Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  Our partners ahead started screaming at us to run. Without looking at what the other was doing, Bruce and I ran three steps away from each other, and the rope drew taught, comically jerking us to a halt. It was a moment that we recounted later in bellyaching guffaws, but it brought me to the brink of a roiling panic at the time. I turned back toward Bruce. “THIS WAY!” I yelled over the increasing but still invisible thunder, and gave a rough tug on the rope.

  We both sprinted forward across the snowfield in a blinding terror. With heavy mountain boots, crampons, and forty-five-pound packs, moving quickly proved to be a nightmare. Time slowed; it felt like we were running in place. Suddenly, the noise got louder and then stopped, as though I’d stepped into a soundproof room. I shot a look back over my shoulder.

  From an ice cliff hanging above and halfway across the traverse, a boulder the size and shape of a motor coach hurtled into the air, spinning and wobbling violently like a punted football. The sight brought me to a horrified stop as I screamed for Bruce. “RUN! KEEP RUNNING!” I couldn’t tell if he was clear of the boulder’s landing zone yet, and we had only about two more seconds before we both found out the hard way.

  In those last elongated seconds, Bruce didn’t even look up—he just sprinted harder toward me. I grabbed the rope, whipped it downhill, and pulled it in as he ran, trying to keep it from tangling in his crampons. A brilliant fury of adrenaline contorted Bruce’s face as the gargantuan boulder ended its meteoric flight in a mammoth explosion of snow fifty yards uphill and—thank the heavens—forty yards behind Bruce. With its momentum only partially absorbed, the boulder slid across our tracks like a derailed train car, accelerating until it careered over the edge of the crevasse lip at near-highway speed.

  The sound died away. None of us could believe how quickly the whole sequence had played out. Bruce didn’t see the boulder at all; he was still running when it dove off the glacier. We were safe from the near-miss and regrouped in a cyclone of backslapping.

  “You sure nobody needs to change underwear?” one of the other guys jested. We had been shaken and wanted to rest, but we were each equally determined to keep going and make our high camp before we ran out of afternoon light.

  After they had led for three hundred vertical feet, the other rope team turned over this more difficult work to Bruce and me. Still recovering from his emotional expenditure, Bruce wasn’t up for kicking steps, hammering in snow pickets, and carrying the psychological burden of being in front. I collected the pickets, borrowed an ice hammer to temporarily replace my lost second tool, and set off from the others, who would follow once I was a rope length above them. Stabbing the front points of my crampons into the stable late-summer snowpack, I held my ice tools like daggers, with my fists wrapped high around the handles.

  I fell into a cycle of motion, first plunging my right axe into the crust above my shoulder, then kicking my right foot through the crust and compressing a step. As I stood on my right foot, the sequence continued on my other side. When I started, I had nearly two thousand feet of virgin white mountainside rising steeply above me. Without landmarks, the unbroken field slipped by indeterminately. Even the horizon of the glacier’s upper slopes rolling back out of sight above me seemed fixed at an unapproachable distance. My one indication of progress was the occasional shout from Bruce that let me know we’d climbed another rope length, and it was time to pound in another picket. At his signal, in a smooth series of motions, I would draw a two-foot-long T-section metal post from my pack’s quiver, hold it against the slope, and strike it with the hammer on the back of my right ice tool until it was nearly buried. Clipping the rope through the adjoining carabiner protected Bruce and me against a fall. Our second team used the same pickets, then removed them as the last man passed each snow stake.

  To my left, the slope swept down to the same hanging ice cliff where we had watched the boulder perform its airborne display. I drew myself inward, focusing my mind on efficiently regulating my body’s motions. My climbing patterns took on an unbreakable rhythm, plunging an axe, kicking twice with my foot, switching sides, plunge, kick, kick, plunge, kick, kick. It was a waltz that I danced with the mountain for an enchanted hour.

  As the sun dropped into a thin cloudbank forty miles out over Puget Sound, light refracted in the prism of ocean vapors, and Mount Shuksan put on her finest evening gown. I glanced over my right shoulder to watch the lights of Victoria illuminate the coastline of Vancouver Island. As the sunset spilled claret wine over the jagged Picket Range and the border peaks of the North Cascades, I found it harder and harder to lean in on my axes, until finally, I stood up and walked ten yards without kicking steps. I was at the top of the glacier, close to 9,000 feet above sea level. Staring ahead, I admired the black pyramid of Mount Shuksan’s symmetrical summit jutting up from the surrounding snowfields. As the rope allowed, I walked over to a convex roll in the white plateau that commanded views of Mount Baker, Puget Sound, the North Cascades, and southern British Columbia, and made an executive decision that this would be our campsite for the night. If the afternoon’s exquisite climbing had been a reward for the torture of the previous night’s bushwhacking, then the tranquil splendor of this campsite was due return for the boulder’s terror. My run-down teammates arrived one by one with compliments for my step-kicking and campsite selection, and we went to work making ready for dinner and rest.

  Our adventure on Mount Shuksan wasn’t over. Since we hadn’t yet topped out on the mountain—and indeed were on the opposite side of the summit pyramid from the fastest route to the top—we had a long day ahead of us when Sunday dawned bright and clear. Circumventing the black pyramid’s ramparts on the east and then the south, we were forced to skip going up the final five hundred feet to the peak’s high point so we could scout the three major gullies that dropped off the west side of the mountain’s southern glacier. Without the map, we had little certainty of our descent, and though we found our way down the steepest climbing of the trip—through an ice tunnel at a glacial bergschrund (a crevasse created where the head of a glacier pulls away from the adjacent rock), down the vertical rock of the Fisher Chimney, and up a grueling finish to reach the Mount Baker ski area—it was dark again before we were off the mountain.

  A week after the Mount Shuksan climb, I moved to New Mexico with my job and immediately joined the search-and-rescue (SAR) group to which Mark had belonged for five years. The Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council, the top team in the state for technical rock rescues, provided me unparalleled training and experience and introduced me to nearly every one of my climbing partners of the next three years. Living in Albuquerque also allowed me closer access to the peaks in Colorado where I spent an average of five days climbing each month, year-round.

  With my summer of big-mountain adventures in Washington, and more time for training in the Colorado mountains, I had gained a significant amount of experience that prepared me for a full slate of winter fourteener ascents during the winter of 1999–2000. However, I was still at the mercy of the mountain gods. Greater-than-100-mph winds blasted me on the summit plateau of Mount Bross on December 22, repeatedly knocking me over. The entire time I was crawling and fighting for my balance, unbeknownst to me, the metal frame of my headlamp was conducting the heat off my forehead into the bitter windchill, leaving a Gorbachevian crimson frostbite mark centered between my temples. I joined my family that evening in Denver with a ridiculous purple brow that faded to a brown splotch, like the stain of a mild sunburn, after four days.

  In the three days after Christmas that year, I surmounted five fourteener summits; two days later, I rang in the millennium in the Everglades of Florida with about twenty of my friends (and eighty thousand other fans) at my fiftieth Phish show. The band played continuously from midnight until dawn, nearly eight hours, in an incomparable marathon set. Later in the spring, four of my friends and I decided to go to Japan that summer to see the band play an entire tour of small venues; while we were there, we also hiked to the top
of Mount Fuji, the first time I’d ever been to the highest point of a country.

  Before the winter of 2000 was over, I soloed another six winter fourteeners back in Colorado, including the moderately technical Kit Carson Mountain and Blanca Peak, both in the southern Sangre de Cristo Range. On January 16, 2000, after nabbing the first documented ascent of the millennium on Blanca and its easier sister summit, Ellingwood Point, I descended briskly on a thin snowfield that barely covered some underlying boulders. At about 12,000 feet, I broke through the snow crust up to my right knee for about the hundredth time—I was bruising and scraping the front of my shins from bashing into the leading edge of the crust each time I stumbled—but this time I couldn’t pull my leg out of the hole. I yanked and yanked without reward; a rock had shifted under the snow, trapping my foot at the ankle. There wasn’t much pressure against my foot, but the boot was stuck fast, and I couldn’t budge the rock from my forward-leaning position. I would have to dig away the snow, then move the rocks to get my boot out, which would be easier if I weren’t lodged in place. Wriggling my hand down into the hole, I released my shoelace, yanked my foot out of the boot, and rolled over onto my right side, trying to keep my sock-covered foot out of the snow. Fifteen minutes later, I had my boot once more. The experience gave me cause to wonder what might have happened if not just my boot but my leg had been stuck, or if I’d twisted my ankle or even broken my leg. Could I have survived a night in the open? I had a 30-degree sleeping bag compressed in the bottom of my pack, and a stove and fuel, but nighttime temperatures were cold enough that I had my doubts. Shrugging off the accident as a brief delay, I nevertheless avoided two other shallowly buried boulder fields during the remainder of the descent.

  Over the course of the winter, I learned about the concept of deep play, wherein a person’s recreational pursuits carry a gross imbalance of risk and reward. Without the potential for any real or perceived external gain—fortune, glory, fame—a person puts himself into scenarios of real risk and consequence purely for internal benefit: fun and enlightenment. Deep play exactly described my winter solo fourteener project, especially when I would begin a climb by heading into a storm, accepting malevolent weather as part of my experience on that trip. Suffering, cold, nausea, exhaustion, hunger—none of it meant anything, it was all part of the experience. The same went for the joy, euphoria, achievement, and fulfillment, too. I found that I could not set out with the intent of having a particular experience—safety precautions and risk management aside—my goal instead was to be open to what that day was giving me and accept it. Expectations generally led to disappointment, but being open to whatever was there for me to discover led to awareness and delight, even when conditions were rough. Mark Twight, an American alpinist with an extraordinary history of success and misadventure at the most extreme level of mountaineering, wrote in a climbing essay, “It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” Precisely.

  In my next two winter fourteener seasons, I would tackle increasingly difficult ascents; however, I had saved the most technical and remote peaks for the second half of the project. With time, I became more efficient with my climbing and camping methods and equipment, and made gains with my fitness and acclimatization, which allowed me to attempt longer and more strenuous routes. I always established an itinerary and communicated my expected return time to my parents or roommates, and chose routes and adjusted my schedule to minimize avalanche exposure—the deadliest objective hazard of the project.

  By the end of 2002, I had completed thirty-six of the fifty-nine fourteeners in four winters. My achievements were greater than the numbers—I was consistently creating for myself new experiences that no one else in the world was having. It was common when I signed in at trailhead registers to see that the last entry before mine was three, four, or sometimes five months old. On the occasions when I would return to a summit in the summer, my entry would be the only one in a seven- or eight-month period. With the solitude that came from being in places four months removed from others’ presence, I felt a sense of ownership of these cold high mountains, these buried alpine tarns, these sound-dampened forests; and a sense of kinship with the elk, deer, beaver, ermines, ptarmigans, and mountain goats. The more I visited their home, the more it felt like mine.

  In the willow thickets of Mount Evans’s west bowl, I almost stepped on a snow-white ptarmigan that cooed and hopped out of my way at the last instant. Bending down to the bird, I fell into a trance in its ink-drop eyes. The universe expanded; neither of us moved. I felt a connection with that little puff of feathers on its matching snow pillow that seemed to surpass my bond with my own species. With our coexistence in the wintry landscape, we shared more than I did with the other humans who would never journey into this world. I took a picture to show my friends, but despite my explanation, they saw only the ptarmigan, not the connection.

  These places, and the experiences I had in them, were mine and mine alone. The senses of solitude, ownership, and place that I felt on these trips were creating a private world that, by definition, was impossible to share. Nevertheless, I tried. I took photographs and posted online albums of my trips; however, the images failed. They were unsuccessful because they were removed in time and location from what I went through to be in that place at that time. To a person sitting in an office or a living room, a picture of a winter mountain sunset is just a picture. To me, it was the experience of taking the picture. For instance, after snowshoeing for eight hours with my fifty-pound pack up Cottonwood Creek Valley, through an untracked forest of bottomless powder, past frozen cascades, I attained the 13,000-foot pass between Electric and Broken Hand peaks. From a vantage worthy of an Albert Bierstadt painting, I watched the red sunset light of the millennium’s first winter solstice transform Crestone Needle’s snow-plastered rock ribs into a purple mountain so majestic I cried at its beauty. A picture couldn’t do the experience justice—no matter my photographic talents, I couldn’t make the viewer feel the transcendent combination of depletion, fatigue, hypoxia, elation, and accomplishment that I felt in reaching such a sublime vista at that twilit moment.

  The further along I got with my solo winter fourteener project, the larger this private world grew, and the more it intertwined with my sense of self. Climbing fourteeners in the winter by myself wasn’t just something I did; it became who I was. I didn’t hold any delusions about the difficulty of the project relative to world-class climbing routes, or compare myself with elite alpinists, but each time I scaled another high peak, I explored and developed another part of me.

  I left my first swooping backcountry ski tracks on Mount Harvard’s lower south face with my telemark skis, the only traces of human passage that peak would see for six months. I saw three wolves run a half mile in three feet of powder across a wide-open meadow at 11,000 feet on the west side of Mount Massive—even more impressive than their power and grace was the fact that prior to that day in March 2002, wolves had been extinct in Colorado for over six decades. I stared into storms and met their fury with intensity and jubilation, growing icicles on my face on Humboldt Peak and spreading my arms like wings in the wind on the summit of Torreys Peak. I basked in the sun spray of a perfectly calm and unnaturally warm noon atop Mount Yale and froze in my maximum-thickness down parka on Mount Sneffels.

  As my passion and dedication to the outdoors deepened, my time in the mountains left me with a singular desire to move back to Colorado and pursue my development from a home in the high country. I was altogether burned out on working in a large corporation. Then, in the spring of 2002, the opportunity came up for me to climb Denali with a group of über-athletes. But without the required vacation time to go on the trip, I had to make a choice between following my bliss and keeping my job at Intel. In the end, it didn’t even feel like a sacrifice to quit my job, sell most of my household goods, and pack my outdoor toys into my three-year-old Toyota Tacoma pickup truck (complete with rubber-tramping topper for camping). On my last day of work, Thursday, May 23, 2002, I w
rote an e-mail to all my friends, announcing my new start, quoting Goethe: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

  Most of my colleagues encouraged me in my transition, but there were a few who could scarcely believe what I was telling them—that I was quitting, didn’t have another job lined up, and wasn’t going back to school. It just wasn’t something that Intel engineers did. But at twenty-six, after a modest career of five years, I officially retired. “Holding a corporate job” joined “living east of the Rocky Mountains” on a two-item list of things I vowed never to do again in my life. Thus began a journey that would take me to the summit of Denali, the highest mountain in North America, through thirty-eight states and Canada in six months, and end in a little place called Aspen, Colorado, elevation 7,890 feet.

  Day Two: Failing Options

  Desert dawn

  Rise up early, lift your song

  On the breath of life that rises from the

  Glowing stone

  Feel the rock of ages, smooth against your skin

  Smell the breath of flowers dancing on the wind Dancing on the wind.

  —STRING CHEESE INCIDENT,

  with lyricist Christina Callicott, “Desert Dawn”

  AS THE MORNING HEATS UP, I no longer have to unproductively hammer my knife into the rock just to stay warm. My aching grip cries out for a change of routine, so I leave the hacking and chipping for another time. Even without sleep, I feel an increased energy from the ambient light in the canyon. It boosts me in the same way that dawn has done when I’ve hiked through the night. Today, though, there is no end in sight. This isn’t a climb with a final pitch or an endurance hike that will be over after a set length of time. My struggle against the boulder is open-ended. I will be here until I solve this problem or I die.