Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

At 2:50 P.M., Terry turned the helicopter around and started quickly working back up Horseshoe Canyon to the trailhead. He had about a half hour of fuel left and would have to land and take off, dropping the officers at the trailhead, before making a twenty-minute dash over Canyonlands to refuel at Moab. It would be a close call to get to the helipad within the time limit.

For the time being, Terry had done all he could do. As he pulled the helicopter up out of the canyon, Mitch took his first easy breath in an hour, looking forward to putting his feet on terra firma once again.

IT’S 11:34 A.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003. I set my knife on top of the chockstone and package my stump in the plastic grocery sack that had been stuffed between my right arm and the wall. Wrapping the white sack with the yellow webbing I have around my neck, I stuff my arm into the empty CamelBak backpack, throwing the tightened straps over my head to hold my amputated arm to my chest in a makeshift sling. It doesn’t cross my mind to stop and remove my biking shorts for additional absorbent padding; at this point, I just need to get moving. I clean two carabiners out of my pulley rigging and clip them to a loop on my harness, then frantically toss a few necessary loose articles into my pack-the empty water reservoir, the mostly full bottle of urine, the video camera, my pocketknife-and pause as I pick up my digital still camera. Some instinct inside me pulses, and I turn on the camera. In five seconds, I take two close-up photos of my severed hand. It is an unsentimental goodbye. Turning off the camera, I replace the lens cover, stuff it in the pack, and carefully cinch the cord shut. After a brief survey of the chockstone vicinity to make sure I’m not leaving anything critical behind, I sloppily grab two dozen coils of my climbing rope in my left hand and stumble off down the canyon.

After careening from wall to wall continuously for the first fifty feet, I have to stop and restore my calm. My heart is raging, beating three times its normal resting rate, but with only a fraction of its regular pressure. I’m in danger of blacking out.

Settle down, Aron. You can’t pass out now.

It will do me no good to rush and overexert myself. First I have to get to water. I deeply inhale and exhale three breaths, compose myself, and go on, dragging the rope behind me in an ever tangling mess. It takes me twenty minutes to cover the next 150 yards. What light was here two hours ago, when the sun dagger made its appearance, is gone, but my eyes are used to the dimness, and I don’t bother to turn on my headlamp. The serpentine slot canyon is less than shoulder width for most of the distance; I carefully scoot sideways through the passage so I don’t bump my right arm. In at least ten different places, I have to single-handedly perform an intricate series of semi-technical scrambling maneuvers, first tossing the rope through each narrow twist in the canyon and then clawing my way through after it. I slide on my butt down into a toilet-bowl feature where water has scoured out a round pothole at the bottom of a pair of S-curves. Thankfully, it is a shallow bowl, with an easy shelf to clamber over at the exit. I worry that a smooth-walled pothole even just a few feet deep could be an insurmountable obstacle for me now. My mood is frenetic; I’m trying to move as quickly as I can, but at the same time, adrenaline and endorphins are warping my mind. This hundred yards of slot stretches out to twice its actual length, and I expect to exit the narrows four or five different times before I finally burst into the sun on a rock shelf midway up a sheer-walled amphitheater some 150 feet deep. I walk out into the middle of the shelf and look around. The position is spectacular, like in The Temple of Doom, when Indiana Jones rides the railcar out of the underground mine and he’s cliffed out halfway up an unscalable face. Fortunately, I am prepared for this: I have my harness, rappel device, and a sufficient length of beefy rope. To my left are two bolts drilled into the rock with a recently tied-off loop of webbing threading through the bolt eyelets, and a floating rappel ring that drapes down to a point some three feet back from the edge of the rock shelf. This is the Big Drop rappel.

Standing in the sun for the first time in six days makes me slightly light-headed. I wobble to the leading edge of the queen-bed-sized shelf to peer down the Big Drop. There, in the sandy bottom of the amphitheater directly below the Drop, is a bathtub’s amount of water in a shallow and turgid pool. My head is baking in the sun, and at the enticing sight of water, I swoon and almost lunge headfirst over the precipice, but catch my balance before I fall over the edge.

Whoa, Aron, slow down. No stupid mistakes.

I hastily clip myself into the anchor with my daisy chain and set to work untangling the 170-foot remaining length of my originally 200-foot rope. Using my left hand and my mouth to shuttle-feed the sandy rope, I tediously work one end at a time back through the knots I’ve unintentionally formed over the past five nights of coiling the rope loops around my legs, and then dragging the whole mess behind me through the slot for the last twenty minutes. Out of sight to my left, little by little, one end of the rope inadvertently slides over the lip of the rappel ledge until its mass has enough tension to tug the rest of the rope precariously close to the shelf’s edge. I hear the distinctive zip-zip of the slinking rope and turn to watch it slithering out of sight over the edge. Instinctively, I jump on the tail of the rope with my left foot, pinning it tight to the sandstone shelf with my running shoe. If I drop the rope, the game is over. This ten-and-a-half-millimeter-diameter lifeline is a sine qua non of my escape from Blue John Canyon. Without it, I would be forced to exit up the canyon, where I know there is no water, journeying in my handicapped state up rough terrain for four hours until I could theoretically flag down assistance on the dirt Maze road. That is, if I lived that long, which I wouldn’t. If I drop the rope, I might as well chuck myself off the ledge and follow its free-falling arc in a terminal swan dive into the shin-deep puddle sixty-five feet below.

Don’t drop the rope, Aron. No stupid mistakes.

I tie a figure-eight on a loop near the middle of the rope and clip the knot into the anchor. This second potentially fatal near-miss in under five minutes has me sharply focused on setting the rappel and getting to that pool of water. Every minute I’ve spent untangling the rope has parched me more and more. Now that I’m fully exposed to the sun’s warmth, I feel the dehydration accelerate threefold; with each pass of the gritty rope through my lips, my tongue and palate increasingly turn to grating sheets of sandpaper. One knot extracted from fifty feet up the rope requires three dozen bites. Finally, I figure out a better method-to hold the knot in my mouth and reverse the rope through the loop. I still have to hold the cord in my lips and override my tongue’s instinct to lick at it every few seconds. My respirations strip the last moisture from my body, and though I’m only five minutes away from the puddle, I have to drink something immediately.

Spitting out the rope, I pinch it between my knees and sling my backpack off my left shoulder, then carefully lift the right strap off the end of my padded stump. Down in the bottom of the main compartment is my charcoal Nalgene bottle, three quarters full of piss. Whereas I previously have only sipped or taken a mouthful at a time of the decanted orange urine, now I gulp three, five, seven ounces down in ten seconds and retch violently at the foul taste of the repugnant liquid. But the sensation that I am shriveling up on this ledge abates, and I can continue preparing the rope.