Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  “Switch your beacon to search and come dig me out. We’ll need both of us to find Mark,” I shouted. Protocol might suggest that Chadwick should try to find Mark by himself, but I couldn’t unbury myself enough to get to my beacon and switch it to search mode. Until I could do that, Chadwick’s beacon would be receiving my transmission on top of Mark’s, making it difficult to pinpoint him.

  Within two more minutes, Chadwick was at my side, digging out my left hand. “Stay with me, Aron!” Chadwick was very emotionally shaken. I reassured him that I was okay and directed him to dig at my legs and then to free my boots from the ski bindings.

  Rolling out of my hole, I stood up and saw the extent of the vast slide. It hushed my voice. “Oh my God, Chadwick. Look at it.” Five hundred vertical feet above us, a gargantuan fracture cut across the top of the bowl, as high as a two-story house on the right. Blocks the size of refrigerators littered the mountainside; a few monstrous chunks were as big as railroad cars. At first glance, the slide looked to be several hundred feet from side to side. Then I saw how it continued to the left, behind the island of trees where we’d been blindsided, arcing almost a half mile to the far southeastern ridge. Untold thousands of tons of snow had crashed down the hillside. My knees weakened at the scale of the avalanche. That two of us were coherently mobilizing a rescue, after a slide of this magnitude had swept us two city blocks down the mountain, was almost unimaginable. But where was Mark?

  Chadwick was still surveying the bowl when I ran down to a terrace in the hill thirty feet below us. The rollover blocked our view of the lower snowfields. At the edge, I scanned the debris for any visual clues, but there were none—the avalanche had swept down the bowl another thousand feet below our position, all the way to the creek. With my beacon set to search mode, I frantically wished for a signal, but there was no feedback on the display. I shouted back to Chadwick, who had started moving to the right and was over a hundred feet away from me. “What’s your range?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Switch your beacon to transmit.” I wanted to identify how far apart we could be and positively pick up a transmission. With Chadwick transmitting and my beacon receiving, we could establish our working range.

  “Do you get me?” he yelled. I could hear the desperation in both our voices.

  “Not yet—come back toward me now.”

  “Okay! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

  “There; thirty-eight!” My beacon had picked up Chadwick’s frequency at thirty-eight meters. “Switch back to search!” We had a range of just over a hundred feet and a slide path over two-thousand-feet wide. If we could trust our beacons to consistently perform at the working range with a minimum overlap in our search pattern, it would take us five trips up and down the length of the slide zone to cover the whole debris field. But there was no time for that.

  Think, Aron. Think.

  “Chadwick! We were together at the top. Look where you and I ended up. We’re in line. Mark should be in that same line. Is he above us or below us?”

  Chadwick didn’t respond. I ran back over to the edge of the rollover and double-checked the lower mountain. The vast majority of people who survive being buried in an avalanche are found within the first fifteen minutes; after a half hour, the chances of a successful resuscitation are negligible. We didn’t have time to go down and up. It was one or the other. I shouted, “I’ve got nothing—no clues down here. He’s above us! Let’s go!” I wasn’t certain by any means, but we had to make a choice. If he was still alive, any indecision on our part would kill Mark in another few minutes.

  With a hundred feet between us, Chadwick and I marched quickly up the slope toward another terrain roll fifty feet above. Chadwick had come to a stop. To my right, he blurted out, “Forty-eight! I’ve got a hit!”

  Mark! We pushed harder, thighs burning, lungs stinging, legs sinking, stumbling in the debris. Mark! No time to catch a breath. I crested the rollover, and my beacon lit up—38, 37, 34…28…24. I was closing in. Then I saw a small object, a ski tip. I could discern the K2 insignia.

  “I’ve got him! I see a ski tip!” With more ground to cover than me, Chadwick had slowed in the debris, falling farther and farther behind. I shouted out, “Mark! We’re coming!”

  Chadwick shouted, “Aron, take the shovel!”

  I was close. 18…15…I couldn’t turn back to get the shovel. “No! Get your ass up here!” As I charged toward the ski tip, my beacon beeped faster and at a higher tone, like a detonator about to explode. 11…8…4…Over the insistent shrill, I heard a weak moan, then another.

  “Mark, I’m here!” I traced back five feet from the ski tip and lifted a briefcase-sized block of snow from the source of the moaning. A tangle of yellow hair and a red piece of cloth protruded from a pile of cementlike snow.

  “Mark! Can you hear me?” Mark couldn’t spare the time it would take me to be delicate with my next task. I roughly knocked his head several times while brushing the snow away from his face, quickly clearing a breathing space. When I moved the red glove bunched up in front of his mouth; Mark’s leaden skin tone arrested my action. I was staring into the ashen face of an entombed ghost. Of the four dead people I’ve seen in my life, all had more color than Mark did at that moment.

  I cocked Mark’s head up and fished the icy blockage out of his mouth. It had been twelve minutes since the avalanche stopped, and Mark had been without adequate oxygen for most of that time. He was still alive but at the lowest level of alertness. I was relieved when he responded to my questions, but all he could tell me was that he was cold and tired.

  I jumped up from my crouch and ran halfway to Chadwick, who threw the shovel to me. Catching it in the air, I turned and raced back to Mark. With his airway clear and him still breathing on his own, my next concern for Mark was his body temperature. Hypothermia could pull Mark from consciousness at any moment and shut down his breathing. I dug first at Mark’s partially exposed left arm, then at his back and left leg, calling out my finds as I made slow progress. Mark was buried more deeply than I had been. Chadwick arrived and talked to Mark as I dug feverishly, scooping snow downhill. I needed help to move all the heavy snow. After exposing Mark’s backpack, I unfastened his shovel and tossed it in front of Chadwick. “Help me dig!”

  “I can’t. My hands are frozen. I can’t hold on to anything.” Chadwick had lost both his gloves in the avalanche, and the combination of excavating me and then clawing up through the debris field had rendered his hands unusable. I had only my left glove and liner. Tearing off the outer shell, I gave it to Chadwick against his protests: “My hands are gone—save yours!”

  “Take it! Turn it inside out and put it on your right hand. I need your help digging.” Next I yanked off Mark’s gloves, gave Chadwick the left one, and took the right one myself.

  For the first time, I saw movement over at the hut, nearly a third of a mile across the mountainside to our right as we looked uphill. I cupped my hands and shouted at the top of my lungs to the people I could see milling around outside: “HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP!”

  Faintly, I heard a voice reply, “We’re coming!” Rescue was on its way, but Mark couldn’t stave off hypothermia unless we could get him out of the snow and wrapped in more insulating layers. We swung the shovels, throwing snow, clanging the blades against each other. Chadwick missed the snow entirely on two consecutive attempts.

  “Chadwick, slow down. You’re not even hitting the snow.” He was panicking; we were falling behind. “Here, start high and scoop the snow down—it’s easier than shoveling uphill.” Even with both of us toiling, Mark was slipping away. He had been repeating that he was very cold and very tired, and then about a minute of quiet passed.

  Chadwick checked Mark’s head again. “He’s not breathing.” With two rescue breaths from Chadwick, Mark resuscitated. I extracted Mark’s left boot from the telemark binding and leash. Five minutes and forty cubic feet of snow later, we disinterred Mark’s right leg from its encasement. />
  “HELP! HELP! HELP!” We shouted together to our friends at the edge of the debris field. We had done as much as we could, and we needed supplies to get Mark warmed up. Exhausted from the half-hour rescue effort and not realizing the precautions our friends were taking to ensure that they were not swept up by a secondary avalanche, I muttered in exasperation, “What’s taking them so long?”

  We rolled Mark onto his left side and sat him up. He lurched back and belched out the air Chadwick had blown into his belly—the rescue breaths had been partially diverted from Mark’s lungs because of his head’s forward position. Smothering his back and sides with our bodies, we removed Mark’s pack and rooted through it for gloves and clothes. Shuddering with the aftermath of adrenaline, Chadwick and I hugged Mark and each other in a seated embrace. We smelled the raw halitosis of fear, mixed with the odors of oysters, clams, fish, and spicy hummus appetizers. Confident of Mark’s survival, we broke into a gale of nervous laughter laced with relief that we were all out and stable with help arriving in minutes.

  One after another, the other four members of the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue team who were with us on the trip—Steve Patchett, Tom Wright, Dan Hadlich, and Julia Stephens—skied over to the pit where we were huddled as darkness consumed the mountainside, carrying with them a down sleeping bag, a foam pad, gloves, and headlamps. We wrapped Mark in the down bag, and by the time Chadwick and I had retrieved our skis and what little of our other equipment we could find in the debris, Mark was up and mobile. It was a tribute to his strength and drive that in thirty minutes, he had gone from losing consciousness to skiing back to the hut under his own power.

  We had a solemn dinner back at the hut, retelling details of the evening. Several of our friends had seen the avalanche and knew right away we were in trouble. They had gone from cooking dinner in their long underwear and socks to being fully prepared for a prolonged rescue effort and arriving safely on-scene in a half hour—a phenomenal performance. Chadwick had held himself together even through the terrifying stress of rescuing both his partners. I was proud of his fast action, and of Mark’s resilience. While we had each decided to ski that slope, I felt guilty about my own decisions: decisions based on ego, attitude, overconfidence, and ambition, which overrode the combined training and experience of our group. We had survived a Grade 5 avalanche—as big as they get in Colorado. We had survived something we shouldn’t have survived. We had survived, but Mark and Chadwick blamed me for pressuring them to ski the bowl. I lost two friends that Sunday because of the choices we made; Mark and Chadwick left the next morning, and they haven’t spoken to me since.

  Rather than regret those choices, I swore to myself that I would learn from their consequences. Most simply, I came to understand that my attitudes were not intrinsically safe. Without fully evaluating a decision for potential danger—i.e., when I had made a decision in which attitude overruled a complete understanding and mitigation of risk—I was playing the odds. I recalled an avalanche instructor’s advice: “When you play the odds, you have to be able to survive not beating them.” After the Resolution Bowl avalanche, I found it easier to let go of the ego and attitude that otherwise pushed me to risk more than I was comfortable with, or rushed my decision-making, causing me to skip critical steps of gathering and evaluating information. Discomfort with elevated risks was not a weakness to overcome, but a signal for me to process a decision until I could either move forward safely or choose to come back another day.

  Warm weather and more storms over the next three weeks caused a rash of natural avalanche activity that diminished the likelihood of my final project for the winter—climbing the Maroon Bells, the postcard-perfect candy-striped twin pyramids that decorate calendars as the most photographed of Colorado’s mountains. Every face and gully of both peaks is subject to extreme avalanche hazard. There is no low-risk route; the only way I would be able to attempt the peaks would be under stable snowpack conditions. By early March, time was running out on my winter season.

  Due to my climbs through the winter, the March 15 Aspen Times Weekly newspaper was running a substantial article on my ascent of Capitol Peak and the Resolution Bowl avalanche. For pictures to accompany the article, I hiked out onto Highland Ridge with Dan Bayer, a photographer friend of mine. We had a bluebird day with unobstructed views of the Maroon Bells. I had said in an interview that I didn’t think conditions would permit an attempt on the Bells before winter was up. But what I saw during the photo shoot led me to reconsider my chances. From 12,000 feet on Highland Ridge, I could see that the major snow chute splitting the east face of the two peaks—the Bell Cord Couloir—had avalanched repeatedly. Sometimes the safest routes to climb are the ones that have already released. Speculating that with continued warm weather, calm winds, and no more snow, the couloir would remain consolidated from the previously run-out slides, I planned an overnight trip for two days later.

  On the day the Aspen Times Weekly cover article ran—entitled “For Whom the Bells Toll”—I skied in my randonée boots the nine miles up from the Maroon Creek road closure to 10,200 feet at Crater Lake. Directly below the Bell Cord Couloir, I crossed a half-mile-wide zone of hardened avalanche debris, the evidence of a weeklong cycle of intense avalanche activity. By one-thirty P.M., I had reached the area where I would camp and was scanning the trees past the edge of the debris for a protected campsite when a thousand-foot-long plume of snow came cascading over the lower cliffs of the East Buttress of South Maroon Peak, less than a quarter mile in front of me. On the quick draw with my camera, I took a series of pictures as the avalanche overwhelmed the forest in a cloud that rose five hundred feet off the valley floor. The sound waves hit me on a time delay. Splintering crashes punctuated the bellowing growl of the snow as it pounced from the upper cliffs onto eighty-foot-tall trees that snapped under the devastating momentum. Avalanches can travel at speeds around 100 mph, with a density four times that of air because of the suspended snow, which hits with the energy of a 400-mph wind. The pines and firs didn’t have a chance. Nor would I.

  As puffs of crystalline snow drifted through the valley, I chose a campsite in the trees at the farthest edge of the older debris and formulated a plan for my ascent. Avalanche threat for the couloir itself was minimal due to prior releases, but both faces empty out into the common trough. Sun exposure on the nearly vertical rock and snow faces on either side of the fifty-degree Bell Cord would put me at the greatest risk. The left face would get sun from first light until about noon, while the right face would get sun until late afternoon. Due to its longer sun exposure and more southerly aspect, the right face had already lost most of its snow and was less of a concern than the left one. I read the mountain and understood that the risk would be lowest before sunrise and just after the left face went into shadow around noon. Later in the afternoon, the right face would begin sliding, just as it did three times while I sat in my tent and prepared soup for an early dinner.

  At three in the morning, I awoke and put on my cold-weather clothes, gathered my water and food, kicked my feet into my boots, and strapped on my crampons. After a quick bowl of oatmeal and protein powder, I was moving up the debris field by three-thirty A.M.

  Within an hour, I was in trouble. While making my observations the afternoon before, I’d spotted a steep shortcut directly up a narrow gully. The gully would eliminate a wide traverse to the right in less consolidated snow, allowing me to enter the Bell Cord Couloir proper at 11,200 feet. Climbing on my front points in the isolated bubble of my headlamp, I was halfway up the gully when a bowling ball of ice came shooting out of the inky heavens down the tightly walled corridor and whizzed past my head. It fell with such velocity that I caught only the flash of it in my headlamp. Terror chilled my blood, but I climbed on, hoping that the twenty-pound ice cube didn’t have any friends. A few minutes later, however, another block hurtled past my right shoulder, also at high speed, and smashed into the right wall of the gully. I had to get out of the shooting gallery as fast as I
could. Climbing out the top was the best option, as the blocks seemed to be leaping over a ledge that would provide cover until I left the confinement of the rock walls. The gully became steeper as I neared the top, and then my ice axe hit solid ice below the Styrofoam snow. I looked up at a forty-foot-high sheer frozen waterfall that spanned the gully wall-to-wall.

  What the…? Where did that come from? Why didn’t I see this before? Can I climb it? Should I go down?

  I didn’t want to risk descending the gully—I had no idea if the bombardment was over or not—and I couldn’t afford to lose the time it would take to reascend the snowy ramps. I needed to be at 13,600 feet by the time sunlight hit the mountain faces in two hours, and I wouldn’t make it if I had to give up a half hour of backtracking. If I wanted a shot at doing the climb today, I would have to climb this curtain of water ice with a single ice axe and general mountaineering crampons—not my preferred ice-climbing equipment. The crampon points on my right foot bit into the frozen glaze of the waterfall, and I swung my long-handled axe in my right hand like a shorter ice-climbing tool, until it sank to the third tooth on the pick. Finger-width cracks, shallow ledges, and inset footholds populated the rock wall on my left. Forming a right angle with the ice, the rock wall on my left allowed me to make stemming maneuvers; using counterpressure, I could more confidently bear down on the crampon points of my right foot, where they were embedded in the ice. I surmounted two ten-foot steps in the rock using this basic technique. Trying to ignore the deathly void behind me, I continued another ten feet and ran out of ice on my right side. I was almost at the top, but now there was a small patch of frozen tundra exposed by the avalanches that had coursed through the gully. A two-inch-tall horizontal crack gave me a decent left foothold where the flat front points of my crampons could balance. My right foot could still puncture the icefall in a straight-legged stem, but the rock wall faded back from my left hand, leaving me without good holds for either hand. I was stuck.