127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (34 page)

Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the chockstone, with a single clear purpose in my mind. Smearing my shoes against the canyon walls, I push with my legs and grab the back of the chockstone with my left hand, pulling with every bit of ferocity I can muster, hard, harder, HARDER!, and a second cap-gun shot ends my ulna’s anticipation. Sweating and euphoric, I again touch my right arm two inches below my wrist, and pull my right shoulder away from the boulder. Both bones have splintered in the same place, the ulna perhaps a half inch closer to my elbow than my radius. Rotating my forearm like a shaft inside its housing, I have an axis of motion freshly independent of my wrist’s servitude to the rock vise.

I am overcome with the excitement of having solved the riddle of my imprisonment. Hustling to deploy the shorter and sharper of my multi-tool’s two blades, I skip the tourniquet procedure I have rehearsed and place the cutting tip between two blue veins. I push the knife into my wrist, watching my skin stretch inwardly, until the point pierces and sinks to its hilt. In a blaze of pain, I know the job is just starting. With a glance at my watch—it is 10:32
A.M.
—I motivate myself: “OK, Aron, here we go. You’re in it now.”

I leave behind my prior declarations that severing my arm is nothing but a slow act of suicide and move forward on a cresting wave of emotion. Knowing the alternative is to wait for a progressively more certain but assuredly slow demise, I choose to meet the risk of death in action. As surreal as it looks for my arm to disappear into a glove of sandstone, it feels gloriously perfect to have figured out how to amputate it.

My first act is to sever, with a downward sawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the noodle-like veins so close to the skin. Once I’ve opened a large enough hole in my arm, about four inches below my wrist, I momentarily stow the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger and then my left thumb inside my arm and feel around. Sorting through the bizarre and unfamiliar textures, I make a mental map of my arm’s inner features. I feel bundles of muscle fibers and, working my fingers behind them, find two pairs of cleanly fractured but jagged bone ends. Twisting my right forearm as if to turn my trapped palm down, I feel the proximal bone ends rotate freely around their fixed partners. It’s a painful movement, but at the same time, it’s a motion I haven’t made since Saturday, and it excites me to know that soon I will be free of the rest of my crushed dead hand. It’s just a matter of time.

Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, rubbery feel of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end if I can help it at all, I decide.

Withdrawing my bloody fingers to the edge of my incision point, I isolate a strand of muscle between the knife and my thumb, and using the blade like a paring knife, I slice through a pinky-finger-sized filament. I repeat the action a dozen times, slipping the knife through string after string of muscle without hesitation or sound.

Sort, pinch, rotate, slice.

Sort, pinch, rotate, slice.

Patterns; process.

Whatever blood-slimy mass I fit between the cutting edge and my left thumb falls victim to the rocking motion of the multi-tool, back and forth. I’m like a pipe cutter scoring through the outer circumference of a piece of soft tubing. As each muscle bundle yields to the metal, I probe for any of the pencil-thick arteries. When I find one, I tug it a little and remove it from the strand about to be severed. Finally, about a third of the way through the assorted soft tissues of my forearm, I cut a vein. I haven’t put on my tourniquet yet, but I’m like a five-year-old unleashed on his Christmas presents—now that I’ve started, there’s no putting the brakes on. The desire to keep cutting, to get myself free, is so powerful that I rationalize I haven’t lost that much blood yet, only a few drops, because my crushed hand has been acting like an isolation valve on my circulation.

Another ten, fifteen, or maybe twenty minutes slip past me. I am engrossed in making the surgical work go as fast as possible. Stymied by the half-inch-wide yellowish tendon in the middle of my forearm, I stop the operation to don my improvised tourniquet. By this time, I’ve cut a second artery, and several ounces of blood, maybe a third of a cup, have dripped onto the canyon wall below my arm. Perhaps because I’ve removed most of the connecting tissues in the medial half of my forearm, and allowed the vessels to open up, the blood loss has accelerated in the last few minutes. The surgery is slowing down now that I’ve come to the stubbornly durable tendon, and I don’t want to lose blood unnecessarily while I’m still trapped. I’ll need every bit of it for the hike to my truck and the drive to Hanksville or Green River.

I still haven’t decided which will be the fastest way to medical attention. The closest phone is at Hanksville, an hour’s drive to the west, if I’m fast on the left-handed reach-across shifting. But I can’t remember if there’s a medical clinic there; all that comes to my mind is a gas station and a hamburger place. Green River is two hours of driving to the north, but there is a medical clinic. I’m hoping to find someone at the trailhead who will drive for me, but I think back to when I left there on Saturday—there were only two other vehicles in the three-acre lot. That was a weekend, this is midweek. I have to accept the risk that when I get to the trailhead, there won’t be anyone there. I have to pace myself for a six-to-seven-hour effort before I get to definitive medical care.

Setting the knife down on the chockstone, I pick up the neoprene tubing of my CamelBak, which has been sitting off to the top left of the chockstone, unused, for the past two days. I cinch the black insulation tube in a double loop around my forearm, three inches below my elbow. Tying the black stretchy fabric into a doubled overhand knot with one end in my teeth, I tug the other end with my free left hand. Next, I quickly attach a carabiner into the tourniquet and twist it six times, as I did when I first experimented with the tourniquet an eon ago, on Tuesday, or was it Monday?

“Why didn’t I figure out how to break my bones then?” I wonder. “Why did I have to suffer all this extra time?” God, I must be the dumbest guy to ever have his hand trapped by a boulder. It took me six days to figure out how I could cut off my arm. Self-disgust catches in my throat until I can clear my head.

Aron, that’s all just distraction. It doesn’t matter. Get back to work.

I clip the tightly wound carabiner to a second loop of webbing around my biceps to keep the neoprene from untwisting, and reach for my bloody knife again.

Continuing with the surgery, I clear out the last muscles surrounding the tendon and cut a third artery. I still haven’t uttered even an “Ow!” I don’t think to verbalize the pain; it’s a part of this experience, no more important to the procedure than the color of my tourniquet.

I now have relatively open access to the tendon. Sawing aggressively with the blade, as before, I can’t put a dent in the amazingly strong fiber. I pull at it with my fingers and realize it has the durability of a flat-wound cable; it’s like a double-thick strip of fiber-reinforced box-packaging tape, creased over itself in quarter-inch folds. I can’t cut it, so I decide to reconfigure my multi-tool for the pliers. Unfolding the blood-slippery implement, I shove the backside of the blade against my stomach to push the knife back into its storage slot and then expose the pliers. Using them to bite into the edge of the tendon, I squeeze and twist, tearing away a fragment. Yes, this will work just fine. I tackle the most brutish task.

Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.

Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.

Patterns; process.

“This is gonna make one hell of a story to tell my friends,” I think. “They’ll never believe how I had to cut off my arm. Hell, I can barely believe it, and I’m watching myself do it.”

Little by little, I rip through the tendon until I totally sever the twine-like filament, then switch the tool back to the knife, using my teeth to extract the blade. It’s 11:16
A.M.
; I’ve been cutting for over forty minutes. With my fingers, I take an inventory of what I have left: two small clusters of muscle, another artery, and a quarter circumference of skin nearest the wall. There is also a pale white nerve strand, as thick as a swollen piece of angel-hair pasta. Getting through that is going to be unavoidably painful. I purposefully don’t get anywhere close to the main nerve with my fingers; I think it’s best not to know fully what I’m in for. The smaller elastic nerve branches are so sensitive that even nudging them sends Taser shocks up to my shoulder, momentarily stunning me. All these have to be severed. I put the knife’s edge under the nerve and pluck it, like lifting a guitar string two inches off its frets, until it snaps, releasing a flood of pain. It recalibrates my personal scale of what it feels like to be hurt—it’s as though I thrust my entire arm into a cauldron of magma.

Minutes later, I recover enough to continue. The last step is stretching the skin of my outer wrist tight and sawing the blade into the wall, as if I’m slicing a piece of gristle on a cutting board. As I approach that precise moment of liberation, the adrenaline surges through me, as though it is not blood coursing in my arteries but the raw potential of my future. I am drawing power from every memory of my life, and all the possibilities for the future that those memories represent.

It is 11:32
A.M.,
Thursday, May 1, 2003. For the second time in my life, I am being born. This time I am being delivered from the canyon’s pink womb, where I have been incubating. This time I am a grown adult, and I understand the significance and power of this birth as none of us can when it happens the first time. The value of my family, my friends, and my passions well up a heaving rush of energy that is like the burst I get approaching a hard-earned summit, multiplied by ten thousand. Pulling tight the remaining connective tissues of my arm, I rock the knife against the wall, and the final thin strand of flesh tears loose; tensile force rips the skin apart more than the blade cuts it.

A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head:

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.

You must believe it before you can imagine it.

—M
ARK
T
WIGHT
,
signature inscription in my copy of
Kiss or Kill

F
OR 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:

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.

“We had our guys out at the Black Box with some of the search-and-rescue team on off-road vehicles, but they didn’t find anything. Two deputies went out to Joe’s Valley, which I don’t think was on your list, but there’s a lot of hiking out there. Nothing there, either, though. We called everybody back in just before dark.”

Steve asked, “Did you get anyone down to Segers Hole?”

Segers had been next on Kyle’s list, but he hadn’t dispatched anyone, because it was nearly a three-hour drive from Castle Dale, in the northwest part of the county, down to the remote and unpaved southern region. With the increased manpower of the day shift, Kyle could afford to send a deputy with some volunteers from the county’s search-and-rescue team down to the Muddy. He said, “It’s a long way, but we’re going to check there. I was waiting for daylight and a couple more pairs of eyes, but that’s next. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

Steve paused and considered all the information he’d reviewed. It was mostly a hunch, but he told Kyle, “I’m pretty sure he’s in your county.”

Kyle promised to update Steve when the reports came back from the more far-flung locations, and thanked him for his involvement. After hanging up, the captain looked at his maps and thought through a short list of other places he would have his deputies and the SAR volunteers check while they were on the way out to Segers. “We’ve already covered the upper corners of the county,” the captain thought, “and most of the trailheads in the central part of the county. If he’s in the county, he’s down south. Where do people go down there? There aren’t even any roads.” But one dirt road, the Lower San Rafael Road, cuts a sidewinding curve through the southern section of Emery County, down into a no-man’s-land at the fringes of Canyonlands. “Maybe there, over in the Robbers Roost area,” he thought as he pored over his enlarged map of the county. There are dozens of canyons and dry washes out in the Roost, most on BLM land accessible from the Lower San Rafael Road and its continuation, the spur that dead-ends in the Maze. Kyle knew the Maze drew considerable numbers of people through Emery County down into Wayne County. It’d be worth a call, he figured, even if he didn’t send his guys over the county line.

Kyle dialed the Hans Flat ranger station at the entrance to the Maze District of Canyonlands, inquiring about a red Toyota Tacoma truck at nine-fifteen
A.M.
Ranger Glenn Sherrill answered the phone and immediately recognized the vehicle description. That truck had been at Horseshoe Canyon since the weekend.

“I was just there. I saw that vehicle, oh, three days ago, and it’s still there,” he told Kyle.

Typically, fewer than ten people visit Horseshoe Canyon each day, with maybe a few more on the weekends. Nearly everyone hikes in and out of the canyon in half a day. The National Park Service posts rangers in the canyon every day at the Great Gallery to monitor visitors and protect the five-thousand-year-old petroglyphs. Since they are typically the first to arrive and the last to leave the trailhead each day, the rangers are accustomed to finding the dirt parking lot empty, or with one or two vehicles and tents set up nearby. They are certainly attuned to notice when one vehicle sits in the parking lot for the better part of a week. Because my truck obnoxiously blocked the welcome sign directly across from the entrance road (I’d parked to make the rear bed level for sleeping), it was all the more conspicuous.

Even feeling 90 percent certain, Glenn paused and hedged his assertion. “Well, I think it’s the vehicle.”

Kyle asked, “Do you have anybody who can go check the license plate?”

“Yeah, will do. Let me call you back.”

Glenn signaled over the radio to his rangers in the parking lot who were preparing to hike into the canyon. They confirmed that the truck was still there and verified the license plate. Glenn phoned Kyle and reported the positive identification. “We have his truck.”

“Thank you for your help. We’re going to get somebody on-scene.”

The captain dispatched Sergeant Mitch Vetere to drive out to the trailhead and then had his dispatcher try to get Sheriff Kurt Taylor from Wayne County on the radio. Sheriff Taylor was off-duty until the afternoon, but his chief deputy, Doug Bliss, called back within the hour.

Since the trailhead for Horseshoe Canyon resides just over the county line in Wayne County, the search had potentially moved beyond the purview of Kyle and his deputies. Although my vehicle was sitting in Wayne County, if I had gone to the north in the canyon, I would be in Emery County; if I went to the south, I would be in Wayne County. With Doug’s permission, Kyle continued as commander and began the process of initiating the Park Service’s incident-response command. He had already called the DPS dispatcher in Price, Utah, to ask for helicopter support.

The news of my truck’s discovery at Horseshoe Canyon reached Elliott at 9:37
A.M.
He spent the next hour on his cell phone to spread word of the breakthrough. It was the focal point of new hope for my friends around the country. In Aspen, Rachel sent e-mails to my friends in the Roaring Fork Valley in 48-point font. Down in New Mexico, Steve Patchett talked with Jason Halladay on the phone at 10:31
A.M.
Within the hour, they had coordinated two groups of my friends, search-and-rescue colleagues, and climbing partners in Albuquerque and Los Alamos who were making immediate plans to drive to Horseshoe Canyon. Steve called Kyle Ekker to let him know a team from the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council was responding. Captain Ekker assured Steve they would be welcome to participate in the search.

At our home in Denver, Ann Fort and my mom were working on a different plan. They were creating a missing person’s poster to send via fax to a list of United Methodist churches in the Grand Junction area, asking them to take the flyer to gas stations around town and find out if anyone had seen me on my way to Utah. My mom had dug out the
Aspen Times
article from back in March, and cut out the self-portrait I’d taken on Capitol Peak. She taped the picture onto a piece of copier paper and, below the four-by-six picture, wrote out my physical description and the best information that she had regarding my whereabouts:

Adding my truck description and the correct license-plate number, my mom finished the poster with the phone number for the Aspen police. She and Ann were at the copy machine when the doorbell rang.

“I wonder who that is?” my mom inquired aloud. Without crossing the room to peek out the window, she went downstairs and answered the door. It was Sue Doss, another friend from church. Sue and her husband, Keith, had been the codirectors of the high school youth programs at Hope when I was at Cherry Creek. I had spent dozens of weekends with them and traveled to Wyoming on two trips with the youth group to volunteer at church camps; I had even given their daughter Jamie her first lessons on the piano. After I graduated and went on to college, the Doss family had remained close to my parents.