by Aron Ralston
The boy happily perches on my right shoulder, holding my arms in his little hands while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully as we twirl together. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I’m back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind, creating a subconscious reassurance that somehow I will survive this entrapment. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.
That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.
Twelve
Firestorm
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
BY NINE A.M. on Wednesday, April 30, my twenty-four hours were up. Brion After walked across the sales floor at the Ute Mountaineer, brooding: “Where the hell is he?” He paced among the racks of skiwear, snowshoes, and camping supplies, his concern mounting. My shift had started at nine o’clock, and for the second day in a row, I hadn’t shown up or called. At nine-fifteen A.M., Brion looked at his watch and decided he had waited long enough. He went upstairs to the office. First he called the house on Spruce Street to check if I’d come home yet, but no one answered. Brion knew what he needed to do next, but he was interrupted by Leona’s phone call from Boulder.
“Did he come in?” Leona’s directness barely disguised her fear. Despite her effort to keep herself collected, her voice wavered. She was taking an emotional brunt from my disappearance, and it had worn on her through her first night back in the Front Range.
“No, he’s not here. He was supposed to start twenty minutes ago, at nine.” Brion’s anxiety over my whereabouts was straining his voice. “He’s so diligent, I know something’s really going on.”
Leona was also certain something was wrong. “This has gone on long enough. We need to get his parents involved.”
“I was just thinking about that. There’s an outside chance that he called them to tell them what’s going on. Would you mind calling them? I need to get the shop ready to open here in the next half hour.”
It was more than Brion’s sense of duty to the Ute that motivated him to ask for Leona’s assistance. Neither he nor Leona wanted to be the person to tell my mother and father that their son had gone missing and was most likely in a lot of trouble. Leona found a way to avoid the messenger’s job. “I don’t have their number. But you do, Brion.”
“I do? Where?”
“In his paperwork. I bet you he put his parents as his emergency contact on his application. Do you have his file?”
“Oh. Yeah, just a second…it’s in my drawer…here.” Brion pulled my manila employment folder from his file drawer and flipped the cover open. There, on top of the thin stack, was my employment application, with my parents’ names and phone number, as Leona had predicted.
At nine-thirty A.M., Brion called my parents’ house in Denver. My dad was in New York, leading a group on the fourth day of their tour of the city. My mom was just back from an errand to the post office and was sitting in her upstairs office, in the room I’d used as my bedroom until I went to college and my parents converted it for my mom’s management consulting business. She answered the home line with a smiling greeting: “Hello, this is Donna.”
“Donna, hi. This is Brion After calling from the Ute Mountaineer in Aspen. I’m Aron’s manager.”
“Oh, yes, good morning, Brion. How are you?” My mom had met Brion the week before on her trip to Aspen to visit me.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Brion replied. Knowing that he was about to unload a tremendous bomb on my mom, he hesitated, then let the words drop. “I was calling to find out if you know where Aron is.” After pausing, Brion continued, “He hasn’t come in for work in two days. He hasn’t called, and no one has seen him in almost a week.”
Brion’s words left my mom shell-shocked. She sat in her swivel chair silently absorbing the significance of what he had told her. It was finally that horrendous day she had hoped would never come.
Brion knew that the hushed phone line meant she hadn’t heard from me, but he had no idea if she was going to start crying, get upset, or explode. It relieved him when she firmly asked, “You realize what this means?”
Brion said, “We think something has happened.”
“Yes. The kinds of things he does are very dangerous, and he goes out by himself a lot. He wouldn’t miss work without calling in if he could. Something terrible has happened. We have to find out where he is. What have you done? Have you talked with his roommates?”
Brion was impressed at my mom’s response and instantly felt some of the psychological weight of responsibility lift from his mind. He had found the ally he needed to move forward with the search, and quickly brought my mom up to speed on the developing situation.
My mom thought it was odd that I hadn’t told my roommates about my plans, but it didn’t completely surprise her. She had coached me during my early seasons of winter climbing to always leave a note on my desk at Intel, or with one of my friends, so that someone would know where I was. At first I left notes on the dash of my vehicle at the snowed-in trailheads, but once I started visiting more and more remote areas, I realized I needed a better system. It could be weeks if not months before someone would happen upon my vehicle at a given trailhead, so I followed my mom’s suggestions and made it a habit to tell at least one person about my plans. One winter climbing season, in 2000–2001, I had called my mom before and after each fourteener I attempted, but she didn’t much like hearing the details of my hair-raising adventures, so I went back to leaving word with my friends.
Terrified about what might have befallen me, my mom struggled to concentrate on what they should be doing. Pushing aside the fear that gnawed in her gut, she was able to carry on with her discussion with Brion: “Have you talked with the police yet?”
“No, I haven’t. I was going to do that next.”
Never having been trained in search and rescue, my mom knew very little about missing person’s reports. She was uncertain about what the police would need to get the search going, but she understood emphatically that was what needed to be done. Speaking almost more to herself than to Brion, my mom said, “Missing person’s reports have to be filed in the jurisdiction where the person lives, I know that much, so it should be with the Aspen police. I’m not really sure what the process is, whether the county sheriff needs to be involved, but they’ll know what to do next. Will you go to them and file the report?”
Brion agreed. “I’ll call them right now and call you back as soon as I’m done.”
“Thank you, Brion. I have to go.” My mom’s world was caving in around her. She immediately phoned her longtime friend Michelle Kiel, who was coming over later that morning to discuss plans for the neighborhood garden club, and asked her to come right away and hurry. “Aron is missing,” she stammered.
Minutes later, Michelle opened the front screen door to find my mom involuntarily rocking back and forth on a stool at the kitchen counter, clutching her heaving stomach and sobbing in grief-stricken terror. My mom’s wail overwhelmed them both. They hugged for several minutes, crying together, and then my mom drew on her own courage and Michelle’s comforting presence to gather herself and start talking through the options of who might know something about my plans.
For my mom, this was the most emotion-wrought hour of her life, all the unspeakable what-ifs floating through her mind one after the other, but still she managed to reason through the puzzle. “He’s usually very good about telling someone where he’s going. If he didn’t say anything to his roommates, or leave a note there at the shop, I don’t know. Maybe he wrote an e-mail to somebody, telling them what he was going to do.”
Michelle’s face lit up. “We could check that. Does he have Internet e-mail, like Yahoo! or Hotmail or something?”
“I know he has a Hotmail address
. Why?”
“Do you know his password?”
“No, I have no idea.”
“We can go online and see what we can do.” Michelle knew that at the least, they could try resetting my password, accessing my files, and seeing what my friends and I had written about most recently.
At the account log-in page, Michelle pointed out the link that suggested, “Forgot your password?” They encountered a screen requesting my e-mail address, home state, and zip code. My mom ran downstairs and pulled out her address book. Back at the computer, she and Michelle tried entering my Aspen zip code but were denied access.
Stumped for twenty minutes, my mom tried using the zip code for her house before she remembered that I’d set up my e-mail account when I was still living in New Mexico. Checking her address book again, she typed in my old Albuquerque zip code, and the site finally responded with the password reset page, asking, “High school?” My mom exclaimed, “Oh—I know the answer to that! Maybe this will work.” However, because the site demands that the spelling match the preregistered answer perfectly, the two amateur hackers had to blindly come up with the exact combination of abbreviations I’d used. Time and again, the site replied in bold red type, “Please type the correct answer to your secret question.” So close and yet so far. Michelle and my mom were guessing at variations on my high school’s name when the phone rang.
Back at the Ute, events snowballed after the first conversation with my mom. Brion called Adam Crider with the Aspen Police Department just after ten A.M. and reported me missing. He explained that I had gone on a weekend trip and hadn’t returned for a party on April 28, and that I’d subsequently missed two days of work without calling. Adam began filing the report, noting that Brion was “very concerned,” and logged the statement into the department’s Law Incident Table at 10:27 A.M. Adam asked Brion to keep compiling information on where I might have gone, and said that he would stop by the Ute in a few minutes to see what Brion had collected.
At 10:19 A.M., Brion called Elliott, who was alone at our house on Spruce Street, to have him look for anything that might indicate where I’d gone. Brion explained that he’d filed a missing person’s report and needed some more specific information about where I had been headed that past weekend. Brion was especially keen on finding out anything related to my Alaska expedition. He told Elliott, “I need your help. Somebody said Aron was supposed to be meeting his Denali team for a training climb. Can you check around in his room for anything that says who they are?”
“Yeah, sure.” Elliott wasn’t in any rush with his cleaning, moving, and unpacking. He didn’t have a job to go to, since he’d left his mechanic’s position at a local bike shop. He walked into my bedroom, off the living area, and looked for paperwork. He found it in abundance, but the first thing that caught his eye was a stack on one of my shelves with travel itineraries and folded photocopies of maps. While the stack looked promising at first, Elliott quickly determined from the water wrinkles and worn-through folds that they were all from past trips, most of which he’d heard about from me during his frequent visits to the house.
Elliott rifled through a dozen files stashed randomly about my room, folder after folder full of personal correspondence, old bills, and tax returns. A half hour passed before he found an orange folder in the back of a satchel under my clothes rack that said “Denali ’02” on the tab. Names and phone numbers appeared on old e-mail printouts, but Elliott dismissed calling any of my old teammates after he found the climbing permit application I had submitted in April 2002. Thinking, “Ahhh, the Park Service would have Aron’s new team information,” Elliott pulled his cell phone from the pocket of his worn-in pumpkin-colored Carhartts and dialed the number, which rang through to the Denali National Park and Preserve ranger station in Talkeetma, Alaska. Despite Elliott’s best assurances that he was honestly trying to help his friend who was missing by getting in touch with the expedition teammates, the rangers at the climbing registry desk were set against giving out any names or phone numbers. (Policy disallows the distribution of private information to non-government parties.)
Elliott understood their position but wanted to leave the issue open so that he might call back with some higher authority. He thanked the rangers for considering his request and hung up, debating whether to have the Aspen police call the Talkeetma station. First, though, he wanted to check in with Brion. Time was slipping by, but in the hour since they’d spoken, Brion had hit pay dirt. “Don’t worry about searching anymore. I found Aron’s folder in his locker, where I should have looked in the first place. Anyway, I’ve got their information.” On the printouts of e-mails to my teammates, he had found the addresses he needed. At twelve minutes before eleven, Brion had sent an e-mail to Team Green Chili Winds, alerting them to my absence and asking for information.
From: Brion After
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 10:48 A.M.
To: Janet Lightburn, Bill Geist, Jason Halladay, David Shaw
Subject: Looking for Aron Ralston
Hello,
I am Aron’s manager at the Ute Mountaineer in Aspen Co., and surprisingly he has not arrived to work in the last 2 days. We are getting very concerned about his well being, and I am wondering if any of you would know where he may be, or can give me any information on his most recent trip. None of his friends/roommates are sure where he went, but we do think he went to Utah on April 24th or 25th. Possibly to meet some of you for Denali training. If you have any information on Aron, please Email me back at this address. Or you can call me at the Ute. We have contacted the Police, and his family, as Aron is usually very diligent on arriving on time and keeping in touch with us and his friends.
Best regards,
Brion After
At that point, although he had done some excellent sleuthing, Brion was getting ready to leave for Australia for a few weeks’ holiday and was a little behind in wrapping up business at the shop. He needed to pass the baton to someone who would be around, so he circuitously asked Elliott for backup: “What are you doing today?”
Sensing the loaded question, Elliott said, “Uhh, I was cleaning out Leona’s room, getting ready to start moving my stuff in, unpacking, like that. You need me to do something else? I’m glad to help.”
“Well, yeah. I’m starting to get e-mails back, and I’m getting swamped. I’m supposed to be leaving tomorrow for two weeks. Would you be able to come in to the shop and make some calls and watch for e-mails?”
“Sure thing. I was going to come in anyway and bug you some more about giving me a job. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
A few minutes before eleven-thirty A.M., Brion was on the phone calling my mom. His call interrupted my mom and Michelle’s efforts to crack my password protection. My mom was happy to hear back about the progress Brion had made with the police and the e-mail to my Denali teammates. She spoke with him about the additional data the police needed while she continued to hack away. Brion asked if my mom had my license-plate information. She went downstairs to the drawer where she had tucked half a sheet of white paper on which she’d written the make, model, year, and license number of my pickup truck. She had asked me for the vehicle description when I was home at Christmas in 2000, prior to a winter solo fourteener climb, in case she needed it in an emergency. I had hastily told her the vehicle information from memory, so she unknowingly passed along to Brion an error I’d made.
As my mom finished confirming the truck description and license, she hit enter on the most recent attempt to guess the answer to my “secret question” and gave a gasp when the computer screen changed for the first time in a half hour. Michelle and my mom shouted in unison, “We got it! We got it!” and hugged each other.
“What’s going on? What happened?” Brion asked when my mom came back on the line.
“We’ve been trying to get into Aron’s e-mail for the past hour. We just figured out how to change his password. We’re going to read his mail and see if there’s anything about where
he went.”
Brion could hear the pick-me-up effect that the success had on my mom. “Are you into his account now?” he inquired.
Scanning through the most recent e-mails from my friends, my mom explained, “Yes, we’re looking at his in box. If we don’t find anything in his messages, would you be able to send a big e-mail to all his friends and find out what they know?”
“Sure, that’s a great idea,” Brion replied. My mom gave Brion the new password, and they agreed he would carry out the mass e-mailing while she and Michelle read through the two dozen e-mails I’d received since I had last checked my messages on Wednesday the week before. After hanging up, Brion immediately phoned Adam Crider over at the Aspen Police Department to relay the truck description and license number.
After my mom had transferred the password to Brion, Michelle had to leave to go home and pack for a trip with her husband. Alone again just before noon, my mom called my sister in Lubbock, who was working on her senior thesis for the Honors College at Texas Tech. Her voice raw from the crying and upheaval of the past two hours, my mom spoke softly: “Sonja, I just found out this morning that your brother is two days overdue for work. Do you have any idea where he was headed or what he was doing?”
Sonja was calm, but she didn’t have much information on my recent travels, since we hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. “I have no idea where he’s at. I’m sorry, Mom. Are you OK? Do you want me to come home?”
“No, stay there and finish your paper. I’ll let you know what happens. Try not to let it distract you.”
Despite my mom’s wishes, life would not go on without distraction for either her or my sister. Even though Elliott was at the helm of the e-mail search, passing leads along to the Aspen police, who were fully engaged once Brion phoned in my vehicle information, my mom could not go back to working without becoming fraught over what might have happened to me.
