127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (40 page)
Read 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place Online
Authors: Aron Ralston
Tags: #Rock climbing accidents, #Hiking, #Bluejohn Canyon, #Utah, #Travel, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Essays & Travelogues, #Sports & Recreation, #General, #Religion, #Personal Memoirs, #Inspirational, #Mountaineers, #Biography & Autobiography, #Mountaineering, #Desert survival, #Biography
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.
Saying farewell is also a bold and powerful beginning.
1987 Moved to Englewood, Colorado; started middle school; went skiing for the first time
1988 First overnight backpacking trip, in Rocky Mountain National Park
1990 First trip to Utah; visited Arches, Capitol Reef, Bryce, and Zion national parks and monuments
1993 Graduated from Cherry Creek High School; rafted Cataract Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, Utah; moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to attend Carnegie Mellon University
1994 Hiked first fourteener, Longs Peak, in Colorado
1995 Was a raft guide on the Arkansas River in Colorado for the summer; moved to Lausanne, Switzerland, for a year of study abroad
1997 Graduated from Carnegie Mellon University; stalked by a black bear in Grand Teton National Park; started working at Intel in Phoenix, Arizona
1998 First winter climb on Humphreys Peak, Arizona; first alpine rock-climbing trip on Vestal Peak, Colorado; backpacked into Havasupai Canyon with my sister for Thanksgiving; climbed first winter solo fourteener, Quandary Peak
1999 Moved to Tacoma, Washington; climbed Mount Rainier and Mount Shuksan in Washington; moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico; joined the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council
2001 Climbed in the Cordillera Blanca in Peru; finished hiking the Colorado fourteeners in November
2002 Left Intel; climbed Denali in Alaska in June; moved to Aspen, Colorado, in November
2003 Climbed Pyramid, Holy Cross, Longs, Capitol, and the Maroon Bells as winter solo ascents; got caught in a Grade 5 avalanche on Resolution Peak, Colorado; visited Blue John Canyon, Utah
anchor:
To fix a rope to the mountain by any of a variety of means, including: placing removable or permanent climbing gear into tapered cracks; looping webbing around a thick tree trunk, or around a large rock or chockstone; or drilling bolts into the rock.
ATC:
Air Traffic Controller, a brand name of a belay/rappel device.
belay/rappel device:
A variable-friction device that controls the speed a rope passes through it, used both to belay another climber or to rappel.
BLM:
Bureau of Land Management, the government agency responsible for managing some federally controlled public lands; separate from national forest, monument, or park lands.
CamelBak:
A company that makes water reservoirs and backpacks for outdoor sports; especially useful for hands-free drinking. The user sucks water through a tube connected to the reservoir.
carabiner (also ’biner):
A metal link with a gate that opens and closes, allowing a climber to clip the link to an anchor, the rope, webbing, or a belay/rappel device. For better security, some carabiners have lockable gates.
chimneying:
A climbing technique that uses the counteracting pressure of feet and hands on opposite walls to move up or down a chimney-width rock feature such as in narrow slot canyons. Also known as stemming.
climbing rope:
A special design of rope with a core and sheath that stretches when dynamically loaded, absorbing a significant amount of the energy generated when a climber falls, as opposed to static ropes that do not stretch.
cornice:
A snow feature usually found on summits and ridges where wind blows and compacts the snow into an overhanging bulge, like a frozen wave curl.
couloir:
A funnel- or hourglass-shaped snow-filled gully, usually exposed to rock and ice falling into it.
crampons:
Metal spikes, often arranged ten or twelve per foot on boot-length metal platforms that are strapped to mountaineering boots for climbing snow and ice.
daisy chain:
A six-foot-long sewed loop of half-inch-wide Spectra webbing that is stitched to itself every five inches along its length, creating a series of load-bearing fabric links in a “chain” of webbing. Typically, at exposed rappel anchor sites, with one end of the daisy chain hitched to his climbing harness, a climber clips a carabiner through one of the links to a solid anchor to prevent a fall while working near the edge.
downclimbing:
Descending steep terrain using climbing techniques, as opposed to rappelling or using anchors.
DPS:
Department of Public Safety; in Utah, the DPS oversees the state highway patrol.
ECSO:
Emery County sheriff’s office.
ICS:
Incident Command System, the command structure and guidelines used by most government agencies and search-and-rescue teams to manage large-scale emergency operations.
Lexan:
Trade name of a type of hard plastic, used in some outdoor recreation water bottles.
mixed:
Combination of ice, snow, and rock terrain; also mixed climbing, climbing on mixed terrain, using crampons and ice tools on rock.
Nalgene:
Brand name of a company that makes outdoor recreation water bottles.
NPS:
National Park Service, an agency within the Department of the Interior that administers national monument and park lands.
progress-capture loop:
A knot, such as a Prusik knot, used in lifting systems to hold the load in place while the haul system is reset for a subsequent lift.
Prusik knot:
A special friction knot useful for ratcheting operations such as ascending a rope or in pulley systems. When loose, the knot can be slid up a rope but locks when tightened under downward force.
randonée (also alpine touring, or A/T):
Backcountry skiing equipment similar to downhill ski equipment but with rear binding components that allow the boot heel to lift for uphill travel, then lock the heel down in ski descent mode. Unlike telemark skiing boots, A/T boots can be used with most crampons.
rappelling:
Descending a cliff using a rope and a special friction device.
rappel ring (also rap ring):
A welded aluminum ring that links a climbing rope to an anchor for rappelling, allowing a climber to pull the rope down from the anchor more freely, once the rappel is completed.
SAR:
Search and rescue.
Spectra:
Trade name for a type of synthetic fiber used in climbing ropes and webbing, stronger for its weight than traditional fibers.
stemming:
See “Chimneying.”
telemark:
Backcountry skiing equipment with a single free-heel mode that allows for both uphill travel and downhill skiing; named for a region in Norway. Downhill technique on telemark gear uses an alternating dropped-knee stance that advances one ski in front of the other to execute a turn. Telemark boots have a toe baffle that flexes, which is necessary for the telemark ski stance, but which makes them incompatible with most crampons.
travertine:
A type of rock formed by water with high concentrations of lime that are deposited wherever the stream flows or splashes. As the creek changes course or water levels drop, lime residue solidifies into travertine and changes from white to burgundy as other minerals in the accretion, notably iron, oxidize and turn red.
webbing:
Flat or tubular strips of closely woven high-strength fabric, useful for building climbing anchors. Usually used in three-quarter, one-inch, and one-and-a-half-inch widths.
yarding:
In climbing, to pull hard on a handhold.
