Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“I’m thinking that in the best of all possible situations that someone’s gotten ahold of Mom and Dad by now, that you guys are at least aware I’m missing, um, yeah, I don’t know.”

I want my parents to know that when they found out I was missing, I was still alive.

About forty minutes later, before four o’clock, I remove the final bite of my last convenience-store burrito from its plastic wrapper. The pale white flour tortilla has desiccated around the softer bean interior. Moist it is not. The bite I had at noon was cardboard, primed to absorb any remaining fluids from my body. Once again, I debate the merits of my next action. Will the last chunk dry me up more than it will provide sustenance? I don’t know. I do know I’m hungry. The wrapper’s nutritional information tells me I have eaten a total of five hundred calories in the two burritos over the last seventy-two hours, and I guess I have about fifty calories left in this last bite. When I’m active, I eat twice the recommended daily average of food, between four and five thousand calories a day. Going since Saturday without substantial food, my body is consuming itself to make up the difference. As little as I have left, it won’t matter much if I do or don’t eat the burrito, but it will put something in my stomach.

I pop the dried-out bite of burrito in my mouth and chew on it for twenty seconds, then take a sip of urine from my Nalgene to soften the mash. Ugh, it’s nasty. I grimace as I chew for another ten seconds, then swallow the disgusting mess, chasing it with another bitter swallow of urine. I should have dipped the bite in the urine and used what saliva I had left to swallow it; it might have saved me from that extra swallow of piss at the end. No matter, I won’t have to go through that again, because now I’m out of food. I’ve licked and relicked my candy-bar wrappers, scavenged for crumbs from my muffin bag, and polished off the burritos. That’s it. I’m on the urine diet now.

Returning to the video camera, I figure I’ll occupy myself a bit more and document that I just finished my food. Taking several long blinks, I film myself speaking very slowly, with long pauses between each sentence. I notice my voice is getting higher and wonder if that’s because of the dehydration tightening my vocal cords.

“Tuesday at four o’clock. It’s about sixty-five, sixty-six degrees out. Just running through the numbers again in my head. There’s very little hope for this kid. I just tried to eat my last bite of burrito and had to wash it down with a slurp of the top part of the bottle of urine, anyways. It seems to leave the denser part at the bottom, but it’s no Slurpee. I could use one of those. I didn’t want to sign off without saying ‘I love you’ to Grandma and Grandpa-both pairs, Anderson and Ralston. Grandpas, I’ll be seeing you soon here. Grandmas, I love you both, proud matriarchs. All my relatives in Ohio, I love you. I’m privileged to be a part of this family.”

I long to see my family again, but I know I’ve entered the protractedly dismal final countdown to my death. This is going to be a hard night.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Kristi and Megan left the confluence where they last saw me, hiked up the West Fork of Blue John Canyon, and sat down to have lunch. The two young women relaxed and chatted for about a half hour then packed up their trash and started on their journey up the wash. Sometime during the next hour, they became disoriented and weren’t able to interpret their map to navigate around the dead end below a fifteen-foot cliff rising up from the canyon floor. Backtracking, then returning upcanyon, pacing around below the cliff, they spent an hour trying to figure out the instructions that called for them to bypass the cliff on the right side of the canyon.

“If we go up the right side, it looks like we’ll have to go out the right-hand canyon. I don’t think that’s the way to go.” Kristi pointed at the two conjoined branches of the canyon upstream from their vantage. “And it’s sketchy-looking, trying to cross that ledge over to the left canyon.”

“Yeah. I’m not climbing up this overhang, either. But how else do we get up there?” The sandstone slab in front of Megan was discouragingly steep, even curling back over itself in a lip at the top. Flipping open the guidebook, Megan found the page marker for Blue John Canyon. “OK, here. The book says, ‘Walk along the right (east) side on a little trail, then route-find down two steep sections.’ Are we sure that side is east?”

“I don’t think either side is east. East is down the canyon, where we came from. We’re hiking up the West Fork, so we’re going west. I don’t get it; there is no east side. Can I see the map again?”

“Yeah, sure-here.” Megan handed the map over to Kristi, running her finger over the guidebook page again and again.

“Man, I wish Aron were here-he’d have this figured out in no time.” She sighed and started the route-finding process over again. “OK, so we put my bike up here, at the head of the West Fork. And we’re here…or somewhere around here. We haven’t left the main drainage. Yeah, we have to go left. Why does it say right?”

“Oh…my…God,” Megan blurted out. “Kristi, we are total idiots. It’s on the right on the way down the canyon. But we’re going up. The ‘little trail’ is on our left. It’s gotta be up there somewhere.” She pointed up to the left.

“Oh, man-you’ve got to be kidding me. That’s ridiculous. How did we miss that?” Kristi felt crushed that they had duped themselves with such a rookie mistake (akin to holding the map upside down).

Megan quickly found a sandy ledge on their left that cut back and forth up the canyon wall like a wheelchair ramp. They followed it up and over the cliff, where they continued up the wash until the footprints petered out into sandy hillsides textured by miniature ravines and water drainages. Two hours later, well after five P.M., they arrived at the main dirt road where Kristi’s bike was locked to a pine tree. Kristi lost the rock-paper-scissors toss to see who would ride the bike back to get her truck at the Granary Spring Trailhead. On the ride, Kristi searched the plateau for my red mountain bike. Had she known where to look, she would have seen it still leaning against a juniper tree a hundred yards off the left side of the road when she was about halfway back to the trailhead. By the time she mounted her bike on the roof rack of her 4Runner at the Granary Spring Trailhead and drove back to pick Megan up, Kristi had decided that they’d taken so long in the canyon that I must have come around to meet them already, and they’d missed the rendezvous.

Pulling over to the side of the dirt access road in front of her friend, Kristi rolled down her window and joked, “Hey there, you need a lift?”

Resting in the seats, the women filled their water bottles and drank up, rehydrating after the tiring hike up the West Fork. Megan asked Kristi, “Should we go back to the Granary Spring Trailhead and wait for Aron?”

“I think he made it out before us, actually.”

Megan didn’t believe it. “No way, he had like ten miles left to hike. There’s no way he already got out and came to look for us.”

“But I looked for his bike, and I didn’t see it. There aren’t that many places to hide a bike out there. I think he’s gone. He probably went to Goblin Valley to get to the party.”

Megan figured Kristi had missed seeing my bike and that I would be around in another hour or two. “Should we go back just to see if he shows up?”