Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Alone in a situation that could very shortly prove to be fatal.

My watch says it’s 3:28 P.M., nearly forty-five minutes since the boulder fell on my arm. I take an inventory of what I have with me, emptying my pack with my left hand, item by item. In my plastic grocery bag, beside the chocolate-bar wrappers and bakery bag with the crumbs of the chocolate muffin, I have two small bean burritos, about five hundred calories total. In the outside mesh pouch, I have my CD player, CDs, extra AA batteries, mini digital video camcorder. My multi-use tool and three-LED headlamp are also in the pouch. I sort through the electronics and pull out the knife tool and the headlamp, setting them on top of the boulder next to my sunglasses.

I put my camera into the cloth goggles bag I’d been using to keep the grit out of the components, and drop it in the mesh pouch with the other gadgets. Except for the Lexan water bottle and my empty hydration pack, the remaining contents of my pack are my green and yellow climbing rope in its black zippered rope bag; my rock-climbing harness; and the small wad of rappelling equipment I’d brought to use at the Big Drop rappel.

My next thought is to brainstorm every means possible that could get me out of here. The easy ideas come first, although some of them are more wishful than realistic. Maybe other canyoneers will traverse this section of slot and find me-they might be able to help free me, or even give me clothes, food, and water and go for help. Maybe Megan and Kristi will think something’s wrong when I don’t meet them like I said I would, and they’ll go look for my truck or notify the Park Service. Maybe my Aspen friends Brad and Leah Yule will do the same when I don’t show up for the big Scooby-Doo desert party tonight. But they don’t know for sure that I’m coming, because I didn’t call them when I was in Moab yesterday. Tomorrow, Sunday, is still the weekend-maybe someone will come this way on his or her day off. If I’m not out by Monday night, my roommates will miss me for sure; they might even notify the police. Or my manager at the shop where I work will call my mom when I don’t turn up on Tuesday. It might take people a few days to figure out where I went, but there could be a search out by Wednesday, and if they find my truck, it wouldn’t be long after that.

The major preclusion to rescue is that I don’t have enough water to wait that long-twenty-two ounces total after my chug a few minutes ago. The average survival time in the desert without water is between two and three days, sometimes as little as a day if you’re exerting yourself in 100-degree heat. I figure I’ll make it to Monday night. If a rescue comes along before then, it will be an unlikely chance encounter with a fellow canyoneer, not an organized effort of trained personnel. In other words, rescue seems about as probable as winning the lottery.

By nature I’m an impatient person; when a situation requires me to wait, I need to be doing something to make the time pass. Call me a child of the instant-gratification generation, or maybe my imagination was stunted from too much television, but I don’t sit still well. In my present situation, that’s probably a good thing. I have a problem to solve-I have to get out of here-so I put my mind to what I can do to escape my entrapment. Eliminating a couple ideas that are too dumb (like cracking open my extra AA batteries on the boulder and hoping the acid erodes the chockstone but doesn’t eat into my arm), I organize my other options in order of preference: Excavate the rock around my hand with my multi-tool; rig ropes and an anchor above me to lift the boulder off my hand; or amputate my arm. Quickly, each option seems impossible: I don’t have the tools to remove enough rock to free my hand; I don’t have the hauling power needed, even with a pulley system, to move the boulder; and even though it seems my best option, I don’t have the tools, know-how, or emotional gumption to sever my own arm.

Perhaps more as a tactic to delay thinking about self-amputation and less as a truly productive effort, I decide to work on an easier option-chipping away the rock to free my arm. Drawing my multi-tool from its perch above the boulder, I extract the longer of the two blades. I’m suddenly very glad I decided to add it to my supplies.

Picking an easily accessed spot on the boulder in front of my chest and a few inches from my right wrist, I scratch the tip across the boulder in a four-inch line. If I can remove the stone below this line and back toward my fingers about six inches, I will be able to free my hand. But with the demarcated part of the stone being three inches thick in places, I’ll have to remove about seventy cubic inches of the boulder. It’s a lot of rock, and I know the sandstone is going to make the chipping tedious work.

My first attempt to saw down into the boulder along the faint line I’ve marked barely scuffs the rock. I try again, pressing harder this time, but the backside of the knife handle indents my forefinger more readily than the cutting edge scores the rock. Changing my grip on the tool, I hold it like Norman Bates and stab at the rock in the same spot. There is no noticeable effect. I try to identify a fracture line, a weakness in the boulder, something I can exploit, but there is nothing. Even if I focus on a small crystalline protuberance in the rock above my wrist where I might be able to break out a chunk, it will be many hours of work before I can remove even that tiny mineralized section.

I hit the rock with the butt of my hand, still holding the knife, and ask out loud in an exasperated whine, “Why is this sandstone so hard?” It seems like every time I’ve ever gone climbing on a sandstone formation, I break off a handhold, yet I can’t put a dent in this boulder. I settle on a quick experiment to test the relative hardness of the wall. Holding my knife like a pen, I easily etch a capital “G” on the tableau of the canyon’s north side, about a foot above my right arm. Slowly, I make a few more printed letters in lowercase, “e-o-l-o-g-i-c,” and then pause to measure the space with my eyes and lay out the rest of the letters in my mind. Within five minutes, I scratch out three more words, then touch them up, until I can read the phrase “Geologic Time Includes Now.”

I have quoted mountaineer and Colorado Thirteeners guidebook author Gerry Roach, from his “Classic Commandments of Mountaineering.” It’s an elegant way of saying “Watch out for falling rocks.” As most people who live on fault lines are well aware, the processes shaping and forming the earth’s crust are current events. Fault lines slip, long-dormant volcanoes explode, mountainsides turn to mud and slide.

I remember trekking with my friend Mark Van Eeckhout through a field of boulders and coming upon a house-sized rock. We said to each other, “Wow, look at the size of this one!” We’d imagined what a spectacle it would be to see something that size separate from a cliff a thousand feet above and fall, spawning rock slides right and left, crashing with apocalyptic force.

But cliffs don’t just form in the middle of the night when no one’s watching. I’ve seen riverbanks collapse, glaciers calve and let loose tremendous icefalls, and boulders plummet from their lofty perches. Gerry Roach’s commandment reminds climbers that rocks fall all the time. Sometimes they spontaneously break away; sometimes they get knocked loose. Sometimes they fall when you’re so far off you can’t even see them, you only hear a clatter; sometimes they fall when you or your partners are climbing below them. Sometimes one will pull loose even though you barely touched it; and sometimes one will fall after you’ve already stood on top of it…when you’re using it for a handhold and it shifts…when your head is right in the way and you put your hands up to save yourself…