by Aron Ralston
Excited and exhausted by the day, I sat at my truck and consulted my canyon guidebook about Negro Bill Canyon. A two-mile hike would take me into a natural bridge with the sixth longest span in the United States. I had enough time to drive around to the trailhead and jog in to the bridge before twilight, when the light would be best for photography.
In past excursions to Utah, I mountain-biked hundred-mile-long routes and traversed forty-mile-long canyons in a single day on foot. While I found the obvious physical challenge of these excursions an attraction in itself, I always carried my camera equipment to capture images of the Martian landscapes, surreal shapes, alluring colors, and hidden treasures of petroglyphs and kivas from cultures long disappeared. The hike in Negro Bill Canyon produced a half-dozen image sets from the streamside hiking route, as well as the natural bridge. My favorite was a picture of the azure skies and auburn desert walls reflected in a mirror-still pool surrounded by green reeds and grasses. While I was happy that I’d made the hike, my photographic appetite was only whetted. I wanted to get out to a slot canyon and see some petroglyphs.
I’d already identified the Robbers Roost area east of Hanksville for my Saturday adventure, but I hadn’t picked out a specific canyon. I wanted to position myself for the Saturday-night rendezvous, and the Roost was ideal—two hours from Moab and two hours from Goblin Valley. Since I wouldn’t be back in the vicinity of a grocery or convenience store for two days, I needed to stock up on water and food before I left civilization for the weekend. So I wouldn’t have to carry the entire guidebook with me, I photocopied the pages of three canyons in the Robbers Roost that offered the best opportunities for narrow slots and petroglyphs. Topping off my gas tank, I was ready for an extended desert foray. I left Moab in the late evening, driving north to the interstate. I set the cruise control and read through the canyon-guide photocopies. Piecing together two descriptions of adjoining canyons, I created a unique loop that would take me on a fifteen-mile bike ride from my truck at the Canyonlands National Park trailhead to the head of Blue John Canyon, through two narrow and deep slots, over a twenty-meter rappel, and out to the confluence with Horseshoe Canyon, past the petroglyph alcoves of the Great Gallery, finally returning to my vehicle. A thirty-mile day. I figured if I started by nine A.M., I would be out by five P.M.
At mile 162 on I-70, I exited for Green River, recognizing the sign warning travelers that the next available gas and food services were 110 miles to the west. I stopped at a convenience store in Green River and considered whether to call Brad and Leah for a final confirmation on the Goblin Valley party. Because of the late hour, I deferred the call, thinking I would get in touch the next afternoon from Hanksville. Brad would be getting up early in the morning to ski, and I didn’t want to wake them. I bought two bottles of Gatorade in the store and then made a lap up and down Green River’s main street until I found the Bureau of Land Management access road heading south out of town.
At the southwest edge of Green River, I pass the empty parking lot of a yellow aluminum-sided building, the Emery County sheriff’s office. After hooking a right on Airport Road, I drive under the interstate into a landscape of obscurity. Not a single light perforates the absolute blackness of the San Rafael Desert.
I drive over weeds growing obstinately in the unstriped and roughly paved road, wondering if their presence is a sign of the tenacity of life or of the laxness of county maintenance. Slowing at an intersection, I turn left onto the graded dirt road leading into the Roost. It’s just after ten P.M. A BLM sign indicates that the Horseshoe Canyon Trailhead is forty-seven miles ahead through the desert darkness. My truck obliterates a tumbling tumbleweed as I pass a yellow triangular sign cautioning, ROADS MAY BE IMPASSABLE DUE TO STORMS. I get the feeling I’m headed out into nowhere. Jackrabbits dart onto the road in my headlights, racing me, scurrying left then right, then heading straight down the road in front of my tires before dashing back into the hardscrabble badlands.
Cresting a swale at high speed, my headlights drop off into an arroyo, and I nearly follow the beams into the gully before I blindly swerve left and find the road cut again. The rear of my truck fishtails madly for the first of many times. Dozens of curves, swoops, and sandy washes try to catapult my truck off the road, but each time I correct my tack and make the save. I feel like I’m driving an off-road rally: skidding my tires through the corners, kicking up dust clouds, accelerating after the curves, launching over humps in the terrain. Stuff’s flying all over the place in my cab as the rock music on the stereo eggs me on. The road is like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I’m driving with my brights on to help me anticipate the curves hidden on the backside of the hilltops, but they barely help. I could slow down, except I’m averaging only 30 mph as it is, I’m tired, and I want to get to sleep before midnight.
I catch the distinct constellation of Perseus out my left window. Except in one ravine that I suspect is the waterless San Rafael River drainage, there are no trees and only scarce bunches of grass growing higher than a few inches. On occasion, I cross a fence line at a cattle guard—the bright yellow bars entrenched in the road have been recently painted, telling me that somebody still uses this land. Still, there are no lights to break the desolate spell that the night casts over the barren country. A beer bottle appears in the throw of my headlights; I don’t swerve to miss it. My front right wheel hits the neck of the bottle, and it jumps up, bumping the bottom of my truck. I think, “Hayduke has been here,” recalling the eco-protagonist of Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang, who protests the presence of roads by chucking his beer bottles at them.
Periodically, my truck hurtles over grooved sandstone slabs in the road tread, where county graders have scraped outcroppings flat. The graders have piled earthen banks along the roadsides, which block my headlights from reaching the desert floor. I fly over the edge of the next swale at 40 mph, to meet another curve in the road and slam my brakes hard. Dramatically reducing my speed just in time, I make the corner and shift from third into fourth on the next straightaway. I rev my truck obnoxiously through a skeletal forest of scrub bushes and rush through the night.
Another rabbit.
Another fence line.
Another curve.
Unexpectedly, a small brown sign flashes past me, pointing out the road spur to Horseshoe Canyon. I stop and reverse, then turn left down the significantly bumpier approach to the dirt parking area. There are three other vehicles and two encampments at the trailhead, despite the signs prohibiting camping in the parking area. I turn my truck around and find a flat spot near the sign board welcoming visitors to the Horseshoe Canyon quadrant of Canyonlands National Park. After organizing the splayed equipment in the bed of my truck, I roll out my sleeping bag and pad and call it a night. I drift off to sleep, thinking about the Blue John–Horseshoe circuit that I will undertake in the morning, the wind rocking my truck in the organic lullaby of canyon country.
Day Four: Out of Food and Water
I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe—what other choice was there?…We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself…believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing….
—LANCE ARMSTRONG, It’s Not About the Bike
DIFFUSE SUNLIGHT catches on the swirling undersides of thin clouds high above the Utah desert. “It’s gonna be a nice sunset,” I think from the bottom of the fissure. I hope that the clouds will stick around and help hold in the heat tonight. It’s early Monday evening. I’ve been awake for fifty-seven hours. I’ve been trapped for fifty hours. And I’ve had the same song stuck in my head for forty-three hours.
Like a radio wi
th the scan button permanently depressed, my restless and unrested mind expends its energy trolling for distraction, only to land on the same station again and again. The station has but one ten-second sample of one song. Over and over, always with the same lyric; “BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC5, BBC6, BBC7, BBC Heaven!” It’s not even a real song. I feel like the antagonist Dr. Evil, my plans foiled again. I’m left shaking my fist in the air—“Why won’t you leave me alone, Austin Powers? Why must you torment me?”
My fatigue has taken on the heavily drugged feel of an intense fever cooking my brain. I’ve fallen asleep in some odd places before—standing in front of a painting in a Paris museum; sitting at a 110-decibel Guns N’ Roses concert—but I’ve never felt this level of sleep deprivation. It’s like a disease breaking down my higher brain functions, pushing me closer to the line of irrationality. Maybe it’s best that I can’t sleep, lest I drift away into hypothermia. I can’t sleep, but neither am I fully awake—this mental miasma has put me well on my way toward madness.
I remember a time I felt almost this way, descending the east bowl of Mount Princeton in the dark with my endurance-training mentor Theresa Daus-Weber during our first annual fourteeners bender in September 2002. We linked seven high peaks in forty-eight hours of continuous hiking, and were into the second night of the sixty-mile, 25,000-vertical-feet climbing spree when my sleep-weary mind lost its grip on reality.
I scampered across a two-mile-wide slanting boulder field ahead of Theresa. We each had a headlamp and a hiking pole to help us traverse the unstable terrain in the dark. I frequently lost sight of her behind me, since the rock flutings that featured the mountainside stood in my line of sight. Stopping to wait around each corner, I would sit and fall asleep for a moment, waking within twenty or thirty seconds to the sound of Theresa’s trekking pole tapping the rocks in sync with her stride. I would see the light of her headlamp bob up in my face as she approached, and then I’d stand up without a word and scramble off over the next few dozen boulders until I couldn’t see her anymore, then stop to repeat the cycle. Tick, tick, tick, her pole lightly striking the boulders. Flash, her headlamp shooting into my eyes, blinding me to the fact there was a person behind the light. Another wordless encounter, boulders zipping underfoot in the throw of my headlamp, then blessed rest.
Despite an hour and a half of movement, it never seemed like I made any progress toward the far side of the bowl, where we would intercept an access road at about 12,000 feet. Something was wrong. After the tenth or twelfth or fifteenth time I had replicated the scramble-doze-wake-tick-flash-scramble pattern, a surreal tug of insanity gave me the idea that each time I fell asleep, it reset my position on the mountainside to the same point in the middle of the boulder field. My body was somehow being transported mysteriously back uphill during my twenty-second naps, and I was reliving the same sequence over and over again.
Another five cycles, and I was sure of it: I was trapped in time, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Somebody was doing this to me. Theresa. I convinced myself that she had put a spell on me. I was helpless against her; the only way I could break her control was by staying awake. No matter what, I couldn’t help myself—when I stopped to wait for her, I dozed off instantly. The delusional paranoia was so strong that it never occurred to me to check my watch, to talk with Theresa, to create some variety to the experience, or to slow down and walk at her pace, thereby eliminating my opportunities to fall asleep. What did occur to me was to memorize the rocks I stepped on. If I could prove to myself that I wasn’t stepping on the same rocks, that would be undeniable evidence that it was all in my head. Therein I found another problem: I couldn’t remember the rocks, not even the ones I would lie on to rest.
We continued the downward traverse with my mind stuck on an infinite playback loop of rocks. After two hours, we exited the boulder field, and I told Theresa about my delusions. She told me that hallucinations are a predictable part of sleep-deprived ultra-hiking. It was nearly twenty-four hours later when I arrived at my truck, some thirty miles away, and I put an end to my delirium with a well-deserved night’s sleep.
Back in the canyon, the only preoccupation that alleviates the ceaseless BBC torture is pondering the question of whether I should or shouldn’t drink my urine. That subject is enough to drive everything else far into the mental background. The issue of taste doesn’t really concern me; it’s going to taste like piss, no matter what. The consideration is whether the urine will prolong my survival or bring on my demise. I speculate that by this point, my urine has a considerably elevated salt content, but I can’t know if the salinity is greater than that already present in my blood. If my urine has fewer salts than my blood, then it won’t be a problem. But at a higher concentration, it would be like drinking salt water, essentially accelerating my dehydration. I wonder, too, if the toxins and other potentially harmful contents are present at dangerous levels. This is the stuff my body is trying to get rid of, and here, I’m going to put it back in.
Sitting in front of me at eye level on top of the chockstone, my translucent blue CamelBak reservoir makes the liter of brackish orange urine look brown in the dim evening light. In the four hours since I peed into the container, the urine has separated into stratified layers: a viscous brown soup on the bottom, a dingy orange fluid in the middle, a clear golden liquid on top. A half-inch-thick accretion of yellow-white sediment collects on the liner bottom; more and more of the dregs fall out of the solution as the urine cools. I prod the CamelBak with my finger, disturbing the solids. It reminds me of the yeast in the bottom of a bottle of home-brewed beer. Of course, it’s substantially less appealing.
Night falls again, presaged by the routine increase in the up-canyon breeze and another invasion of mosquitoes. Why are they so active just before dark, I wonder, and then say aloud, “And where the hell are they coming from?” There must be standing water someplace in the canyon—I didn’t pass any on the way here, but maybe at the bottom of the Big Drop rappel. I think I remember something in the guidebook. I check my map. The photocopy is wearing thin along the crease lines, but I can still read the marking that calls out a pool below the rappel. It’s probably a pothole, a remnant of the last rainfall, like the greenish slime on the south wall behind my feet. In fact, my map indicates that there should have been a pool in the upcanyon section, and another where I am, but they have obviously evaporated. I hope there’s some kind of water supply still available at the rappel. I bet it dries up in the summer and winter, but the slime, the mosquitoes, and the gritty residue on the walls make me think there is water now. That will be very important if I get out of here—it’s the only source for four miles, until Barrier Creek appears in the bottom of Horseshoe Canyon, just beyond the Great Gallery.
You’re not getting out of here, Aron. You’ll never see water again.
Dark.
Cold.
Stars.
Space.
Shivering.
I return to the pattern of fidgeting and rest that helped me through last night, but I can get only ten minutes of stillness from each cycle. It seems colder tonight, or perhaps I’m feeling the increased effects of starvation and dehydration on my body’s metabolic systems. With the certain deterioration I’ve suffered since my entrapment began, I assume my body is not generating as much heat. The deeper cold increases my compulsion to retain every bit of heat possible. What else can I do to insulate myself? Unplugged from the CD player, the headphones around my neck haven’t produced music for three days. I pull them over my ears all the same, like half-sized ear-muffs. When I tuck my head inside the rope bag, I shut the zipper until it slides into the skin of my neck. With the bag so tightly closed around my face, I hope to benefit from my breath’s warmth, letting it warm my head and preheat my next inhalation without taking me too close to the brink of suffocation.
Breath after breath fills the rope bag with moist air as I focus on exhaling against the waterproof liner. Instead of letting my breath dissipate into the
chilly night air, I try to recapture some of my body’s water content from the humidified exhalations. Using the rope bag like a breathing chamber seems like a sound theory, though I have no idea if it will help. I get the familiar sense that I’m prolonging the inevitable. After five or six minutes of breathing in the bag, the cold seeps up from my legs and arms into my core. Shuddering, I struggle to hold the position, sitting in my harness for another three or four minutes: left hand grabbing my right elbow, head nestled on my right biceps, knees bent into the rock shelf. But the shivers tear across me like attack dogs. I have to extract my head from the bag in order to fidget with the ropes around my legs and the coverings on my arms. I’m getting too efficient—rewrapping my leg coils takes only twenty minutes—and I have a more difficult time warming up between sit sessions. I don’t even bother to take up my knife and chip at the rock; I just suffer my misery and pray that I’ll live through the night.
Midnight. It’s now Tuesday, April 29. After hours of debating the issue with myself, I decide to take a sip of my urine. I still have nearly a half-cup of fresh water left, but I want to find out what the urine tastes like and whether I’ll be able to stomach it. With the CamelBak bite valve reattached to the tubing at the stub where I cut off the hose during my first attempt to fabricate a tourniquet, I suck two tablespoons of urine into my mouth and swallow it immediately. The night air has chilled it substantially from its initial 98 degree temperature, to maybe 60 degrees. The sharp saltiness is repugnantly tangy and bitter. My face wrinkles into a knot. Surprisingly, it’s not as horrible as it could be—I don’t gag or puke. My quagmire deepens. If the urine was so insufferably foul as to be undrinkable, I would have my answer—don’t drink it. But because it’s feasible that I could drink almost half of what I peed out before I get to the unfathomable brown filth, the question is still open. My thirst would have me drink two cups right now. That doesn’t seem like a good idea, though. I think I’ve heard of people undertaking some cleansing dietary program that encourages you to drink your urine, but I have to assume that you stay well hydrated at the same time. Maybe that memory is a figment—I can barely trust my brain with anything at this point—but clear pee would definitely be a better alternative than what I have available. In the end, I don’t know if I should drink any more of the urine, and there’s no way for me to accurately guess. I suspect it will be worth the gamble, but not yet. I’m going to keep sipping my water for the next twelve hours, until it runs out, and then I’ll think about drinking my urine again.
