Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“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.

IWAS 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.