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Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and the Hardest Place What happens when a solitary day hike turns into the ultimate test of survival? By Mark Jenkins
By 2:45 p.m., Ralston had started his solo descent into the deep, narrow slot of Bluejohn Canyon. Passing over and then under boulders that clogged the three-foot-wide penumbral passage, Ralston was negotiating a ten-foot drop between two ledges when an 800-pound boulder shifted above him. He snapped his left hand out of its path in time, but his right hand was smashed between the rock and the sandstone wall.
Ralston was trapped, alone in a remote canyon. Rescue was unlikely: He'd neglected to inform anyone of where he was going, which he later acknowledged is "something I almost always do but I failed to do this time." Six foot two, long, lean, and fit, Ralston is an accomplished outdoor athlete. He first became interested in climbing in 1996, after reading about the Everest disaster in which eight mountaineers lost their lives in a single storm. "I wondered what I would do if I were in a situation like that," he told a reporter earlier this year. He grew up in Colorado and graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, with a double major in mechanical engineering and French, then worked at Intel for five years, hopscotching to posts in Phoenix, Tacoma, and then Albuquerque, where he volunteered on a local search-and-rescue team. In the spring of 2002, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, took a retail job at Ute Mountaineering, a local shop, and began training to become a guide. According to his Web site, Aron's Optimal Experiences On-Line, Ralston has built an impressive outdoor résumé: topping out on 34 of the 50 states' highest points, soloing 45 of Colorado's 59 fourteeners in winter, and, in June of 2002, summiting 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. This kind of serious adventure invariably involves risk. In March 2003, Ralston and two companions were backcountry skiing on Resolution Peak, in central Colorado, when they got caught in an avalanche. "I just remember rolling down with it. Powder was swirling all around, and I was trying to breathe, but I would breathe a mixture of snow and air, and you'd swallow it like seawater," Ralston told The Denver Post after the slide. "It was horrible. It should have killed us." It didn't. Buried up to his neck, Ralston was rescued by his friend, and together they dug out the third skier. It was less than a month later when he embarked on a solo day hike in the Utah desert. After the boulder crushed his hand, Ralston explained at the press conference, "I very quickly figured out some of my options. I began laying plans for what I was going to do." He also inventoried his provisions: two burritos, one liter of water, and some candy bar crumbs. One possibility was that "someone would happen along the trail" and rescue him. No one did, so he spent the first of five nights in the slot canyon working on Plan B: futilely chipping away at the rock with his multitool, a cheap knockoff of a Leatherman model. The next day, Sunday, using his climbing gear and his search-and-rescue skills, he moved to Plan C: rigging ropes in an attempt to hoist the boulder off his hand. This also failed. On Monday, he rerigged the ropes and again tried moving the rock. "At no point was I ever able, with any of the rope mechanics, to get the boulder to budge even microscopically," Ralston said. He kept chipping away at the boulder, but over the next few days he would often simply pause. "There were times when I thought that was the most efficient use of my time," he explained. He thought a lot about dying and was afraid at first, but he "came to peace with death over the time spent in the canyon." On day four of his ordeal, Tuesday, April 29, Ralston ran out of water. Realizing he would die of dehydration within days, he prepared to reckon with his last resort: severing his hand with the blunt blade of his multitool. "Essentially I got my surgical table ready and applied the knife to my arm, and started sawing back and forth. But I didn't even break the skin. I couldn't even cut the hair off of my arm, the knife was so dull," he said. On Wednesday, he managed to puncture the skin but realized he wouldn't be able to cut through the bone. By Thursday, May 1, growing weak and having passed through stages of depression, hope, and prayer, Ralston decided he would have to break his arm near the wrist to extricate himself. "I was able to first snap the radius," he calmly recalled, "and then, within a few minutes, snap the ulna at the wrist, and from there I had the knife out and applied the tourniquet and went to task. It was a process that took about an hour." He sawed through the soft tissue between the broken bones and amputated his hand. "All the desires, joys, and euphorias of a future life came rushing into me," Ralston stated at the press conference. "Maybe this is how I handled the pain. I was so happy to be taking action." Ralston rigged his rope, set his anchors, rappelled 60 feet to the floor of Bluejohn Canyon, and hiked five miles downstream into Horseshoe Canyon, supporting the bloody stump of his right arm in a makeshift sling fashioned from a CamelBak pack. He ran into three hikers from Holland who gave him Oreos and water and helped him carry his pack another mile. At 3 p.m., he was finally rescued by a helicopter, which had begun searching for him when friends in Aspen, worried because he hadn't shown up for work, called the Utah authorities. Flown first to Allen Memorial Hospital, in Moab, Utah, he walked unaided off the helicopter to a waiting gurney team. Later that day, he was transferred to St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction, where he underwent the first of several surgical procedures to prepare his right arm for a prosthesis. Three days later, a team of 13 rangers trekked into the canyon to retrieve Ralston's hand. Using a hydraulic jack and a grip hoist, it took them an hour to lift the boulder. Ralston had carved the words good luck now into the rock just before he severed his hand.
Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way. • Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift! • Give the gift of Outside Magazine! • Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more. |
   
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