Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

People say that we’re searching for the meaning of life. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

  —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth

  THROUGH THE WINTER of 2003, I kept my immediate attention on the nine 14,000-foot mountains that I was climbing, week by week adjusting my energy to a new route on another challenging peak. They were ends in themselves, a series of intrinsically rewarding journeys, but they also provided a winter-long training regimen that prepared me well physically for my big trip to Denali. I knew from the Stray Dogs expedition in 2002 that the 20,320-foot mountain would demand everything I had to successfully attempt back-to-back climbs, including the sub-twenty-four-hour solo speed attempt and ski descent. Once winter was officially over, I closed the books on another tremendous season with my fourteener project and turned my focus to backcountry skiing.

  On an important trip that helped me regain some lost confidence in my avalanche awareness and hazard evaluation, I skied Mount Sopris near Carbondale in Colorado with Rick Inman, a friend and colleague from the Ute. We had a safe day skiing moderate slopes above the Thomas Lakes, steering clear of the steeper, more slide-prone slopes. It felt great to be free of my previous powder-hounding attitude that had gotten my friends and me in trouble on Resolution Mountain just a month earlier.

  In late March, Gareth Roberts and I would be competing in the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse, a forty-two-mile backcountry ski touring race from Crested Butte to Aspen. To scout the route, I went out on a solo circumnavigation of Star Peak near Aspen, a twenty-five-mile ski trek. Wanting to test the equipment I would use in the race, I picked up some special waxless metal-edged backcountry skis from the Ute in the morning and got a crack-o’-noon start from the Ashcroft Ski Touring Center. I made the eighteen miles over the three passes before dark, but I crossed over Pearl Pass at nightfall and found myself stranded in a whiteout. I skied about halfway across the prime avalanche terrain of Pearl Basin, taking care to avoid a dozen starting zones and slide paths, but turned myself around in a circle. How many times would it take for me to learn that my compass wasn’t lying to me? Lost above treeline in the dark in the middle of a storm, I decided my best option was to dig a snow cave.

  It took me three attempts to find a section of the snowpack that was wind-compacted and sufficiently deep to dig out a shelter at 12,000 feet. I sat in my burrow for five hours, poking my head out every twenty to thirty minutes to check for stars, mountaintops, a valley, or trees, anything that would help me navigate with my map. There were three valleys that I could end up in from my approximate position, two of which were densely packed with trail-less dark timber. I was better off waiting to determine my exact location and then find the valley with the road cut. At around three A.M., the storm cleared enough that I could pick out a peak a few hundred feet above me, and I was on my way, skiing through the fresh snow and keeping off the steeper slopes. Home at five A.M., I showered, napped, and got to work a few minutes late, apologizing for my tardiness to my manager, Brion After, with what I felt was an exceptional excuse.

  The race turned into quite the epic, with 40 percent of the teams dropping out due to bitter temperatures in the first half of the race and high winds in the second half. The cold and the storm caused serious frostbite in a dozen people, foiled attempts to stick skins on skis, broke equipment, and as my partner, Gareth, learned, froze water reservoirs solid. Not only were iced-up CamelBaks deadweight, but some competitors became dangerously dehydrated. A little under halfway through the race, Gareth and I were the last team to leave the Friends Hut checkpoint who successfully surmounted Star Pass before the turnaround time. We had raced through eight hours of negative-2-degree temperatures for eighteen miles to make the pass with two minutes to spare. Nine and a half hours later, we were the sixtieth team to finish the race, with only two other teams finishing after us (one pair of racers spent the night out when they inadvertently skied several miles off the course and couldn’t retrace their mistake until morning). Skiing down the face of Aspen Mountain to the cheers of Gareth’s wife and a dozen hearty race volunteers, Gareth and I dropped to our knees in free-heel telemark style just to show we were still having fun. We crossed the finish line to the flashes of cameras, bent our necks to receive our finisher medals, and smiled and laughed with chilled bottles of microbrew in our hands, feeling like we’d won the race. In actuality, the winning teams had finished over nine hours before us, enough time to have showered and gotten a full night’s rest before we tottered through the final timing gate. That’s probably why they all found their way to the awards ceremony, and we got lost and ended up celebrating on our own over burgers and beers at Little Annie’s.

  Two weeks later, I took a solo trip to Cathedral Peak and climbed and skied the east-facing gully on the south ridge. Once I’d finished the summertime fourteeners in 2001, I lowered my altitude bar and added another sixty peaks to my list, creating my version of what are known as the Centennial Peaks—the hundred highest peaks in Colorado, the Centennial State. I climbed fifty of those mountains in 2002, bringing my total to 109 of 119 summits above 13,800 feet. Cathedral was next on my list, and it became my 110th high summit in the state. From the top, I surveyed the length of Highland Ridge across the Conundrum Creek Valley. I was planning a traverse of the fifth-class eighteen-mile-long ridge for May, and I videotaped a scouting report to plan the trip.

  Skiing off Cathedral was the most extreme backcountry ski descent I’d ever pulled off; the five-hundred-foot-long, fifty-degree east gully was only ten feet wide for most of its length. Thankfully, the snow had softened in the bright sun, allowing me to link several dozen turns down the most technical section of the couloir and relax on the lower-angled apron. I skied out past the Pine Creek Cook-house at Ashcroft at three P.M., being one of the last people to see the unoccupied building before it caught on fire (due to a gas explosion) and burned to the ground forty-five minutes later. The fire engines blazing up Castle Creek Road puzzled me as I drove back into town, until I read in the paper the next morning what had happened.

  On April 17, I skinned into Conundrum Basin near Aspen. In the morning, I climbed Castleabra Point (my 111th of the Centennial Peaks) a 13,800-foot subsidiary summit of Castle Peak and skied in the basin until noon. The best part about climbing and skiing in Conundrum Basin is coming back to the 104-degree natural hot springs at 11,200 feet and stripping down for a soak while you’re still eight miles from your vehicle.

  The next day, one of my Denali teammates, Janet Lightburn, and I booted up the Cristo Couloir on Quandary Peak. I skied from the summit in drop-knee telemark style on alpine-touring gear, because one of my rear bindings broke. It was a 3,000-foot joyride that tested my skiing abilities as I concocted an unconventional mix of equipment and technique. I drove home to Aspen that evening, and since I didn’t have to be at work until one P.M. on Saturday, I went out for a run in the morning. Covering an off-road marathon of twenty-six miles, I ran from my house in Aspen over to Snowmass and back in just over three and a half hours, hurtling through hip-deep snow in two separate half-mile stretches. Then I worked an eight-hour shift. Reviewing everything I’d done in the last sixty hours—over fifty miles skied, hiked, and run, and 10,000 vertical feet gained—I felt primed for my Alaska trip. The fact that I was in the best physical condition of my life would play an unexpected role on my trip the next week.

  I had arranged to meet up with two friends of my climbing mentor Gary Scott. Dianne and Wolfgang Stiller wanted to climb the namesake Cross Couloir on Mount of the Holy Cross, a spectacular steep-walled gully route that ends at the 14,003-foot summit. We had planned two and a half days for the climb which had a significant ski approach of twelve miles. It would be our first outing together, and if things went well for us, we had bigger plans for Liberty Ridge on M
ount Rainier. However, another late-winter storm interrupted us the day before our departure, dropping eight inches of snow on the central mountains. As the avalanche hazard rose, we knew it would be much more risky to be in the narrow couloir, completely at the mountain’s mercy. A slide would rip our threesome off the slope into a one-thousand-foot-long blender of ice tools, rock walls, crampons, and snow pickets, then spit us over a cliff that intersected the couloir near the bottom. It wouldn’t be a question of if we would survive, but whether our families would be able to tell who was who after being sent through the couloir’s meat grinder.

  It was an easy decision. Dianne and Wolfgang were in complete agreement, and we planned to try again in June. They knew I’d arranged time off from the Ute specifically to make the trip in April, and they apologized. It didn’t bother me in the least.

  “Actually, my manager told me yesterday that I have off until Tuesday, so now I have a five-day vacation coming. I’m skinning up Mount Sopris tomorrow with a friend. I’ve been thinking about the desert a lot lately. I might head over to the Moab area for some time off from the mountains.”

  I’d learned the year before that when you spend the month of June in Alaska, camping on glaciers, digging snow fortresses, and climbing icy headwalls, your time to enjoy the typical warm-weather activities of summer is substantially shorter. Presented with the chance to go to Utah for four days, I hoped to get in some summertime fun before the season started. Dianne and Wolfgang wished me safe travels, and I thanked them for the call. I needed to finish getting my things packed—adding my mountain-biking and climbing gear and guidebooks for the time in Utah—and go to bed. My Aspen friend Brad Yule and I had arranged a three A.M. rendezvous for our Sopris trip, and I had to get some sleep.

  As I packed, Leona came home from an evening in town.

  “Where’re you headed off to this time?” She was happily tipsy from a few hours at the local bars.

  “I’m skiing Mount Sopris in the morning.”

  “And you need all that?” My storage containers of climbing and biking gear, sleeping bag, and backpacks were piled in the middle of the living room.

  “I’m going to Utah. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. My Holy Cross climbing trip was canceled.”

  “Oh, bummer.”

  “Ehh, not so much. I’ve been wanting to get out to the desert and warm up a little, you know? Do some mountain biking, hit some slot canyons. Brad told me about a party at Goblin Valley on Saturday. I might try to hit that, too. I guess a bunch of people from town are going out for an all-weekend rager.”

  The last of the Aspen ski areas had closed on Monday, officially signaling the off-season emigration of Aspenites to exotic lands around the globe. Residents don’t get out of the valley much during the busy season because of work and skiing—in fact, driving twenty miles to Basalt takes on the feel of a significant road trip. But from late April till the end of May, when the highway department opens Independence Pass, things get real slow in town, and people flock to the warmer climes of Mexico, Thailand, the Bahamas, and Utah. It was due time for me to join the droves, right after one more ski trip.

  Later that night, around four A.M., Brad bounced alongside me in the passenger seat as I busted my truck through two-foot-deep snowdrifts on the Mount Sopris access road. It was like a four-wheel-drive commercial, with snow shrapnel exploding from the wheel wells and the two of us grinning ear to ear. We were pleasantly surprised that we were able to drive all the way to the trailhead so early in the spring. Unloading our backcountry gear in the dark, we alternated trail-breaking duties up the four miles to the Thomas Lakes, the same area I’d been the month before with my friend Rick. Twilight broke over us at the frozen lower lake around five-thirty A.M., to reveal socked-in weather above treeline. Despite the weather and the increased slide potential from the previous day’s snowfall, I was much less nervous about being in the backcountry on this trip. I was prepared to turn back if avalanche conditions weren’t acceptable in the bowl, and I knew Brad would be, too.

  Sopris has the unusual attribute of twin summits about a half mile apart, each with exactly the same elevation of 12,995 feet. We ascertained a safe ascent route to the eastern peak and skinned up above the lakes to a steep north-facing ridge. Ten-foot visibility and thin snow cover on the upper mountain precluded a summit ski descent, so we stashed our snow-riding equipment (my skis and Brad’s split snowboard) at about 11,800 feet. Climbing into dense clouds, Brad and I lost our depth perception in the foggy blanket that turned ground and sky into a dingy white wall at the tips of our noses. We gave a wide berth to the precipitous cliffs on our right, which forced us to confront a cornice at 12,800 feet. I blindly led up the hard-packed snow, kicking toehold pockets into the wall with my telemark boots, the whiteout obscuring the top of the cornice. Brad had it tougher than me because he was climbing in his soft snowboard boots, but I lent him my ice axe, and he made fast work of the cornice. We reached the eastern summit together at eight-thirty A.M. I took a photo of us laughing at the frost plastered on Brad’s six-inch goatee.

  We returned to our skis and snowboard and, one at a time, rode the steep flank of the ridge down into the bowl, rejoining our ascent tracks. The new snow had bonded well to the older layers, and we decided that the bowl would be worth checking out. After digging a pit, we opted against skiing a gully formed by two rock outcroppings in the center of the basin, and chose instead to take a couple of laps up to the head of the bowl. With the clouds burning off in midmorning, we yo-yoed down and back up the slope, carving sweeping turns a quarter mile wide. For two hours, we painted the Thomas Lakes Bowl with the brushstrokes of skis and snowboard, lacing the mountainside before sitting down to share one of Brad’s Fruit Roll-Ups. It was apropos to enjoy a kid’s treat while we giggled at the good times we’d been blessed to have that day.

  Afternoon sunlight turned the snow to mush on our descent back to my truck. The day’s warming temperatures had turned the parking lot and the road to mud. My truck wheels slopped around in the tracks I’d made on our way in, threatening to pitch us off the narrow road and adding more excitement to the day. Almost past the last pit of slushy snow, a steering mistake bounced us out of the ruts, and I barely brought the vehicle to a stop before sliding sideways into the sodden forest. Brad speculated that my four-wheel drive wasn’t working correctly; otherwise, I would have been able to drive out of the predicament. As it was, soft mud and snow on top of thick ice left us stranded, tires spinning, for an hour and a half until—thank God for cell phones—Brad’s girlfriend, Leah, arrived with a tow rope. We put my chains on Brad’s tires, hooked up the tow rope, and, gunning our engines simultaneously, freed my truck.

  With a plan for me to call Brad’s cell phone on Saturday to get final directions to the Goblin Valley party, Brad and Leah left for Silverton over McClure Pass, and I drove down to Glenwood Springs, westward-bound. I drove three hours down the highway, reading in my canyoneering guidebook about the slot canyons near Moab and Green River. I pondered the possible itineraries and figured that I’d go mountain biking in the morning on the Slick Rock Trail down by Moab, then go for a canyon hike on Saturday that would put me in range of the desert party at Goblin Valley. Five miles along I-70 past Thompson Springs, Utah, I pulled off the interstate at a large rest area and backed my truck up into the darkest parking spot between two sixty-foot-high light poles illuminating the half-dozen landscaped mesquite trees near the picnic shelters. I laid out my sleeping bag in the bed of my pickup and crawled in, with just enough sense left in me to take out my contacts before falling into a well-earned sleep.

  Friday morning, I drove the thirty miles south into Moab for an all-day mountain-biking excursion on the Slick Rock Trail. Slick Rock is one of Utah’s most popular biking trails because of its twelve miles of technical sandstone challenges with only a few sand traps; its numerous viewpoints with expansive vistas of the Colorado River canyons; and its proximity to the center of Moab. I laughed at the sight of m
y truck in the bike trailhead parking lot, with skis on the roof rack and not a snowflake to be seen for fifty miles.

  Heading out on my own, I soon caught up to a group of four proficient bikers and tailed them through the warm-up problems. Shortly thereafter, they ascended a technical challenge that was beyond my ability. Running headlong into a ten-foot-high slab of seemingly vertical rock, I toppled off the side of my bike, clipping out of my pedals in time to avoid a humiliating spill. It was my first time riding sandstone, and I found out how much I had to learn as the first dozen problems harder than a six out of ten on the local scale of difficulty thwarted me. Thankfully, each time, I safely escaped my bucking bike.

  I focused on developing my skills, tackling some problems three and four times each to get them right. Mimicking some of the better bikers’ techniques on a steep fifty-foot-high sandstone dome, I stood up on my pedals and thrust my weight all the way over my handlebars, compressing the shock on my front fork. I couldn’t believe my tires didn’t skid out and force yet another abortive dismount. Cranking hard in my lowest gear, I hammered my way up the sandstone, knowing that a slip would plant my crotch squarely on the bent neck of my handlebars. Gasping for oxygen, I felt my momentum dissipate as my legs screamed in fury, but I pumped out the last few revolutions and collapsed in my seat at the top of the dome.

  By mile eight, I was able to cleanly ride the sixes, sevens, and even an eight without coming out of my toe clips. Predictably, right as I was getting confident with my riding, I got a full-on ego check in the return portion of the loop when I descended into a sand trap with my weight too far forward. I blinked, and the next time I opened my eyes, I was flat on my belly, nose deep in the sand. My bike was piled on top of my legs, back, and neck, with the handlebar pressing my head down. I squirmed and wriggled, but my legs were twisted up behind my butt, with my right foot still attached to the pedal of the upturned bike. I’d been pinned by a two-wheeled wrestling champion in a startling takedown. The airburst of my laugh blew sand up around my face, pasting grit onto my sweaty cheeks. I couldn’t decide if I was more relieved that no one had seen my over-the-handlebars wreck, or disappointed that there was no one to laugh with me at my utter discombobulation. Back at the beginning of the circuit, I re-attempted the problem that had first ejected me and cleaned it in front of a group of other bikers who had all dismounted to walk up the slab.