Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I AM FREE!

This is the most intense feeling of my life. I fear I might explode from the exhilarating shock and ecstasy that paralyze my body for a long moment as I lean against the wall. No longer confined to the physical space that I occupied for nearly a week, I feel drugged and off balance but buoyed by my freedom. My head bobs to my right shoulder and dips to my chest before I right it and steady myself against the wall. I stumble as I catch my left foot around the rocks on the canyon floor, but I get my legs under me in time to prevent a hard fall onto the southern wall. It is beautiful to me that I could actually fall over right now. I glance at the bloody afterbirth smeared on the chockstone and the northern canyon wall. The spattering on the chockstone hides the dark mass of my amputated hand and wrist, but the white bone ends of my abandoned ulna and radius protrude visibly from the gory muddle. My glance lingers and becomes a stare. My head whirls, but I am fascinated, looking into the cross section of my forearm.

OK, that’s enough. You’ve got things to do. The clock is running, Aron. Get out of here.

FOR THREE HOURS, my mother sat in the dark on the aspen-white carpet of the upper stairway in our family’s home in Denver. These were the same stairs I bounded up and down two at a time for six years in middle and high school, earning uncountable reprimands from my parents. She was unable to relax, worst-case-accident scenarios chasing one another through her mind. The intense anxiety in her stomach forced her to crunch her body into an upright fetal position, her knees tucked in the crooks of her crossed arms, her forehead resting on the bend of her left forearm.

She was waiting for land-management personnel to return to work in the morning. Like me, my mom is not very good at waiting. She prayed, but even after she had prayed dozens more times, she was restless and unsettled. Needing to do something, at about five-forty-five A.M., she got up from her vigil and started to wade through her list of federal and state agencies that administer the public lands in central and southern Utah. My mom called a half-dozen groups in those early hours of Thursday morning. First she phoned the Hanksville branch of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and left a message; then she called the St. George police and filed a report. Next she filed the missing person’s information with the Department of Public Safety (DPS) dispatcher in Cedar City and, minutes later, with the DPS dispatcher out of Richfield. Her voice was exhausted and tattered with emotion when she spoke with Georgia, the Rich-field dispatcher of DPS, at a quarter to seven. In explaining that I would not have much money and would therefore be camping out of my truck, my mom called me a cheapskate, but followed that by saying that I was very responsible and would not have failed to call in to work unless something disastrous had happened that kept me from reaching a phone.

Georgia sent a statewide “Attempt to Locate” notice over the radio at 6:52 A.M. with the information my mom had provided:

All cars, Richfield, attempt to locate missing person. He should be in the Utah, possibly the Parks areas.

All cars, Richfield, attempt to locate missing person out of Aspen, Colorado, traveling to Utah, for a backcountry trip. He was last seen April 24th, last Thursday, in Aspen. Advised he was going to go somewhere in Utah where it was warm to hike.

His vehicle is maroon ’98 Toyota Tacoma, has New Mexico plate, Eight-Four-Six-Mike-Mike-

Yankee, New Mexico Eight-Four-Six-Mike-

Mike-Yankee, will have a topper and ski racks on top.

All call, continuing, subject is Aron Ralston, twenty-seven-year-old white male, six-foot-two, a hundred-and-sixty-five pounds, brown eyes, brown hair. He is alone, he is an experienced hiker, search and rescue, and mountain climber, also a skier. Very responsible person.

Subject failed to return to his work Tuesday as expected. He has not been heard from. He should have ski racks and ski equipment on his truck. He had advised a friend that he was going to Utah backcountry, on a hiking trip. Would have been traveling I-70, unknown from there and he should be camping in his truck. Would have very little money.

At the BLM office in Salt Lake, Larry Shackleford spoke with my mom at eight A.M. Immediately upon hanging up, he sent a “Be On the Look Out” notice for my vehicle to the BLM and Utah State Fish and Wildlife offices, then called a half-dozen of his personal acquaintances in those bureaus to follow up and make sure they received the action request. It reassured my mother that Georgia and Larry had taken direct action to help move the search along. She was tired of hearing from the police and some of the dispatchers that “this happens all the time” or “he’ll eventually show up someplace.” These actions were two rays of sunshine for my mom through that darkest morning. She was anxious for Captain Kyle Ekker, the most cooperative and helpful of the many contacts she had established and maintained over the past twenty-four hours, to resume his shift so she could speak with him about the investigation’s progress.

At nine A.M., Adam Crider walked out of the Aspen Police Department with a voided check from my checking account and headed over to the U.S. Bank. First thing on a Thursday, the bank was empty of customers, and he approached the first window and interrupted the teller preparing her drawer for the day.

Upon hearing his spiel, the teller summoned the bank manager to get his approval to access my debit-card history. The small group peered at her computer screen as she entered the digits of my account.

“It looks like the last transaction was on the twenty-fifth, in Moab, at a City Market.”

“How much was it?”

“Twenty-two thirty-one was the charge…no cash back.” (I had stocked up on water, juice, fruit, candy bars, and burritos.)

“What’s the one before that?”

“Twenty-nine twenty-two at Clark’s here in town on the twenty-fourth.” (I had bought groceries on the evening of the twenty-third, before going home to pack for my ski day with Brad and the subsequent Utah vacation, but the supermarket had not processed the transaction until after midnight.)

“And that’s it? Nothing after the twenty-fifth? How frequently is this updated?”

“It’s immediate, at least within a few hours, depending on how the merchants submit their batches.”

Crider already knew from the phone work he and the other officers had done the night before that my last credit-card transaction had been on the twenty-fourth, gassing up in Glenwood Springs, the city at the intersection of the Roaring Fork River and the Colorado River. From Glenwood, it’s possible to head east or west on I-70, which didn’t tell the officers much except that I hadn’t used my credit cards for a week. With the information from the bank, Adam knew I’d arrived in Moab and probably departed from there on Friday the twenty-fifth. But where had I gone?

At 9:07 A.M. on Thursday, Steve Patchett sat in the kitchen of his Albuquerque home and considered what needed to be done next with the search. As a union electrician, Steve was presently without a job-which usually happened for four to six weeks every six months or so-so he had time to dedicate to the search planning. He first dialed the Emery County sheriff’s office on his home line and was transferred to Captain Kyle Ekker. The two men reviewed the status of the search initiated by their conversation the previous afternoon. Kyle explained that the first search hadn’t turned up any clues.