Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  With two technical routes and three long-distance routes in four weeks—including skiing the northeast bowl of Snowmass Mountain, another Elk fourteener—I felt ready for the biggest challenge of my project: solo climbing Capitol Peak. In my experience, Capitol has the longest stretch of difficult climbing of all the fourteeners, as technical as Longs and Pyramid put together, and is as dangerous as the Maroon Bells (aka the Deadly Bells). But I knew the approach, I knew the snow conditions, and I was at the top of my fitness and acclimatization. The peak is known for the Knife Ridge; a hundred-yard-long ridge at 13,500 feet that drops fifteen hundred feet away to the east, down steeply corniced flutings that end high above the Pierre Lakes Basin, and twenty-five hundred feet down the west side to Capitol Lake. While the exposure gives the Knife Ridge its infamous reputation, the most arduous sections of climbing come after the ridge, on the upper pyramid of the peak.

  On February 7, 2003, I woke to sub-zero temperatures at my advance camp on the frozen rocky perimeter of Moon Lake. Ascending in the hyperborean conditions, I skinned on alpine-touring gear until the grade became too steep for my ski skins to hold on to the slope. Still below 13,000 feet, I removed my skis, mounting them on my backpack, and wallowed through bottomless powder, trenching six- and even eight-foot-deep troughs up the forty-degree snow slopes to the 13,600-foot-high subsidiary peak, locally known as K2. Stashing my skis at K2 in anticipation of the long powder-field descent, I continued across the Knife Ridge with crampons strapped to my randonée boots. Halfway across, I came to a disturbing section of the precipitous ridgeline, which was broadly corniced on the left-hand side. Due to prevailing westerly winds, snow had solidified in a cantilevered lip extending from the east side of the ridge.

  I had been straddling the apex of the ridge to move across it, but at the overhanging snow cornices, I had to add to my technique, moving forward now with my ice axe poised to latch on to the rock rib if I should tumble off my saddle position. While I was safely perched with my weight balanced on either side of the knife-blade ridge, the cornices continually broke away from under my left leg, vacating space in a startling silence. Each collapse jolted me onto the Knife Ridge’s edge under my crotch. An accompanying sense of airiness frightened me, as I knew without looking that coffee-table-sized sections of compacted snow were dropping from under my left buttock in muted free fall. I focused on the rhythm of placing my right crampon in a convenient crack on the west side of the ridge, then humping my body forward another six inches or a foot. Soon enough, I was across the Knife Ridge. Euphoric with the rush of having completed the daunting traverse, I pulled my digital camera out of my jacket for a self-portrait. The huge smile on my face said it all.

  I dug my way up the final five hundred feet. At twelve-forty-five P.M., I summited Capitol Peak and fulfilled a dream of five years. My entire project had been building to the day that brought me safely to the top of the mountain, my forty-third winter solo fourteener. It was the test piece of the project. With a second traverse of the Knife Ridge still to follow on the descent, I hustled off the high point after recording an exultant video and snapshot footage from the summit, and returned to my skis at the top of K2. As the day grew longer, I dropped into the freezer-box shadows of the upper mountain and had to periodically remove my gloves to knock ice from their linings. All the trenching and wallowing in the snow on the ascent had soaked the gloves and packed them with snow that quickly solidified into ice with the dropping afternoon temperatures.

  Skiing off K2, I worried less about my hands than the stability of the snow. The powder turns I laced down the face of K2 joined those first S’s of Mount Harvard on a short list of my favorite backcountry ski descents. By the time I arrived back at my Moon Lake campsite, however, I knew something wasn’t right with my hands—they wouldn’t warm up again, no matter what I tried. Holding them over my lit stove, I melted my liner gloves in the flame without feeling any warmth in my fingertips. Tearing the molten fabric off my hands, I saw for the first time the eggshell-white pallor of my fingers and thumbs. Not good.

  I hastened my departure from camp without preparing any food. I wasn’t so much afraid of frostbite; I accepted what had happened and wanted to minimize any further tissue damage. I had climbed a peak in a style that, over the course of the last thirty hours, had completely satisfied my yearnings for mountain experiences. That I had attained partial- and full-thickness frostbite on eight of my fingers, including both thumbs, was part of that adventure. While I didn’t understand the depth of the damage at the time, I put on a dry set of liner gloves and kept my barely functional hands protected from the cold for the seven-mile ski descent.

  When I arrived home in Aspen, instead of going to the hospital (which is what I should have done), I treated myself for the frostbite. To start with, I took four tablets of extra-strength pain-reducing medication to prepare me for the next part of the procedure. I waited a half hour for the pills to take effect, filled the kitchen sink with hot water, and experimented with how fast the steaming faucet had to run to maintain a consistent hot-tub temperature in the plugged washbasin. Standing alone, I held both my hands in the basin for an hour, watching my fingertips change from white to black, red, orange, and green, obscenely screaming out at the throbbing pain. At times I had to seize my right wrist with my left hand to keep from yanking it out of the water—it was more damaged and caused me more agony. My roommates were all out of the house, and our neighbors must have been gone, too, or they may well have notified the police of a murder in progress. Over the hour, I hoped again and again to see blisters form under the skin of my fingers. Blisters meant the underlying tissue would probably recover, though never fully regain its original circulation; whereas no blisters meant the cold damage was severe and I could lose portions of those fingers. One after another, excruciating blisters bubbled up at the end of each finger, back to the first knuckle on most of them. I was thankful for the fiery swelling.

  I subsequently decided I would take five weeks off from solo mountaineering, allowing my hands to heal from the frostbite, even though I had two peaks left in the Elk Range—the Maroon Bells. There was plenty to occupy me until my fingers grew new layers of protective skin: Phish was touring the West for the first time in three years; I had a hut trip planned with some friends from New Mexico; and there was lots of in-area telemark skiing to be done with my Aspen pals. But even this “downtime” wouldn’t be free of risk.

  Two weeks after my ascent of Capitol, I headed over to a mountain range just east of Mount of the Holy Cross to join six friends from the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and five of their relatives on an annual backcountry ski trip. This year’s destination was the Fowler-Hilliard Hut on Resolution Mountain above Camp Hale. We met in Leadville and divvied up food and drink loads to be carried in our packs to the hut. The 10th Mountain Division huts are named for the World War II ski infantry who fought the infamous Battle of Riva Ridge in Italy. Their main training camp for two years was Camp Hale, halfway between Leadville and Vail. Many of the war veterans returned to Colorado, where they helped propagate the postwar ski-area development boom with their passion for skiing and familiarity with the region. The ski areas of Breckenridge, Vail, and Aspen were some of the largest of the 10th Mountain veteran enterprises. While the backcountry huts weren’t established until the 1980s, they are dedicated to the memory of individuals whose love for country took them overseas to protect the freedom that I find most glorified in the mountains.

  After five hours plowing through two feet of fresh snow along the six-mile approach to the hut, we settled into our weekend home and ate gourmet appetizers of oysters, spicy hummus, clams, and kippered fish on crackers, and drank three rounds of hot cocoa and schnapps. Spying out the hut’s picture windows, I lusted to take some turns in the east bowl of Resolution Peak directly in front of the hut. When talk turned to action, two of my Mountain Rescue colleagues, Mark Beverly and Chadwick Spencer, joined me in buckling up our boots and preparing our avalanche
safety equipment for the short ascent.

  Our threesome skinned up to Resolution Peak on the wind-scoured northeast ridge, starting at 4:50 P.M. and summiting the 11,950-foot peak just after 5:15. Darkness was coming quickly, but while Mark and I waited for Chadwick to arrive, we took a five-minute break to survey the ridgeline of the Continental Divide to the east and the Eagle River watershed and Mount of the Holy Cross to the west. Beyond the White River National Forest, only thirty miles away (but a three-hour drive from the trailhead), was my home in Aspen. I recounted my solo winter ascent of Holy Cross for Mark, and the night ski off the 12,000-foot saddle when I’d seen the elk in the meadow. I also spoke of the hairball adventure I’d had with my emergency bivouac en route to the rock shelter and the contrasting triumph I’d felt at surmounting the Halo Ridge.

  Even though this was our first trip together, I knew Mark was one of the best climbers on our rescue team. I admired his technical climbing and rescue rigging skills, advanced medical training, and guiding experience. In sharing the details of one of my recent climbs, I think I was trying to impress him, as he had impressed me with his Canadian ice-climbing trips. He surprised me when he responded with an accepting but seemingly unmoved reply: “I can’t be excited for you, Aron. I don’t do climbs like that. But I think it’s great for you—as long as you’re happy.”

  “Yeah, I am. I’m living my dream.”

  Mark was saying that he didn’t aspire to do winter solos, and it seemed like he was making sure I was doing them for the right reasons—climbing not for bragging rights, or the perceived admiration of others, but because it made me happy. It was a subtle check that I had cleared in myself a long time back, but I was grateful for his reminder.

  Once Chadwick joined us, we posed for a group portrait with Elk Ridge behind us. Skiing off the rock-strewn summit, Mark led us back down the wind-packed ridge, a safe but unappealing ski descent because of the thin, icy snow. After I slipped and fell to avoid an exposed tree root, I called out to Mark: “Hey, this sucks! I’m gonna head over to the powder.” I had borrowed a set of new powder skis from the Ute in Aspen and was itching to try them out in the untracked bowl. It had been a year since I had first freed my heel and started telemark skiing. Chadwick had given me some of my first pointers on technique, and I was excited to show him how much I’d improved. Leaving the ridge, I skied out to my right onto the softer snow, which got deeper and deeper the farther I traversed across the top of the forty-degree bowl.

  Mark stopped slightly downhill from me on the ridge. Chadwick was behind me, traversing to the right, parallel and uphill from my tracks. None of us called out to dig a snow-study pit to check the snow stability and the likelihood of an avalanche, but I felt confident in the snowpack from having been out climbing and skiing the backcountry all winter. Success on the fourteener climbs and providential salvation from the string of close calls had bred in me a cavalier attitude toward the real avalanche danger. We spread out in the standard routine to expose one skier at a time to potential slide terrain. I arrived at the top of the lowest-angle fall line that started at thirty-eight degrees and eased off to about thirty-two degrees above a cluster of twenty fully grown pine trees.

  “I’m gonna ski here. Are you coming down?” I said to Chadwick, who was close enough that we could talk in normal tones. Mark was still a hundred yards away over on the ridge.

  “I don’t know. How are you going to get back to the hut? It looks like you’ll have to skin back out.”

  “I’m not going to go past those trees. I’ll stop there, then traverse back left to the hut.”

  Mark shouted over that he wasn’t going to ski the bowl. He’d go down the ridge. I yelled out, “Okay! Watch me!” to let my partners know I was dropping into the bowl. I felt a little nervous but didn’t pause to pinpoint whether it was about the avalanche danger or wanting to ski well in the deep powder. Moments later, as I took my first three sweeping turns, the sweet sensations of plowing through billowing snow replaced my timidity. I sped up and quickened my rhythm, popping shorter-radius turns on the lower-angled slope, and hooting as I passed the uppermost trees on my right. With another 1,500 vertical feet of the bowl below the trees luring me to keep skiing, only the fatigue in my legs made me stop. I turned and yelled back to Chadwick, three hundred vertical feet above me, “Yaaa-hooo! That was great! The snow is awesome! Come on down!”

  Lurching in the powder, Chadwick followed my tracks, falling twice on the steeper part near the top as Mark watched from the ridge. I had my camera out, taking pictures as Chadwick settled into the easier slope, matching his turns to my tracks. Breathing hard, Chadwick forced out his last turns and stopped next to me. “Wow, that was a lot of work. I could barely turn, the snow was so deep.”

  “Yeah, but it was great, huh? You looked good on that last part. I got a couple pictures of you. Check it out, how our tracks slink down like that. It’s like we’re heli-skiing.” I yelled up to Mark, “Come on—it’s great!”

  Chadwick and I stood at the edge of the trees, looking up to Mark traversing into the bowl just below our entry tracks, bouncing on his skis. He was ski-cutting the snow, trying to preemptively trigger a slide by simulating the impact of his weight as he compressed in a turn. Seemingly satisfied at the snow stability, Mark made three turns in the upper slope, fell, tumbled over, and stood up, still skiing but sitting back on his skis. He recovered and finished his run smiling. Exhausted, Mark plopped down into the snow about thirty feet from the trees instead of turning to a stop. A hollow whoomph escaped from the snow under Mark, and we each jumped through our skin—hearing the whoomph of collapsing snow often means you’ve triggered an avalanche. But the snow around us remained in place without fracturing. Relieved, Chadwick joked, “Did you hear that? Mark’s butt just whoomphed.”

  “Ha! Hey, Chadwick, drop forward on your knees—I want to get a picture of you in the snow.”

  A diesel engine—or maybe it was the whispered roar of a jet plane—sounded above us.

  As I lined up Chadwick in my viewfinder and depressed the shutter release, I noticed a swirling cloud of thick airborne spindrift over his head. Then the diesel rumble registered in my ears, and in the same fraction of a second that I realized the growling and the spin-drift were related, I was shoved hard from behind my right shoulder, lifted from my feet, and slammed downhill onto the slope on my left side. My world went black.

  Accelerating from zero to thirty as if a truck had hit me, I opened my eyes to a dense soup of white. I knew immediately that I was sliding downhill headfirst, buried in a teeming mass of snow, but several seconds passed before I understood that I was being carried away by an avalanche. I opened my mouth and sucked in a mist of snow that lined my throat, choking me. Spitting out the snow, I waited until I saw a patch of sky through the avalanche, then inhaled deeply and held my breath. I fought the pull of the current, trying to rotate my body to get my head uphill so I could swim against the roiling white flood, but my skis dragged through the accelerating debris, anchors shackling my feet above me. Relaxing to save my oxygen until another window opened in the suffocating tide, I silently wondered when my life would start flashing through my mind; fortunately, it never did. My next thought was “So this is what it’s like to be in an avalanche.” I was expecting to be rolled over in a terminal somersault, but I simply continued to slide on my left side. Several more seconds dragged on. I needed to breathe again. I waited for a chance, but there was no blue window this time. I gasped and filled my mouth with snow.

  Then I sensed the deceleration as the avalanche slowed, and I yanked my arms to get them above the snow. Because of the ski poles tethered to my wrists, only my right hand came up. It ripped free from my glove, with my forearm and elbow interred in the stiffening snow, like the rest of my inundated body. As I stopped sliding, I jerked my head up and thrust my hips forward, arching my back like a scorpion. I was peering down the hillside, eye level with the rubble. The thought struck me: “I’m alive!”

>   My torso heaved relentlessly for air. The asphyxiating conditions of the avalanche and a mouthful of compacted snow had starved my body of oxygen. Spitting out the snow, I continued to hyperventilate but managed to yell out, “I’m okay! I’m okay!” between overwrought gasps. The avalanched snow had promptly consolidated, encasing me in an unyielding cast that constricted my chest and held my body motionless except for my right hand and my head. Brushing away what little debris I could from in front of my face, I looked to my left and saw the hut; to my right, the hillside. Avalanche debris was everywhere, but I saw no sign of either of my partners. “Chadwick! Mark!”

  Above me, Chadwick screamed in response. “Aron! Mark!”

  I craned my head as far to the left as I could and caught a glimpse of Chadwick about a hundred feet upslope. “I’m okay! Are you okay? Where’s Mark?”

  “I don’t know!” Chadwick sounded scared, and the shouting wasn’t helping.

  “Are you free?”

  “Yes, not yet, I’m digging my feet out!” Chadwick had somersaulted in the avalanche several times, but landed on his feet and stood up as he came to a stop. He had already unclipped his shovel from his backpack and was excavating his boots and ski bindings as I continued to yell for Mark.

  “Chadwick, can you see anything of Mark?”

  “No!”

  My goggles, shovel, and camera were gone, torn off me during the tumult. My probe poles and right glove were gone, too, buried in the debris. I was hoping Mark might have lost some equipment and that a visible trail of gear would suggest his location, but neither of us could see any personal effects amid the debris field.