Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“Do you need a…” She let the question die.

“Do I need a hand? ” I finished for her. “Of course I do, silly; I’ve only got one now.” I smiled at her, and she blushed. Getting out my rocker knife, I cut the orange into unpeeled eighths, just like I used to eat at Little League soccer. I secretly stuck a slice in my mouth so it covered my teeth and started hopping around doing my impression of a gorilla. Just at the moment my sister thought I’d totally lost my marbles, I flashed my goofy grin at her, revealing the orange peel. It caught her right as she was taking a sip of water, and she snorted back into her glass, splashing her face. After that, it was a joke for us, her asking me if I needed a hand even when I wasn’t doing anything.

Because of my margarita comment at the press conference, people sent me all sorts of related gifts: twenty-dollar bills with yellow stickies labeled “Margaritas,” gift certificates to Mexican restaurants with reputations for making good margs, even bottles of tequila. Periodically, I got large packages that usually turned out to contain margarita supplies. When I opened one particular box, the contents briefly stunned me. I called my sister into the kitchen. There, besides the bottles of tequila, triple sec, and margarita mix, was a box containing a Black & Decker rechargeable-battery-powered blender. No way. My sister and I became giddy imagining the possibilities-hiking up high peaks, pulling out the backcountry blender, and making margaritas right from the snow. How cool was that? I called out, “High five,” and raised my arms, facing my sister. She put her hands up, ready for contact, and at the last split second, as we both realized the problem, she redirected to give my left hand a high ten. “Ha-ha! You totally forgot!” I teased her. “No, you put it up there, you forgot, too.” She was right, I had. We still laugh about our whiffed high five.

Highlights from the next few months sound so improbable that I can barely believe they happened to me. Four of my friends and I were invited to dinner with our rock idol, Trey Anastasio, and his eight-piece band before their June performance at the Fillmore in Denver. Another of my favorite bands, the String Cheese Incident, ran a major benefit auction and poster sale at Aron’s Incident, a July concert held in my name in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that raised seventeen thousand dollars for the five volunteer search-and-rescue groups in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico that assisted with my rescue. Kristi and Megan, the two women from Moab whom I met in Blue John Canyon, came to the concert, as did my sister and my parents, and about two gazillion of my friends.

I made my return to the mountains with a visit to the avalanche site on Resolution Mountain, where we recovered the belongings Chadwick, Mark, and I lost in the Grade 5 slide in February, including my Sony digital camera, which, when I changed out the battery-despite the shock of the avalanche and the facts that it melted through a ten-foot-deep snowpack, was exposed to four months of rain and sun, and got chewed on by marmots-started working again on the spot. It’s still taking great pictures. (Well done, Sony.)

In July, I went on David Letterman’s show, met a dozen of the biggest names in broadcast journalism, saw five concerts around the West with my friends, went rock climbing with my new prosthetic arm in Castlewood Canyon near Denver, and hiked a contiguous series of five fourteeners in thirty hours in central Colorado. August saw me rock climbing with my fellow amputee and friend Malcolm Daly in El Dorado Canyon near Boulder, pacing my friend Rich Haefele to his first ultramarathon finish in the Leadville Trail 100, and surviving two hair-raising back-to-back days of intense photo shoots for GQ ’s “Men of the Year” issue and Vanity Fair ’s “People of 2003” issue.

On August 31, I gave a reading at my sister’s wedding, about how love is like a dance. She looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her as she said “I do” to her husband, Zack Elder. During the reception, Sonja and I boogied together to “Climb,” her favorite String Cheese Incident tune, laughing and smiling as we let our freak flags fly in front of all our relatives.

Four days after the wedding, I climbed the standard route on Mount Moran in Wyoming with a team of eight of my friends. The special treat for me was leading the majority of the difficult sections of climbing using the one-of-a-kind prosthetic device that I designed with the production help of three amazingly generous companies: Hanger Prosthetics, Therapeutic Recreation Systems, and Trango (a climbing equipment company). Two weeks later, I competed in Minnesota’s Adventure Duluth race with my two teammates, finishing in the middle of the pack after twelve miles of sea kayaking, four miles of white-water canoeing, and twelve miles of trail running.

In September, my mom and I watched the video I’d made in the canyon. We cried together-it was hard for my mom to see my suffering on the tape, but it made us both thankful to still have each other in our lives. We sat on the couch and held hands, saying “I love you,” over and over.

And then there was the return to Blue John Canyon. I took four of my friends, Mark Van Eeckhout, Jason Halladay, Steve Patchett, and Kristi Moore, as well as an entire team from Dateline NBC, through the slot where I was trapped from Saturday, April 26, until Thursday, May 1, 2003. In one of those odd synchronicities of life, I stood on top of the boulder that had crushed and pinned my hand exactly six months to the minute of when it fell on me. Once everyone else cleared out down through the canyon, I held a solitary ceremony in which I distributed the cremated ashes of my hand in the accident site and rubbed out the visible remnants of the “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03” inscription on the southern wall, two days before my twenty-eighth birthday. Later that night, back at our helicopter-supported encampment, I dropped a plastic cup of red wine on Tom Brokaw’s shoe.

Over the course of the summer, my sister and I had joked repeatedly about my new status as a pirate, practicing our “arrs” and our “me-hearties” together. Imagine our amusement, then, when we discovered that September 19, 2003, had been officially designated as “International Talk Like a Pirate Day.” A month later, I went as Captain Funhook for Halloween in Aspen, and was delighted when I ran into a fellow climber dressed up as Aron Ralston, post-self-surgery.

Through the fall and winter, I returned to lead climbing on rock, mountain biking, ice climbing, backcountry telemark skiing, cross-country skate skiing, and solo winter mountaineering. I solo-climbed Mount Wilson and El Diente Peak on March 17 and 18, 2004, in official winter, making my first solo winter fourteener ascents since my accident and bringing my project total to forty-seven of fifty-nine. In the next two seasons, I plan to finish the project, potentially becoming the first person to solo-climb all fifty-nine of the Colorado 14,000-foot peaks in winter. By the end of the season, I was performing at, near, or even in some cases, above my ability levels prior to my accident. My roommate and friend Elliott Larson and I raced together in the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse, the ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen, and took six hours off the time Gareth Roberts and I set in 2003, when I had both my hands. Next year, I’m going to cut off my left arm and see how much faster I can go.

For all that has happened and the opportunities still developing in my life, I feel blessed. I was part of a miracle that has touched a great number of people in the world and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, not even to have my hand back. My accident in and rescue from Blue John Canyon were the most beautifully spiritual experiences of my life, and knowing that, were I to travel back in time, I would still say “see you later” to Megan and Kristi and take off into that lower slot by myself. While I’ve learned much, I have no regrets about that choice. Indeed, it has affirmed my belief that our purpose as spiritual beings is to follow our bliss, seek our passions, and live our lives as inspirations to each other. Everything else flows from that. When we find inspiration, we need to take action for ourselves and for our communities. Even if it means making a hard choice, or cutting out something and leaving it in your past.