the garden of four-foot-high cacti, to gain a wider series of dams where it would be easier to cross back to the east side. The best strategy looked to be climbing about ten feet up the rock wall above the shelf and traversing over the cacti. I went for it, despite doubts that my sandals would grip the steep, wet travertine.

Perched a body’s length above the largest of the prickly-pears after five moves from right to left, I pinched a hold with my left hand that stretched my body into an X. As I shifted my weight onto my extended left foot, the travertine broke off, and the resulting jolt of my body on the knob I was holding in my right hand caused it to disintegrate as well. Suddenly, I was slipping down the travertine slide on the toe tips of my sandals, facing the rock. I had enough time to spot the prickly-pear closing in on my ass. The branches and paddles were naturally arranged in a curve close to the wall, with two separate cacti at the shelf’s lip. In my brief downward glance, the prickly-pear bushes turned into a grotesque smile, like a ravenous oversized fly-trap about to enjoy an overdue meal. Just before my heels met the top of the cactus, I sprang off the wall, turning a half rotation in midair to clear the tallest part of the spiny plant.

My feet hit the sand straddling a three-foot-high branch of the pear-shaped paddles-the nose of the smiling face. The landing would have been safe, except that my momentum had pushed my body into a crouch to absorb the fall’s energy. Spine-covered pear paddles met the sensitive soft tissue of my inner thighs. Recoiling from dozens of impalements, I burst back into the air. I stood bowlegged on the shelf above the travertine dams and aqua pools like a dismounted cowboy. My sister’s shout, “Are you okay?,” allowed me to defer looking down for another five seconds while I replied, “Yeah…but I fell on a cactus.”

I twisted and maneuvered my way out of the cactus garden, then dropped my shorts. The fabric of my gray long underwear was polka-dotted with red spots of blood. At the center of each crimson bull’s eye was a half-inch-long barbed cactus needle. I plucked for twenty minutes and removed the most offensive thorns, then took off my long underwear to hunt for the smaller, more hairlike spines. Extracting them one by one, I lost count somewhere past a hundred. Nearly an hour later, Sonja shouted over the water noise for me to pull my shorts back on-there were other hikers approaching. I stuffed my gray tights into my pocket and crossed the dam to see who was coming. These were the only other people we had seen below the village. They were two gregarious guys about my age, also from Phoenix, heading down to camp at the Colorado River. I wanted to see the lower part of Havasupai, but as my sister had little desire to make the sixteen-mile round trip, I arranged to meet Jean-Marc and Chad at the river by ten the next morning to make the return trek together.

Sonja and I returned to climb the Mooney Falls tunnels in the fading light. For our dinner back at camp, we laid out some pre-cooked turkey on crackers to go with our main course of macaroni and cheese. Even for backcountry cuisine, it was basic fare, but we weren’t there to celebrate a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner-we were most thankful about being with each other in such an inspiring place. After a chocolate bar each for dessert, we hung our food to protect it from the ring-tailed cats and raccoons and crawled onto our open-air tarp, the two lone occupants of the half-mile-long campground. My sister rolled over and fell asleep as I sat with my headlamp and tweezers for about forty-five minutes, trying to extract the remaining prickly-pear barbs from my inner thighs. It eased my embarrassment to know that no one was watching my peculiar ritual of awkward stretching, rubbing, plucking, prodding, and grimacing-my tweezers and I had the canyon to ourselves. It would be a full week before I found and removed the last spine, a fine hair impaled in my left buttock, while watching football on television in my town home in Chandler.