Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  Sonja and I returned to climb the Mooney Falls tunnels in the fading light. For our dinner back at camp, we laid out some pre-cooked turkey on crackers to go with our main course of macaroni and cheese. Even for backcountry cuisine, it was basic fare, but we weren’t there to celebrate a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner—we were most thankful about being with each other in such an inspiring place. After a chocolate bar each for dessert, we hung our food to protect it from the ring-tailed cats and raccoons and crawled onto our open-air tarp, the two lone occupants of the half-mile-long campground. My sister rolled over and fell asleep as I sat with my headlamp and tweezers for about forty-five minutes, trying to extract the remaining prickly-pear barbs from my inner thighs. It eased my embarrassment to know that no one was watching my peculiar ritual of awkward stretching, rubbing, plucking, prodding, and grimacing—my tweezers and I had the canyon to ourselves. It would be a full week before I found and removed the last spine, a fine hair impaled in my left buttock, while watching football on television in my town home in Chandler.

  By seven A.M. the next morning, I was descending the canyon by headlamp, downclimbing the ropes and chains at Mooney Falls, splashing through the streambed, and hiking swiftly through the grasses and reeds bordering the sandbars and creek banks past Beaver Falls. I was exactly on time for the rendezvous at the Colorado River, where Jean-Marc and Chad offered me some of their coffee, freshly brewed on their backcountry stove. We hung out on the slate ledges along the downriver side of the Havasupai outlet, overlooking the comparatively monstrous Colorado, and scoped out swimming possibilities along the south shore of the river. Chad waded out throughthe confluence zone of Havasupai Creek to get a picture of the mixing line where the translucent waters first met the rushing madness of the Colorado’s black-opal current.

  What possessed me to follow Chad out into the water, pass him to climb onto the last rock at the upstream edge of a powerful eddy, and then cannonball into the Colorado River, fully clothed, without a life jacket…Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Chad did get a funny picture of me, balled up in midair and unthinkingly bound for disaster, but had he and Jean-Marc not acted as fast as they did in the ensuing moments, it would have been the last picture anyone ever took of me, silly or otherwise. As I plunged in and came to the surface, I gasped at the unexpected temperature of the river—a hypothermic 50 degrees—over twenty degrees colder than the tropically warm Havasupai Creek.

  My thick long-sleeved shirt and pants became ten-pound weights, and my running shoes dragged my feet plumb as the current swept me along the edge of the fifteen-yard-long eddy. Kicking off my shoes, I swam hard and fought my way into the eddy within five feet of shore in deep water. I noticed I was no longer getting any closer to solid ground. The circular eddy current was too strong to overcome. As I made stroke after stroke, I watched the shore move past. Chad and Jean-Marc were watching me and called out, “Aron, do you need help?” My pride replied, “Nah, I’ll make it,” as I took in my first swallow of river water.

  Chad must have heard panic in my voice, because he dashed up the ledge behind the short beach to their campsite, thirty feet away, as I recirculated upstream in the eddy. Pushed from shore by the eddy current, I was quickly caught by the main current and the cycle began to repeat itself. As I attempted to unbutton my long-sleeved shirt to alleviate the drag, I instantly submerged and couldn’t get more than a single button undone before I needed air. The icy grip of the Colorado constricted my chest, making my breathing a shallow and rapid gasping. After swallowing three gulps of water and immersing a second time, I abandoned the shirt removal. Downstream of the eddy, the canyon walls rise straight from the water in two-to-three-hundred-foot cliffs for a thousand yards until the river turns right and disappears at the corner. I knew if I were swept past the Havasupai Creek eddy, I would drown long before I had another chance to get out of the river, and indeed it would be another hundred river miles until the current would spit my remains onto a beach at the upper end of Lake Mead. A newspaper headline flashed in front of my eyes: IDIOT ENGINEER DROWNS IN GRAND CANYON, BODY RECOVERED IN LAKE MEAD.

  I thrashed at the water, straining for the eddy. At the farthest downstream edge, I broke through the eddy line and cried out, “Help! Help!”

  Chad was up on a ledge returning from the campsite. “Jean-Marc, here!” Chad tossed a coiled accessory cord to Jean-Marc, who was fifteen feet away from me.

  “Aron, grab hold!” He threw out the line, but it fell in the eddy, upstream of my position, and quickly floated out of my reach.

  “Unnnggh,” I grunted. I continued to swim as hard as I could manage toward the shore. The cold was crippling me, numbing my legs, my arms, and my core. Jean-Marc retrieved the cord and tossed it out again, but the eddy current had already swept me past the beach and out into the overwhelming force of the Colorado. Concentrating on the eddy line, I kicked my lethargic legs and pumped my arms freestyle. I didn’t see Jean-Marc hand the cord off to Chad, but when I broke into the eddy again five seconds later, Chad had already thrown the coil and was shouting, “Aron, grab it! Get it! It’s right there!”

  I reached to my right and brought my hand down on the thin black line as it drifted limply in the eddy. Chad yanked on it to reel me in, and I lost my sodden grip on the cord. The crush of disappointment nearly drowned me. Certain I wouldn’t survive another recirculation, I pleaded, “Help! Throw it again!”

  My strokes were desperate but weak. The toss had to be perfect. Any mistake here and I was dead. Three seconds later, the line came back and draped over my right shoulder. A miracle! I grabbed at it with both hands, wrapping my left wrist in the line twice as my body wilted. With one last breath, I let my head drop into the water and felt the tension increase on the cord, biting into my wrist, but I didn’t care. My only thought was a hope that the line wouldn’t break. First my hands, and then my arms and chest brushed up onto the sand, and Jean-Marc was grabbing me under my shoulders. I felt sick, cold, blown out, and apathetic. I was safe at last but exhausted beyond concern. A voice spoke: “Oh my God, are you breathing?”

  I nodded. “Thank…you…” I huffed between choked breaths, my head buried between my outstretched arms, face in the sand.

  “Jesus, you almost died!” Jean-Marc was upset and stressed out, but Chad was calm.

  “It’ll be okay. You’re safe. How do you feel?”

  “I’m cold.” I paused and shuddered. “I think…I swallowed…a lot of water.” Rolling over to sit up, I slowly drew my legs out of the eddy and held my bloated stomach, groaning over the ache, wanting to puke, but I was too faint to summon the energy.

  It took a full five minutes of rest, staring at the eddy where I nearly took my last lungful of air, before I could stand up. Chad offered me a dry sweatshirt, and I paced around in lurching stumbles, trying to restore my equilibrium. Even dry, I was still chilled and needed to get moving. However, nauseated from the river water, I could barely hold my balance. Jean-Marc spotted me when I climbed up the slate ledge to our earlier perch, and I had to sit and take a break while they packed away their camping supplies. We were relaxing, and the aftermath of the adrenaline made us all a little slaphappy.

  “I can’t believe how lucky that last toss was.” I was dumbstruck at how a matter of seconds and inches had saved my life.

  “I can’t believe you were like ‘No, I don’t need any help—I’m drowning, but I’ll be OK,’ ” Chad teased me.

  I looked up and smiled, and we giggled. “Are you ready to go? I need to get my metabolism fired up.”

  “Yeah, we’re ready,” Jean-Marc said. “Get your shoes on.”

  “Oh. They’re gone. I had to kick them off when I was in the river. I’m gonna hike back in my socks.” My shoes were halfway to Mexico by now, and my sandals were back at Havasupai Campground.

  “It’s eight miles, man. Here, take my sandals off my pack.” Chad leaned over, and I undid the Velcro loops. The rubber sandals were too big, but they were b
etter than nothing.

  The more we walked, the better I felt. I warmed up, and my stomach absorbed the river water. We rehashed the rescue, I asked if Chad had gotten the picture of me, and he confirmed, “It was you in the middle of ‘Yeee-haw’ jumping off the rock.”

  “Well, then, it was worth it. As long as you got the picture,” I said sarcastically and grinned. Secretly, I was pleased to know that I’d have a souvenir of one of my stupidest moments ever.

  As we headed back to our camp, Jean-Marc mentioned he had a bottle of Stolichnaya up at their gear stash above Mooney Falls, and all of a sudden, it was the only thing the three of us could think about. We sped the remaining three miles upstream, hopping over logs, splashing and slipping in the creek, in an hour-long dash for the Havasupai happy hour. We eagerly guzzled most of Jean-Marc’s vodka, then found Sonja as it was getting dark, to join up for a swim in the large pool below Havasupai Falls. Telling and retelling the story of my near-drowning, we waded up under the falls to reemerge in the moonlight like creatures from the Blue Lagoon. After polishing off the vodka, our group of four stumbled out of the water well past dark. We crafted a faux distress note to stick in the bottle before sending it over Mooney Falls toward its destiny. We imagined it making a journey all the way to Lake Mead, where a Jet Skier would find our message: “Help! We’re at Havasupai Campground. Send more vodka immediately! Emergency! [signed] Jean-Marc, Chad, and Aron, November 29, 1998.”

  An hour later, when we’d called it a night, Sonja and I got into our sleeping bags. Lying there next to my sister, I told her what it had been like at the Colorado. All comedy aside, I said, “I was scared, Sonja. I saw headlines reporting my death. I thought I was a goner.” We cried together, then drifted off to sleep. The next morning, we packed up our gear for the ten-mile hike back to my car, then posed together for a final picture next to Havasupai Falls, happy to have each other. It became one of my favorite photos of the two of us.

  By December 1998, I hadn’t yet climbed any winter fourteeners. Indeed, I’d climbed only seven total, and all of those in summer conditions. I planned to start with the easier, nontechnical peaks at the beginning of the winter 1998–99 season. Even these least demanding mountains would require safe snow-travel knowledge and winter-weather experience. On the last training trip Mark and I did before I left for my winter vacation, we attempted Engineer Mountain in southwestern Colorado, near Durango. Conditions were rough, due to a ground blizzard whipping snow into fifty-foot visibility conditions. About a third of the way in, we bailed on the climb and spent the late morning and early afternoon digging snow-study pits to practice evaluating the snowpack. Mark showed me how to check the snow layers for hardness, cohesion, and avalanche potential, something that would become routine for me as part of my fourteener project.

  Two days later, after one of my best days skiing ever—in three feet of powder at Wolf Creek—Mark and I drove down into Alamosa in my fully laden sports coupe to get a motel room and recuperate from our binge of snow recreation. We had skied together regularly in the big snow year of 1997, usually camping out in zero-degree weather in the back of his Tacoma in ski-area parking lots, sitting on his tailgate eating hot oatmeal straight from his camping-stove pot, and watching the other skiers arriving. This time was even more special because Mark was moving to work in Alamosa for the winter.

  In the morning, we parted ways, and I drove north toward Fair-play, in central Colorado. My plan was to attempt a winter solo of Quandary Peak before I visited my parents for Christmas. Quandary’s easy winter access and short ridgeline route makes it the easiest winter fourteener, and one with a low exposure to avalanches, an ideal proving ground to test my winter skills and solo methods. December 22 dawned clear and cold, but with a jet-stream wind blowing hard across the high peaks. I had bought Mark’s old snowshoes from him, and as I strapped them to my waterproof leather hiking boots, I jittered with childlike excitement, feeling that it wasn’t just another hike. This ascent of the 14,265-foot Quandary represented the first stage of a substantial commitment, an engagement to my project. I stood at the threshold of the forest, arms wide, balancing on that moment when preparation changes into performance.

  The wind in my face occupied my attention for most of the gentle ascent. I tried to keep my head bent and my goggles from frosting over on the inside as I trudged in the snow up to the elevation where the trees grow more horizontally than vertically. I quickly left behind even these stumpy juniper shrubs. Higher up, the wind scoured the snowpack down to the rock-strewn tundra. I left my snowshoes on the broad ridge at a knoll somewhere above 12,000 feet. I looked to the southwest, where the nearby Lincoln group of fourteeners was clearly visible. The wind cut through my goggles’ ventilation ports, making my eyes tear up; snow-frosted summits swam in my vision under the azure sky.

  As I put more and more of the atmosphere and its contaminants below me, the sky sank along the color wheel from Mediterranean blue to solid cobalt to indigo dye. I imagined I could hike until the sky went black, and to me, for a few hours, the sky in my world was a different color than just about everyone else’s. I thought about the chance that I was the highest person in Colorado, and it seemed extremely likely—virtually no one climbs fourteeners in the winter. Given that it’s the off-season for the other high mountains of North America, I figured there were fairly good odds that I was the highest person on the continent, too.

  Windchill temperatures were in the negative twenties, and I’d completely spaced on my plan to keep a few food items in my pants pocket. At the summit, I found that my storebought water bottles had frozen through completely, and my chocolate bars were frost-nipped inside their packages. They weren’t edible, though I sucked on one like a Popsicle until I had licked the chocolate coating off the peanut core.

  Descending with the wind at my back, I nearly took flight from the mountaintop, as I ran in bounding leaps to my snowshoes. Relief from the physical stresses of the climb gave me a chance to celebrate my accomplishment. I put on the snowshoes and thought back over the day, especially about what I could do better to keep my food and water thawed during the climb—it wouldn’t always be such a short trip that I could get away without eating and drinking. In fact, hunger was gnawing in my stomach, and my tongue felt sticky in my mouth. I needed refreshment and was discouraged that I’d carried around the deadweight of my frozen food and water without gaining from it.

  I returned to my car and drove two hours down to Denver and my parents’ house, bursting with the exhilaration of a successful start to my project. There would be many more successes and opportunities for improving my performance on the winter solo climbs, but that one held me all year, until I climbed my second winter fourteener in December 1999. In the interim, I moved to Washington State with my engineering job, which provided me mountaineering opportunities that pushed my skills to the next level. My speed increased to where I could climb over 3,000 vertical feet in an hour with a twenty-pound pack; I became proficient in using crampons on snow, ice, and rock; and I went out with climbing partners to practice crevasse rescue and roped-team glacier travel techniques as we prepared for multiple ascents of the Cascades’ glaciated peaks—Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount Shuksan. During the six months I spent in Washington, there wasn’t a single weekend of good weather (by the end of summer, the world record for annual snowfall had been set on Mount Baker), but neither was there a single weekend that I didn’t go mountaineering. I discovered that if I waited for the weather, I’d never do anything, so I coped with soggy clothes, a mildewed tent, cold nights out in the middle of summer, and less than rewarding summit views from the inside of clouds.

  On Mount Rainier, I learned what it meant to sit in an exposed bivouac after my partner Paul Budd and I had made a traverse over the summit, ascending via the Kautz Ice Chute route and then—because of our shortage of ice screws and a nasty lightning and snow storm—descending via the standard Disappointment Cleaver route. With our camping gear, food, and water sup
plies at 11,000 feet on the opposite side of the mountain, we shivered at 10,000 feet for eight hours as a ten-degree chill drained our bodies’ warmth. During that epic, we climbed over 15,000 feet vertical in twenty-four hours (we had to reclimb the peak to retrieve our gear) and went sixty-six hours without sleeping due to the storms.

  Paul and I had put forth a monstrous effort that showed new depths to my strength; these came to bear the next weekend, when I returned with my friend Judson Cole from Arizona and we climbed the regular Disappointment Cleaver route in a single push, going from the Paradise base area to the summit and back in fourteen hours. On an endurance-climbing kick, I joined a group of three companions from the ACME Mountain Club for an ascent of the North Face of Mount Shuksan, one of the most beautiful mountains in the world and still one of the greatest climbs I’ve ever done. But the approach to the climb was proof of the adage “If you want to get to heaven, you have to go through hell.” Our team bushwhacked through such heavy forest undergrowth that it ripped one of my ice tools completely off my backpack without my even noticing. I lost our only map as well, as I slipped with every second step on the sloping hillside coated in two-inch-thick slide alder branches. Thankfully, we knew the route well enough from having memorized the description that we were able to keep going, despite gaining only a mile’s progress in almost eight hours of hiking through the night.

  By morning we were exhausted from the heinous approach. After reorienting ourselves in the daylight, we reached 5,000 feet on the north shoulder of the mountain and collapsed for an hour-long nap. At noon, we rousted ourselves and roped up for protection against falling into a crevasse while we climbed the mountain’s upper glaciers. A thousand feet up, in the middle of the ramp connecting the two glaciers of the North Face, as my rope-mate Bruce and I were spread across an avalanche debris field, we heard a distant rumbling far above us.