127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (22 page)

“I’ve been thinking about that. My friend Rob in Aspen says to me several…frequently…several times that, confusingly, ‘It’s not what you do but who you are.’ I kind of got hung up on that a lot, because I always thought who I was, was very much wrapped up with what I did. That I was happy because of the things that I did that made me happy. If things you do make you happy, then they can also make you unhappy.

“I think that’s why I found myself being as ambitious and energetic—” The wind interrupts me, and I shiver, muttering, “It’s cold,” then continue where I left off: “—to do all the outings that I did.”

The video letter to my sister has turned into a confessional. While I don’t feel regret for how I’ve lived, I think I’m trying to share some advice with Sonja, something she’ll take from this that will help her to be happy with herself. We’re similar in our assertiveness, our intelligence, and our sense of inner competition that drives us to perfectionism. I’m hoping she won’t stumble into the pitfall that I have fallen into, of letting my ability to create what I want in my life convince me that “I am” only insofar as “I do.” Yes, I am a mountaineer, an engineer, a music enthusiast, an outdoorsman. But I am not
only
those things; I am also a person who enriches other people’s lives, and whose life is enriched by other people when I let them.

“In retrospect, I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’m learning here is that I didn’t enjoy the people’s company that I was with enough, or as much as I could have. A lot of really good people have spent a lot of time with me. Very often I would tend to ignore or diminish their presence in seeking the essence of the experience. All that’s to say, I’m figuring some things out.”

My rambling explanation eases the guilt I feel for my selfishness. Bringing to mind those memories has lifted my spirit and even made me smile despite my present circumstances. That I spent so much of my time leaving my friends behind for solo trips, or even for some alone time when I was with them, reveals a self-centeredness that displeases me. The memories evoking the most gratitude for my life are of times with my family and friends. I am beginning to understand the priceless nature of their company, and it depresses me to realize that wasn’t always the focus of our time together.

I record a few snippets of my ongoing efforts to free myself. “On the situational front here, I rerigged and rerigged, even got to a six-to-one pulley system—too much friction. I wasn’t even pulling the main rope taut—too many sharp bends in the rope. I chipped away some more at the rock. It’s hopeless.” Fatigue and sleep deprivation cloud my thinking, and I fail to mention that I tried to saw through my arm.

Now I turn toward the bleak prospects of outside intervention and rescue. “I got to the point where I was realizing the slim factors that might go into my rescue, and I don’t see those happening and coming together at all in time. I’m thinking about Leona, my roommate who worries about me as much as my family does. I just told her that I was going to Utah. She’ll know when I’m not back tonight that I’m overdue. Even if she immediately files a police report, it’ll be twenty-four hours before they take action on anything. That said, I think there’s a very slim chance that a ranger even goes by the trailhead where I parked at Horseshoe, except for weekends, to lead the walks to see the Great Gallery.”

Shaking my head, I gaze at my sliver of sky, at the foot-wide bottom of the canyon, and at the rigging, anything to avoid the condemning reflection of my face in the viewfinder.

“Brad and Leah were expecting to hear from me on Saturday, but when they didn’t, they probably didn’t think much of it. I was supposed to meet them for the party out at Goblin Valley State Park. But I doubt they really missed me enough to take action. They didn’t know where I was going, anyways.
I
didn’t even know. One of the things that got me so excited was I’d crossed the state line before I knew where I was headed to, where I was going on Friday, and even then I wasn’t sure about what I was going to do on Saturday. Oh, man.”

I know I broke one of my rules when I left without detailing my plans in advance. Now I’m paying an overdue debt. How many times have I gotten away with making changes to my itinerary without notifying someone? It happens all the time. Not anymore.

“I also could have said something more to Megan and Kristi, the Outward Bound girls. I should have gone with them. Just left and gone out the West Fork.”

Again I shake my head in self-pity and fight off a series of long blinks. I deserve all of this.

“God, I am really screwed. I’m going to shrivel up right here over the course of the next few days. If I had a way to end it, I probably would, tomorrow afternoon or so. It’s miserable. It’s cold. I can’t keep the wind off me. It just blows. It’s not even that much of a breeze, but it’s cold. It comes from back there.” I motion over my left shoulder with a toss of my head.

“I’m doing what I can, but this sucks. It’s really bad. This is one of the worst ways to go. Knowing what’s going to happen, but it still being three or four days out.” My voice trails off to a hoarse whisper. I hope I don’t last for four more days. I can’t imagine what shape I’ll be in if I’m still alive on Friday.

Feeling the weight of my impending demise, I make a logical transition to what to do with my stuff. I can’t avoid the moroseness of it, but it seems practical to advise my family about my assets, effectively recording a short version of a last will and testament.

“I did want to say, on the logistical side of things, I have some American Express insurance that should cover costs of the recovery operation when that does happen. Bank-account balances should take care of my credit-card debts. You’ll have to sell my house, Mom and Dad. Possession-wise, I don’t know if Sonja can use my computer and video camera…There are pictures on the memory stick in my pocket and in the camera. My friend Chip down in New Mexico can have my CDs. All my outdoor crap, Sonja, if you want it, if any of it fits and you can use it, you’re welcome to it.”

Nearly in tears, I’m finished talking. I stop the camera, fold the screen into its stowed position, and put it back in my pack. I hold my head in my left hand and dejectedly shake it, sniffling, wiping my palm down over my nose and mouth, my fingers wiping at my eyelashes and brushing the facial hair under my nose and around my frown lines.

A half hour later, around 3:35
P.M.
on Monday afternoon, I have to urinate again. “How is this possible?” I wonder. That’s twice today, despite the fact that I’m most certainly dehydrated. What’s going on?

Save it, Aron. Pee into your CamelBak. You’re going to need it.

Obeying, I transfer the contents of my bladder into my empty water reservoir, saving the orangish-brown discharge for the unappetizing but inevitable time when it will be the only liquid I have. I should have saved the first batch, I realize with hindsight. It was much clearer than this and didn’t smell half as nasty. I debate whether I should drink it or not but defer that choice for later.

I eagerly dig out my digital still camera for the first time and take a series of pictures: a close-up of my arm disappearing into the rock; a detail of my anchor system that suspends me in my harness; and two self-portraits—one looking downcanyon, and one from above my left shoulder that shows me with the chockstone. Reviewing the photos, I also flip through the ones I took during the first two days of my vacation on Mount Sopris and around Moab, then the ones of Megan and Kristi in the upper part of Blue John Canyon. The angels.

People say that we’re searching for the meaning of life. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

—J
OSEPH
C
AMPBELL
,
The Power of Myth

T
HROUGH THE WINTER
of 2003, I kept my immediate attention on the nine 14,000-foot mountains that I was climbing, week by week adjusting my energy to a new route on another challenging peak. They were ends in themselves, a series of intrinsically rewarding journeys, but they also provided a winter-long training regimen that prepared me well physically for my big trip to Denali. I knew from the Stray Dogs expedition in 2002 that the 20,320-foot mountain would demand everything I had to successfully attempt back-to-back climbs, including the sub-twenty-four-hour solo speed attempt and ski descent. Once winter was officially over, I closed the books on another tremendous season with my fourteener project and turned my focus to backcountry skiing.

On an important trip that helped me regain some lost confidence in my avalanche awareness and hazard evaluation, I skied Mount Sopris near Carbondale in Colorado with Rick Inman, a friend and colleague from the Ute. We had a safe day skiing moderate slopes above the Thomas Lakes, steering clear of the steeper, more slide-prone slopes. It felt great to be free of my previous powder-hounding attitude that had gotten my friends and me in trouble on Resolution Mountain just a month earlier.

In late March, Gareth Roberts and I would be competing in the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse, a forty-two-mile backcountry ski touring race from Crested Butte to Aspen. To scout the route, I went out on a solo circumnavigation of Star Peak near Aspen, a twenty-five-mile ski trek. Wanting to test the equipment I would use in the race, I picked up some special waxless metal-edged backcountry skis from the Ute in the morning and got a crack-o’-noon start from the Ashcroft Ski Touring Center. I made the eighteen miles over the three passes before dark, but I crossed over Pearl Pass at nightfall and found myself stranded in a whiteout. I skied about halfway across the prime avalanche terrain of Pearl Basin, taking care to avoid a dozen starting zones and slide paths, but turned myself around in a circle. How many times would it take for me to learn that my compass wasn’t lying to me? Lost above treeline in the dark in the middle of a storm, I decided my best option was to dig a snow cave.

It took me three attempts to find a section of the snowpack that was wind-compacted and sufficiently deep to dig out a shelter at 12,000 feet. I sat in my burrow for five hours, poking my head out every twenty to thirty minutes to check for stars, mountaintops, a valley, or trees, anything that would help me navigate with my map. There were three valleys that I could end up in from my approximate position, two of which were densely packed with trail-less dark timber. I was better off waiting to determine my exact location and then find the valley with the road cut. At around three
A.M.,
the storm cleared enough that I could pick out a peak a few hundred feet above me, and I was on my way, skiing through the fresh snow and keeping off the steeper slopes. Home at five
A.M.,
I showered, napped, and got to work a few minutes late, apologizing for my tardiness to my manager, Brion After, with what I felt was an exceptional excuse.

The race turned into quite the epic, with 40 percent of the teams dropping out due to bitter temperatures in the first half of the race and high winds in the second half. The cold and the storm caused serious frostbite in a dozen people, foiled attempts to stick skins on skis, broke equipment, and as my partner, Gareth, learned, froze water reservoirs solid. Not only were iced-up CamelBaks deadweight, but some competitors became dangerously dehydrated. A little under halfway through the race, Gareth and I were the last team to leave the Friends Hut checkpoint who successfully surmounted Star Pass before the turnaround time. We had raced through eight hours of negative-2-degree temperatures for eighteen miles to make the pass with two minutes to spare. Nine and a half hours later, we were the sixtieth team to finish the race, with only two other teams finishing after us (one pair of racers spent the night out when they inadvertently skied several miles off the course and couldn’t retrace their mistake until morning). Skiing down the face of Aspen Mountain to the cheers of Gareth’s wife and a dozen hearty race volunteers, Gareth and I dropped to our knees in free-heel telemark style just to show we were still having fun. We crossed the finish line to the flashes of cameras, bent our necks to receive our finisher medals, and smiled and laughed with chilled bottles of microbrew in our hands, feeling like we’d won the race. In actuality, the winning teams had finished over nine hours before us, enough time to have showered and gotten a full night’s rest before we tottered through the final timing gate. That’s probably why they all found their way to the awards ceremony, and we got lost and ended up celebrating on our own over burgers and beers at Little Annie’s.

Two weeks later, I took a solo trip to Cathedral Peak and climbed and skied the east-facing gully on the south ridge. Once I’d finished the summertime fourteeners in 2001, I lowered my altitude bar and added another sixty peaks to my list, creating my version of what are known as the Centennial Peaks—the hundred highest peaks in Colorado, the Centennial State. I climbed fifty of those mountains in 2002, bringing my total to 109 of 119 summits above 13,800 feet. Cathedral was next on my list, and it became my 110th high summit in the state. From the top, I surveyed the length of Highland Ridge across the Conundrum Creek Valley. I was planning a traverse of the fifth-class eighteen-mile-long ridge for May, and I videotaped a scouting report to plan the trip.

Skiing off Cathedral was the most extreme backcountry ski descent I’d ever pulled off; the five-hundred-foot-long, fifty-degree east gully was only ten feet wide for most of its length. Thankfully, the snow had softened in the bright sun, allowing me to link several dozen turns down the most technical section of the couloir and relax on the lower-angled apron. I skied out past the Pine Creek Cook-house at Ashcroft at three
P.M.,
being one of the last people to see the unoccupied building before it caught on fire (due to a gas explosion) and burned to the ground forty-five minutes later. The fire engines blazing up Castle Creek Road puzzled me as I drove back into town, until I read in the paper the next morning what had happened.

On April 17, I skinned into Conundrum Basin near Aspen. In the morning, I climbed Castleabra Point (my 111th of the Centennial Peaks) a 13,800-foot subsidiary summit of Castle Peak and skied in the basin until noon. The best part about climbing and skiing in Conundrum Basin is coming back to the 104-degree natural hot springs at 11,200 feet and stripping down for a soak while you’re still eight miles from your vehicle.

The next day, one of my Denali teammates, Janet Lightburn, and I booted up the Cristo Couloir on Quandary Peak. I skied from the summit in drop-knee telemark style on alpine-touring gear, because one of my rear bindings broke. It was a 3,000-foot joyride that tested my skiing abilities as I concocted an unconventional mix of equipment and technique. I drove home to Aspen that evening, and since I didn’t have to be at work until one
P.M.
on Saturday, I went out for a run in the morning. Covering an off-road marathon of twenty-six miles, I ran from my house in Aspen over to Snowmass and back in just over three and a half hours, hurtling through hip-deep snow in two separate half-mile stretches. Then I worked an eight-hour shift. Reviewing everything I’d done in the last sixty hours—over fifty miles skied, hiked, and run, and 10,000 vertical feet gained—I felt primed for my Alaska trip. The fact that I was in the best physical condition of my life would play an unexpected role on my trip the next week.

I had arranged to meet up with two friends of my climbing mentor Gary Scott. Dianne and Wolfgang Stiller wanted to climb the namesake Cross Couloir on Mount of the Holy Cross, a spectacular steep-walled gully route that ends at the 14,003-foot summit. We had planned two and a half days for the climb which had a significant ski approach of twelve miles. It would be our first outing together, and if things went well for us, we had bigger plans for Liberty Ridge on Mount Rainier. However, another late-winter storm interrupted us the day before our departure, dropping eight inches of snow on the central mountains. As the avalanche hazard rose, we knew it would be much more risky to be in the narrow couloir, completely at the mountain’s mercy. A slide would rip our threesome off the slope into a one-thousand-foot-long blender of ice tools, rock walls, crampons, and snow pickets, then spit us over a cliff that intersected the couloir near the bottom. It wouldn’t be a question of if we would survive, but whether our families would be able to tell who was who after being sent through the couloir’s meat grinder.

It was an easy decision. Dianne and Wolfgang were in complete agreement, and we planned to try again in June. They knew I’d arranged time off from the Ute specifically to make the trip in April, and they apologized. It didn’t bother me in the least.

“Actually, my manager told me yesterday that I have off until Tuesday, so now I have a five-day vacation coming. I’m skinning up Mount Sopris tomorrow with a friend. I’ve been thinking about the desert a lot lately. I might head over to the Moab area for some time off from the mountains.”

I’d learned the year before that when you spend the month of June in Alaska, camping on glaciers, digging snow fortresses, and climbing icy headwalls, your time to enjoy the typical warm-weather activities of summer is substantially shorter. Presented with the chance to go to Utah for four days, I hoped to get in some summertime fun before the season started. Dianne and Wolfgang wished me safe travels, and I thanked them for the call. I needed to finish getting my things packed—adding my mountain-biking and climbing gear and guidebooks for the time in Utah—and go to bed. My Aspen friend Brad Yule and I had arranged a three
A.M.
rendezvous for our Sopris trip, and I had to get some sleep.

As I packed, Leona came home from an evening in town.

“Where’re you headed off to this time?” She was happily tipsy from a few hours at the local bars.

“I’m skiing Mount Sopris in the morning.”

“And you need all that?” My storage containers of climbing and biking gear, sleeping bag, and backpacks were piled in the middle of the living room.

“I’m going to Utah. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. My Holy Cross climbing trip was canceled.”

“Oh, bummer.”

“Ehh, not so much. I’ve been wanting to get out to the desert and warm up a little, you know? Do some mountain biking, hit some slot canyons. Brad told me about a party at Goblin Valley on Saturday. I might try to hit that, too. I guess a bunch of people from town are going out for an all-weekend rager.”

The last of the Aspen ski areas had closed on Monday, officially signaling the off-season emigration of Aspenites to exotic lands around the globe. Residents don’t get out of the valley much during the busy season because of work and skiing—in fact, driving twenty miles to Basalt takes on the feel of a significant road trip. But from late April till the end of May, when the highway department opens Independence Pass, things get real slow in town, and people flock to the warmer climes of Mexico, Thailand, the Bahamas, and Utah. It was due time for me to join the droves, right after one more ski trip.

Later that night, around four
A.M.,
Brad bounced alongside me in the passenger seat as I busted my truck through two-foot-deep snowdrifts on the Mount Sopris access road. It was like a four-wheel-drive commercial, with snow shrapnel exploding from the wheel wells and the two of us grinning ear to ear. We were pleasantly surprised that we were able to drive all the way to the trailhead so early in the spring. Unloading our backcountry gear in the dark, we alternated trail-breaking duties up the four miles to the Thomas Lakes, the same area I’d been the month before with my friend Rick. Twilight broke over us at the frozen lower lake around five-thirty
A.M.,
to reveal socked-in weather above treeline. Despite the weather and the increased slide potential from the previous day’s snowfall, I was much less nervous about being in the backcountry on this trip. I was prepared to turn back if avalanche conditions weren’t acceptable in the bowl, and I knew Brad would be, too.

Sopris has the unusual attribute of twin summits about a half mile apart, each with exactly the same elevation of 12,995 feet. We ascertained a safe ascent route to the eastern peak and skinned up above the lakes to a steep north-facing ridge. Ten-foot visibility and thin snow cover on the upper mountain precluded a summit ski descent, so we stashed our snow-riding equipment (my skis and Brad’s split snowboard) at about 11,800 feet. Climbing into dense clouds, Brad and I lost our depth perception in the foggy blanket that turned ground and sky into a dingy white wall at the tips of our noses. We gave a wide berth to the precipitous cliffs on our right, which forced us to confront a cornice at 12,800 feet. I blindly led up the hard-packed snow, kicking toehold pockets into the wall with my telemark boots, the whiteout obscuring the top of the cornice. Brad had it tougher than me because he was climbing in his soft snowboard boots, but I lent him my ice axe, and he made fast work of the cornice. We reached the eastern summit together at eight-thirty
A.M.
I took a photo of us laughing at the frost plastered on Brad’s six-inch goatee.

We returned to our skis and snowboard and, one at a time, rode the steep flank of the ridge down into the bowl, rejoining our ascent tracks. The new snow had bonded well to the older layers, and we decided that the bowl would be worth checking out. After digging a pit, we opted against skiing a gully formed by two rock outcroppings in the center of the basin, and chose instead to take a couple of laps up to the head of the bowl. With the clouds burning off in midmorning, we yo-yoed down and back up the slope, carving sweeping turns a quarter mile wide. For two hours, we painted the Thomas Lakes Bowl with the brushstrokes of skis and snowboard, lacing the mountainside before sitting down to share one of Brad’s Fruit Roll-Ups. It was apropos to enjoy a kid’s treat while we giggled at the good times we’d been blessed to have that day.