127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (6 page)

Looking up to my right, a foot above the top of the boulder on the north wall, I see tiny wads of my flesh, pieces of my arm hair, and stains of my blood streaked on the sandstone. In dragging my arm down the wall, the boulder and smooth Navajo sandstone acted like a grater, scraping off my skin’s outer layers in thin strips. Peering at the bottom of my arm, I check for more blood, but there is none, not even a lone drip.

As I bring my head back up, I bump the bill of my hat, and my sunglasses fall onto my pack at my feet. Picking them up, I see they’ve gotten scratched at some point since I had them on in the open sunny part of the canyon an hour ago. “Not like that’s important,” I tell myself, but still I take care to put them on top of the boulder, off to the left side.

My headphones have gotten knocked off my ears, but now, and in my calm, I hear the crowd on the live CD cheering. The noise evaporates as the disc winds to a stop, and the sudden silence reinforces my situation. I am irreversibly trapped, standing in the dimly lit bottom of a canyon, unable to move more than a few inches up or down or side to side. Compounding my physical circumstances, no one who will suspect I am missing knows where I am. I violated the prime directive of wilderness travel in failing to leave a detailed trip plan with a responsible person. Still eight miles from my truck, I am alone in an infrequently visited place with no means to contact anyone outside the fifty-yard throw of my voice.

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…

It’s rare. But it happens. Has happened.

This chockstone pinning my wrist was stuck for a long time before I came along. And then it not only fell on me, it trapped my arm. I’m baffled. It was like the boulder had been put there, set like a hunter’s trap, waiting for me. This was supposed to be an easy trip, few risks, well within my abilities. I’m not out trying to climb a high peak in the middle of winter, I’m just taking a vacation. Why didn’t the last person who came along dislodge the chockstone? They would’ve had to make the same maneuvers I did to traverse the canyon. What kind of luck do I have that this boulder, wedged here for untold ages, freed itself at the split second that my hands were in the way? Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, it seems astronomically infeasible that this happened.

I mean, what are the odds?

Mountains are the means, the man is the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man.

—W
ALTER
B
ONATTI
,
Italian climber

I
N
A
UGUST
1987, when I was twelve, my family was preparing to move to Colorado from Indianapolis, Indiana, to follow my dad’s career. While visiting with a friend of our family in rural eastern Ohio that July, I found an encyclopedic book about the fifty states and looked up my future home. At the time, I had never been over ten miles west of the Mississippi River in my life. Facing this imminent displacement to the West, I wanted to find out what was in store for me. I admit I was prejudiced—I had preconceived images of horseback riders, skiers, and so much snow that it covered the state year-round.

What I found in the book not only reinforced those notions, it terrified me. There was a photo of Pikes Peak, the view from which inspired the song “America the Beautiful,” according to the caption. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the peak was so rugged that it seemed a caricature of ferocious nature. I didn’t know at the time that there are both a railway and a road to the top of the peak, ending in a parking area beside a restaurant and gift shop. At that point in my life, the great outdoors was a concept limited to the woods behind my house, the dirt-bike course over on the lot near my friend Chris Landis’s house, and Eagle Creek Reservoir on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In my world, the outdoors did not include mountains. And it especially did not include mountains fourteen thousand feet tall. Intimidated, I turned the page.

I found people skiing down improbably steep slopes at life-threatening speeds. Though I’d taken my metal-runner Flyer all over the embankments, ditches, and streets of our Indianapolis subdivision, and even ridden a sizable hill in the neighborhood north of our house, I was always able to drag my feet behind me to brake. How do you stop on skis?

I flipped the page again, and this last picture shook me to my core. It was a photo of people cross-country skiing the streets of Denver after a winter storm. There were no vehicles on the roads, just lanes of people on their skis. I slammed the book shut in horror. My imagination went to work completing the scenario. People don’t drive anywhere in Colorado, they just cross-country ski. To school, to work, to the grocery store, wherever they went, people travel only on skis, as in some Nordic wonderland. Even in the middle of the summer. To a kid who’d been born in Ohio and spent his formative years as a Hoosier, raised on the holy trinity of basketball, basketball, and Indy car racing, skiing, even on flat ground, was as foreign a concept as riding a camel.

As I developed more of an idea of this place where my family was headed, I came to believe in Colorado as an entire state of skiers, the landscape striated with ski tracks, social groupings segregated by skiing ability. How would I ever fit in if I couldn’t ski? I cried to myself in bed every night for a week after I read that book. While sad that we were parting ways, my friends were excited for me to move to Colorado. They told me how much fun it would be to go skiing. They didn’t realize that was exactly what terrified me so much. Having noticed my red eyes and sniffles, my parents grew concerned at dinner one night. “It looks like you’ve been crying. What’s wrong?” my dad inquired.

“I’m scared,” I lied. I wasn’t scared, I was absolutely terrorized by the notion of moving to Colorado.

My dad tried to console me, saying, “I know moving is hard. We’re all leaving our friends behind. You know you’ll make new friends, right?”

“Yeah. That’s not why I’m scared.”

“Why are you scared?”

Once I had explained about the book, my parents smiled, reassured me that it didn’t snow
that
much that I would have to ski to get to school, and got me in a better mood. We flew out for a visit before we moved, and aside from the nasty sunburn I got at the water park, I found that Colorado wasn’t nearly as inhospitable as it had first seemed. Once we moved for good, I joined the ski club at my middle school, and by the end of my second day on skis that December, I was hurtling down intermediate runs, outracing all my new friends, and even tackling some of the hardest terrain at Winter Park/Mary Jane, the resort that would become my absolute favorite place to ski moguls in the whole world.

My adaptation to my new environment continued the next summer, when I had a seminal outdoor experience on a backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National Park. The two-week-long trip with other thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds into the park’s backcountry marked the first time I would ever carry a heavy load and spend the night more than a few minutes’ walk from a house or vehicle. A full season of skiing had assuaged my fear of the mountains. Without knowing it, I was poised on the brink of a love affair.

On the first day of our late-June backpacking trip, I felt so enthused by being in such a grand place as the western side of the park that I leaped and bounded down the trail despite my pack load. My frantic energy quickly earned me the nickname Animal, after the drummer of the Muppet band. Our group’s two counselors had their hands full trying to keep me from sprinting off ahead of the group. After lunch they increased my pack burden with the huge bucket of peanut butter that was to feed our group of fifteen for five more lunches, until we were resupplied, but even so I would run up to the next curve along the trail and disappear from sight until I heard one of the leaders shout, “Animal! Wait for us!”

That first evening, as dusk approached, we spread out around our campsite at 9,600 feet elevation in the Big Meadows, each of us with a notepad and the encouragement to write or draw whatever we wanted. I sat in the tall grass in the middle of the meadow, alongside the shallow gravel-bottom stream, and played with the water. After a few minutes on the bank, I watched an adult mule deer amble out from the cover of the trees toward the creek, twitching her ears and shaking her head to shoo away insects. I froze in place, entranced, as the doe paraded out into the meadow, right to left, as I looked to the south. I was at the fringe of our group, since everyone else had stayed closer to the tents. She reached the water, and I leaned back to reach my tablet and cautiously opened the cover, anxious that any rustling might frighten her. For the next five minutes, which seemed like both five hours and five seconds, the doe drank from the creek and I sketched her shape on my notepad, until she turned and walked back into the forest.

When our fifteen minutes of personal reflection time were up, everyone else was quiet and introverted until I bounced into camp with my report of the deer. The other kids were impressed, and I showed off my sketch—it wasn’t brilliant art, by any means, but as a souvenir of my awe, it did the job. Two nights later, up at a boulder field of 11,000 feet, I experienced the fun of scrambling on house-sized rocks. We dunked our bodies in a stream pool so cold the snow-banks extended down into the water. That same night I learned a firsthand lesson about not leaving sweaty boots outside the tent when there are porcupines around (they ate the leather uppers, laces, and tongues, reducing my boots to Vibram-soled flip-flops).

The next summer, 1989, I went to an outdoor adventure camp that ranged across the state, including rock climbing near Estes Park, white-water rafting on the Colorado River out near Grand Junction, and horseback riding at a ranch near Gunnison. I wasn’t exactly turning into an expert, but something was growing in me, and four years later, when I headed off for college in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University, I felt like I’d established an identity in the West. I had become a Coloradoan at heart—a “transplanted native.” In Pennsylvania, when I felt homesick, it was for the spaces, sun, and peaks of my western home, and when people asked where I was from, I enjoyed seeing their eyes light up after I told them I was from Colorado. For two years, I was the only student at CMU from Colorado. Lacking fellow Coloradoans with whom I could share my longing for the Rocky Mountains, I pined disconsolately for snowy ski slopes.

I climbed my first fourteener, Longs Peak—one of the fifty-nine mountains in Colorado higher than the magic line of 14,000 feet—in July 1994, with my best friend, Jon Heinrich. Longs dominates the northern half of Colorado’s Front Range, northwest of Boulder. At 14,255 feet, the mountain is the sixteenth-highest peak in the state, and one of the most renowned. While its spectacular East Face, known as the Diamond, draws world-class technical climbers to its sheer granite lines, the relatively easy standard hike through the Keyhole allows thousands of scrambling hikers to make the summit each summer. Jon and I gathered advice from Dick Rigo, our friend Brandon’s dad, who had been a Boy Scout leader and who had himself climbed several dozen of the fourteeners. Mr. Rigo told us some basic tenets of hiking high peaks—start early, take water and food, rain gear, a map, and be off the summit by noon to avoid lightning from the almost daily afternoon thunderstorms—most of which we subsequently ignored.

Jon carried a gallon jug of water in his grip; our packs were stuffed with sandwiches, candy bars, and our ski jackets. By the time we reached treeline, the elevation above which trees no longer grow (about 11,000 feet on Longs Peak), we had stripped off our shirts and slathered sunscreen on our chests. We noted our progress compared to the photocopied trail map we’d picked up at the ranger station that morning, marking down the time we reached each landmark. We were going to be a long way behind the record ascent time, but we would easily get back before dark. A broad trail ascended to Granite Pass near 12,000 feet, and in a set of a half-dozen long switchbacks, the route turned back above itself several times to reach the Boulderfield, a half square mile of couch-sized boulders piled over one another. We ate a snack under the clear sky at the Keyhole, a steeply sided, jagged notch in the northern ridge of the mountain. Then I climbed up the rocks on the north side of the Keyhole and crawled out onto the overhanging pinnacle some thirty feet above Jon. With my legs dangling over the drop, he took my picture. I came down, Jon climbed up, and I returned the favor.

Even though we were well above 13,000 feet, the most difficult climbing of the day was still to come, with first a treacherous traverse across the granite slabs that slope down the west side of the north ridge, then a steep climb up the Trough Couloir, a five-hundred-foot-high rocky gully, where we encountered a dozen other hikers who were having increasing difficulty breathing under the exertion of scrambling up the couloir (the air near 14,000 feet is about half the density of air at sea level, so the available oxygen is significantly reduced). Jon suggested we race to the top of the couloir, one at a time, and see how many people we could pass. He went first and eventually passed everyone else in the couloir. While Jon was nearing the halfway point, I started up. Trying to pace myself to overtake a couple before the gully narrowed at a four-foot-high rock step, I felt my breathing escalate, but since I was unacclimated to the altitude, my chest could heave only so much until the fiery sensation in my lungs won and I had to pause at the rock step. Though I still passed all the other hikers, I was several minutes slower than Jon. It was significant to me that it could feel so good to make my body hurt by pushing so hard.

Approaching 14,000 feet under our own power for the first time, Jon and I felt giddy with the promise of making it to the top. But first we rounded an outside corner and were looking up at the Homestretch, a three-hundred-foot-high open dihedral formed at the crease where two sections of the summit walls create an inside corner, like an open book.

The last task before we would stand atop Longs Peak was to scramble up this smoothly polished slab using both hands on the rock. Below us, the rock walls fell away into a two-thousand-foot-deep chasm, from which an occasional wind gust burst, sharpening the psychological edge. Jon and I stopped to watch a summiteer descend the Homestretch above us in his blue jeans. He faced out from the mountain and alternated lowering his feet and scraping his underside down to meet his shoes. His tentative style in such a precarious place concerned us; we joked that if he slipped, he would knock us both off the Homestretch, like bowling for climbers. At a protected spot behind a large flake that had separated from the wall, we passed the man in the flat lee of the protrusion and continued. In another three minutes, we reached the open rocky plateau of Longs Peak and celebrated with an extended hug. Jon made a sign on the back of our map that read “I love you,” for his girlfriend, Nikki, and I took a photograph of him holding the paper in the breeze, beaming a hypoxic smile.

Despite our late start, we were off the summit and climbing down the Homestretch before two o’clock in the afternoon. A few clouds were gathering to the northwest, but we’d lucked out with the weather. Once we were down below the Keyhole again, we stopped for another snack and spied an open snow slope to our right, on the east side of the north ridge. I think the idea came to Jon and me at the same moment, because we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go slide on the snow!” I don’t think either of us knew what glissading was, but we clambered over to the top of the longest stretch of snow, some two hundred yards long, and donned our ski pants. It was a slope steep enough to avalanche, but with midsummer conditions, we were more concerned that we would slide all the way off the bottom edge and go hurtling into the Boulderfield. Jon went first on a thirty-second ride, spraying the softened snow in all directions with his boot heels, hooting with glee. I yelled for him to take a photo of me when I got close enough, and I plopped onto the snowfield and accelerated toward Jon at breakneck speed.

Using the snow groove Jon had created, and with my low-friction nylon ski pants, I quickly surpassed the speed where I could control my descent. Bouncing over buried obstacles, tearing down in a streak, I was going to end up staining some rocks with blood if I didn’t slow down. In fear, I thrust my hands down into the snow at my sides, dug in my heels, and was instantly rewarded with a faceful of heavy wet slush. As the slope angle diminished at the end of the snowfield, I raked my fingers more tenaciously and kicked with my boots until, half blind, I stopped right beside Jon, just a few feet before the rock field. We immediately broke into a bout of exuberant laughter and shouted at each other, “Let’s do it again!” Hiking up back to where we’d left our backpacks, I tried to revive my numbed hands, wiping off the ice crystals, and devised a scheme to hold small pointed rocks as brakes this time.