Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  All cars, Richfield, attempt to locate missing person out of Aspen, Colorado, traveling to Utah, for a backcountry trip. He was last seen April 24th, last Thursday, in Aspen. Advised he was going to go somewhere in Utah where it was warm to hike.

  His vehicle is maroon ’98 Toyota Tacoma, has New Mexico plate, Eight-Four-Six-Mike-Mike-

  Yankee, New Mexico Eight-Four-Six-Mike-

  Mike-Yankee, will have a topper and ski racks on top.

  All call, continuing, subject is Aron Ralston, twenty-seven-year-old white male, six-foot-two, a hundred-and-sixty-five pounds, brown eyes, brown hair. He is alone, he is an experienced hiker, search and rescue, and mountain climber, also a skier. Very responsible person.

  Subject failed to return to his work Tuesday as expected. He has not been heard from. He should have ski racks and ski equipment on his truck. He had advised a friend that he was going to Utah backcountry, on a hiking trip. Would have been traveling I-70, unknown from there and he should be camping in his truck. Would have very little money.

  At the BLM office in Salt Lake, Larry Shackleford spoke with my mom at eight A.M. Immediately upon hanging up, he sent a “Be On the Look Out” notice for my vehicle to the BLM and Utah State Fish and Wildlife offices, then called a half-dozen of his personal acquaintances in those bureaus to follow up and make sure they received the action request. It reassured my mother that Georgia and Larry had taken direct action to help move the search along. She was tired of hearing from the police and some of the dispatchers that “this happens all the time” or “he’ll eventually show up someplace.” These actions were two rays of sunshine for my mom through that darkest morning. She was anxious for Captain Kyle Ekker, the most cooperative and helpful of the many contacts she had established and maintained over the past twenty-four hours, to resume his shift so she could speak with him about the investigation’s progress.

  At nine A.M., Adam Crider walked out of the Aspen Police Department with a voided check from my checking account and headed over to the U.S. Bank. First thing on a Thursday, the bank was empty of customers, and he approached the first window and interrupted the teller preparing her drawer for the day.

  Upon hearing his spiel, the teller summoned the bank manager to get his approval to access my debit-card history. The small group peered at her computer screen as she entered the digits of my account.

  “It looks like the last transaction was on the twenty-fifth, in Moab, at a City Market.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Twenty-two thirty-one was the charge…no cash back.” (I had stocked up on water, juice, fruit, candy bars, and burritos.)

  “What’s the one before that?”

  “Twenty-nine twenty-two at Clark’s here in town on the twenty-fourth.” (I had bought groceries on the evening of the twenty-third, before going home to pack for my ski day with Brad and the subsequent Utah vacation, but the supermarket had not processed the transaction until after midnight.)

  “And that’s it? Nothing after the twenty-fifth? How frequently is this updated?”

  “It’s immediate, at least within a few hours, depending on how the merchants submit their batches.”

  Crider already knew from the phone work he and the other officers had done the night before that my last credit-card transaction had been on the twenty-fourth, gassing up in Glenwood Springs, the city at the intersection of the Roaring Fork River and the Colorado River. From Glenwood, it’s possible to head east or west on I-70, which didn’t tell the officers much except that I hadn’t used my credit cards for a week. With the information from the bank, Adam knew I’d arrived in Moab and probably departed from there on Friday the twenty-fifth. But where had I gone?

  At 9:07 A.M. on Thursday, Steve Patchett sat in the kitchen of his Albuquerque home and considered what needed to be done next with the search. As a union electrician, Steve was presently without a job—which usually happened for four to six weeks every six months or so—so he had time to dedicate to the search planning. He first dialed the Emery County sheriff’s office on his home line and was transferred to Captain Kyle Ekker. The two men reviewed the status of the search initiated by their conversation the previous afternoon. Kyle explained that the first search hadn’t turned up any clues.

  “We had our guys out at the Black Box with some of the search-and-rescue team on off-road vehicles, but they didn’t find anything. Two deputies went out to Joe’s Valley, which I don’t think was on your list, but there’s a lot of hiking out there. Nothing there, either, though. We called everybody back in just before dark.”

  Steve asked, “Did you get anyone down to Segers Hole?”

  Segers had been next on Kyle’s list, but he hadn’t dispatched anyone, because it was nearly a three-hour drive from Castle Dale, in the northwest part of the county, down to the remote and unpaved southern region. With the increased manpower of the day shift, Kyle could afford to send a deputy with some volunteers from the county’s search-and-rescue team down to the Muddy. He said, “It’s a long way, but we’re going to check there. I was waiting for daylight and a couple more pairs of eyes, but that’s next. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  Steve paused and considered all the information he’d reviewed. It was mostly a hunch, but he told Kyle, “I’m pretty sure he’s in your county.”

  Kyle promised to update Steve when the reports came back from the more far-flung locations, and thanked him for his involvement. After hanging up, the captain looked at his maps and thought through a short list of other places he would have his deputies and the SAR volunteers check while they were on the way out to Segers. “We’ve already covered the upper corners of the county,” the captain thought, “and most of the trailheads in the central part of the county. If he’s in the county, he’s down south. Where do people go down there? There aren’t even any roads.” But one dirt road, the Lower San Rafael Road, cuts a sidewinding curve through the southern section of Emery County, down into a no-man’s-land at the fringes of Canyonlands. “Maybe there, over in the Robbers Roost area,” he thought as he pored over his enlarged map of the county. There are dozens of canyons and dry washes out in the Roost, most on BLM land accessible from the Lower San Rafael Road and its continuation, the spur that dead-ends in the Maze. Kyle knew the Maze drew considerable numbers of people through Emery County down into Wayne County. It’d be worth a call, he figured, even if he didn’t send his guys over the county line.

  Kyle dialed the Hans Flat ranger station at the entrance to the Maze District of Canyonlands, inquiring about a red Toyota Tacoma truck at nine-fifteen A.M. Ranger Glenn Sherrill answered the phone and immediately recognized the vehicle description. That truck had been at Horseshoe Canyon since the weekend.

  “I was just there. I saw that vehicle, oh, three days ago, and it’s still there,” he told Kyle.

  Typically, fewer than ten people visit Horseshoe Canyon each day, with maybe a few more on the weekends. Nearly everyone hikes in and out of the canyon in half a day. The National Park Service posts rangers in the canyon every day at the Great Gallery to monitor visitors and protect the five-thousand-year-old petroglyphs. Since they are typically the first to arrive and the last to leave the trailhead each day, the rangers are accustomed to finding the dirt parking lot empty, or with one or two vehicles and tents set up nearby. They are certainly attuned to notice when one vehicle sits in the parking lot for the better part of a week. Because my truck obnoxiously blocked the welcome sign directly across from the entrance road (I’d parked to make the rear bed level for sleeping), it was all the more conspicuous.

  Even feeling 90 percent certain, Glenn paused and hedged his assertion. “Well, I think it’s the vehicle.”

  Kyle asked, “Do you have anybody who can go check the license plate?”

  “Yeah, will do. Let me call you back.”

  Glenn signaled over the radio to his rangers in the parking lot who were preparing to hike into the canyon. They confirmed that the truck was still there and ve
rified the license plate. Glenn phoned Kyle and reported the positive identification. “We have his truck.”

  “Thank you for your help. We’re going to get somebody on-scene.”

  The captain dispatched Sergeant Mitch Vetere to drive out to the trailhead and then had his dispatcher try to get Sheriff Kurt Taylor from Wayne County on the radio. Sheriff Taylor was off-duty until the afternoon, but his chief deputy, Doug Bliss, called back within the hour.

  Since the trailhead for Horseshoe Canyon resides just over the county line in Wayne County, the search had potentially moved beyond the purview of Kyle and his deputies. Although my vehicle was sitting in Wayne County, if I had gone to the north in the canyon, I would be in Emery County; if I went to the south, I would be in Wayne County. With Doug’s permission, Kyle continued as commander and began the process of initiating the Park Service’s incident-response command. He had already called the DPS dispatcher in Price, Utah, to ask for helicopter support.

  The news of my truck’s discovery at Horseshoe Canyon reached Elliott at 9:37 A.M. He spent the next hour on his cell phone to spread word of the breakthrough. It was the focal point of new hope for my friends around the country. In Aspen, Rachel sent e-mails to my friends in the Roaring Fork Valley in 48-point font. Down in New Mexico, Steve Patchett talked with Jason Halladay on the phone at 10:31 A.M. Within the hour, they had coordinated two groups of my friends, search-and-rescue colleagues, and climbing partners in Albuquerque and Los Alamos who were making immediate plans to drive to Horseshoe Canyon. Steve called Kyle Ekker to let him know a team from the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council was responding. Captain Ekker assured Steve they would be welcome to participate in the search.

  At our home in Denver, Ann Fort and my mom were working on a different plan. They were creating a missing person’s poster to send via fax to a list of United Methodist churches in the Grand Junction area, asking them to take the flyer to gas stations around town and find out if anyone had seen me on my way to Utah. My mom had dug out the Aspen Times article from back in March, and cut out the self-portrait I’d taken on Capitol Peak. She taped the picture onto a piece of copier paper and, below the four-by-six picture, wrote out my physical description and the best information that she had regarding my whereabouts:

  Aron Ralston, 10/27/75, age 27. 6’2”, approx. 175 lbs., brown un-kempt hair. Last seen Thursday 4/24 approx. 6pm near Carbondale, COL. Used credit card at a gas station in Glenwood Springs early evening 4/24. Very athletic—possibly headed to Utah camping, biking, or skiing.

  Adding my truck description and the correct license-plate number, my mom finished the poster with the phone number for the Aspen police. She and Ann were at the copy machine when the doorbell rang.

  “I wonder who that is?” my mom inquired aloud. Without crossing the room to peek out the window, she went downstairs and answered the door. It was Sue Doss, another friend from church. Sue and her husband, Keith, had been the codirectors of the high school youth programs at Hope when I was at Cherry Creek. I had spent dozens of weekends with them and traveled to Wyoming on two trips with the youth group to volunteer at church camps; I had even given their daughter Jamie her first lessons on the piano. After I graduated and went on to college, the Doss family had remained close to my parents.

  Sue had come directly from Hope UMC, where she heard about my mom’s request for support during the crisis. My mother quickly told Sue the limited amount she knew about my situation. There were more tears and hugs and sobs, but shortly, Sue, Ann, and my mom were ready to get back to work.

  The threesome began a long-distance distribution of the freshly made poster. My mom asked the office administrator at Hope Church to fax over a phone list of United Methodist churches in Grand Junction. Juggling two phones to collect fax numbers, my mom also got the fax machine warmed up. At nine-forty-five A.M., they were about to go into high gear when my mom’s cell phone rang.

  The voice on the other end belonged to Acting Chief Ranger Steve Swanke of Canyonlands National Park. It was the first time my mom had spoken with Ranger Steve, as he introduced himself—he had just become involved in the investigation within the hour—but she was ecstatic to hear his startling good news.

  “Mrs. Ralston, we have located your son’s vehicle,” Steve said in a friendly drawl honed by a career of interacting with the public.

  With a gasp, my mom relayed the news in an escalating din of excitement just short of a scream: “They found his truck! Thank God! They found his truck!” After Steve gave my mom the full situation update, she and her friends hugged, then they sat on the back porch, knowing that now there was nothing more they could do but pray the rescuers found me and that I was alive and OK.

  In a coordinated effort between the NPS and the Emery County sheriff to command the incident response, Ranger Steve Swanke and Captain Kyle Ekker requested helicopters, search dogs, a climbing team, ground personnel, and horse-mounted search teams for the effort in Horseshoe Canyon. At the Unified Command Headquarters in Moab, Swanke assigned two investigators to research a subject profile on me. One of their first actions was to go on the Internet and enter my name in a search engine. They immediately turned up my website, with links to my mountaineering projects, canyoneering trip reports, and photo albums of rock art panels in New Mexico. They deduced that I was an experienced outdoorsman but not necessarily familiar with the area around Horseshoe Canyon, providing one of nine factors that go into the subject profile evaluation.

  The National Association of Search and Rescue (NASAR) guidelines help incident commanders assess the relative urgency of a subject’s absence, based on the number of subjects and their age, medical condition, equipment, and experience, along with factors for the weather, terrain, and history of rescues in the area. Assigning values of 1, 2, or 3 to each factor, search leaders can measure their response appropriately. A 1 indicates a higher urgency than a 3. A very old (1) and inexperienced (1) subject with a history of heart disease (2) who is lost by himself (1) in a storm (1) with only the clothes on his back (1) in a region of steep, rocky terrain (1) that has a history of incidents (1) with a low probability of a bogus search (1) would earn a total profile score of 10. Any score of 9 to 12 dictates a first-degree emergency response.

  From the information available on me, the relative urgency work-sheets in the incident command guidelines suggested a second-degree measured response, which differs from an emergency response only in the speed and number of people and equipment initially committed to the field. However, because of my extensive experience with solo-climbing winter fourteeners and the nearly weeklong duration of my absence, Ranger Swanke increased the urgency to an emergency response.

  On Swanke’s request, New Air Helicopters, a charter service out of Durango, Colorado, launched a helicopter for Horseshoe Canyon just before noon on Thursday. Subsequently, the NPS requisitioned a another bird from a Forest Service firefighting crew in southern Utah, effectively commandeering it for assistance with the search mission. In the mission objectives, Swanke declared that his second-priority goal, behind ensuring the personal safety of search-and-rescue personnel, was to “Locate, access, stabilize, and transport Ralston by 20:00 hours on 05/01/03.” It was a by-the-book statement for which search-and-rescue leaders sometimes use the acronym LAST—for locate, access, stabilize, and transport—with a necessarily ambitious time frame to have me out of the wilderness in the first ten hours.

  Captain Ekker conferred with Wayne County’s commanding officer, Chief Deputy Doug Bliss, who agreed to call out his county’s search-and-rescue group, including a horse team for faster ground-searching capability. Even though it was his request to deploy the mounted searchers, Captain Ekker joked, “Well, with the helicopter in the air, by the time you pull those horses down there, we’ll have found him. But bring ’em out, and be ready to stay the night.”

  At 11:25 A.M., Chief Deputy Bliss paged the search-and-rescue group with the message to rendezvous in Hanksville: “Meet at Carl Hunt’s for
search in Horseshoe Canyon area. Bring horses, be prepared to be out all night.”

  Terry Mercer, a pilot with the Department of Public Safety, had just been canceled for a flight, and had left his DPS helicopter fueled and sitting on the helipad at the Salt Lake City International Airport, when he got a call at ten-forty-five A.M.

  Within twenty-five minutes, Terry was airborne and communicating with Captain Ekker, who asked him to pick up one of his officers at the Huntington airport in the northwest part of the county, some seventy air miles from Horseshoe Canyon. By twelve-fifty P.M., Terry had landed and brought on board the aircraft bush-bearded Detective Greg Funk, fresh from an undercover assignment in the Emery County sheriff’s narcotics division. They departed for the canyon, just thirty-five minutes away by air.

  Even with the two-hour flight from Salt Lake, Terry’s DPS chopper was the first to arrive at Horseshoe Canyon, landing in the dirt parking lot. Sergeant Mitch Vetere showed Terry my maroon truck, and they looked through some of my hiking and camping gear in the pickup bed. After a quick discussion with the BLM and NPS rangers gathered at the trailhead, Terry and the two officers decided that the best place to look for an experienced hiker would be to search the northern end of the canyon, toward its intersection with the Green River. When the next helicopter arrived, it would fly over the upper half of the canyon, to the south of the trailhead.

  With their flight plan identified, Mitch joined his colleague Greg in the backseat of the helicopter as a second pair of onboard eyes, even though he was particularly averse to flying. Federal regulations prohibit BLM and Park Service employees from boarding any aircraft that does not have a green-card registration. Since the Utah DPS officials have a primary focus of aiding the counties, they don’t let their pilots have green cards, and thereby avoid any obligation to help with federal requests. While this policy usually works in DPS’s favor, conserving the department’s limited resources for local and state needs, it removed the dozen BLM and NPS rangers assembled at the trailhead from the pool of available air searchers. Thus, as much as Mitch disliked flying in general, and despite the special anxiety he reserved for helicopters, he was the only person at the trailhead who could ride.