Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  I assume that Monique and Andy Meijer are running farther ahead to climb out and ask for a helicopter, but I haven’t seen them for about ten minutes. As we come up on yet another long sandbar covered in brush and a few scattered trees, I have to stop to empty the sand in my shoe again. The grating friction on my bare left foot is so intense that it pushes the agony of my arm into the background. I find it ironic that my foot is distracting me from the fact that I’ve cut off my arm. I think it’s doubly ironic that now, when I tell Eric I’m going to stop, he is the one who protests, “No, you must keep going.”

  “No, listen, I am going to sit down and empty the sand out of my shoe, and then you are going to help me retie my shoe when I’m done.” I can be a bossy SOB when I’m tired and in pain, but Eric takes it in stride, and after I find a seat on a downed tree trunk and dump half a sandbox out of my sneaker, he ties my shoe for me.

  I tried to imagine what Aron must have gone through over the past few days. I was really impressed by his physical, as well as mental, power. He exactly knew what he was doing, what he wanted and where his limits were even after going through all this.

  Despite all the loss of blood, his walking pace was remarkably strong, until sand in his shoe started to irritate him and he just stopped in a shady part to get that out of the way before he wanted to continue. He asked me to fasten the lace of his shoe.

  It is mile seven, and a few minutes after three P.M. The sun is beating down hard on the shadeless sand at the bottom of the eight-hundred-foot-deep Horseshoe Canyon. Eric and Wayne and I have just come around a wide bend in the open canyon, and I see what must be the beginning of the exit trail that leads to the parking area, zigzagging up the steep hillside ahead on the left. Somewhere on the rim, some seven hundred feet above me, the rescuers are waiting. Oh, how I wish I were a raven and could simply open my wingspan and, with a husky-voiced ca-caw, catch a rising thermal current in the air; I’d be at that trailhead in two minutes.

  It will kill me if I try to hike out of this canyon. I’ve lost too much blood; I’m on the verge of deadly shock. I contemplate sending Eric up to get help as well, but before I can spit out the idea, the rapid stutter of a booming echo interrupts my thoughts.

  Thwock-thwock-thwock-thwocka-thwocka-thwocka.

  Two hundred yards in front of us, the metallic body of a wingless black bird rises over the canyon wall.

  The sight shocks me into an abrupt halt and then inundates me with emotion. In disbelief, I try to sort out how Monique and Andy got to the trailhead and the rescuers brought in a helicopter so quickly, but I then understand that this bird was already here. My astonishment yields to immense relief, and it’s all I can do for the moment to remain standing in the sand. Also stunned to a standstill, Wayne and Eric begin waving their arms over their heads, trying to signal to the helicopter. We are in the middle of the canyon, the tallest, darkest shapes in a hundred-foot-diameter area on a flat sandbar that is sparsely covered with short grasses and stunted rabbit brush, but even still, I’m not sure the helicopter’s occupants see us until the bird banks at low altitude and loops back to soar over our heads a second time. I look around for the best landing zone and decide it will be in the wash in front of us. I hastily hike the fifty yards to the edge of the sandbar as the helicopter banks into another U-turn and hovers two hundred feet above the dry streambed. Eric catches up to stand beside me, and we watch the helicopter begin its descent. I take ten short steps into the streambed and turn my back to the landing zone, anticipating that the rotor wash will kick up a bunch of sand. I bring my remaining energy to bear on keeping my legs strong. My knees are weak, and every instinct tempts me to drop and kiss the earth to praise my deliverance, but I am well aware that my brain is tired of supporting the burden of my pain and the demands of the discipline that has sustained me. It wants to abdicate, but I cannot let it, not until I am in a hospital.

  The engine whine falls, and the dusty wind at my back dies to a breeze. I turn around to see a stiff-legged passenger hop awkwardly out of the rear door of the helicopter. The figure motions for me. I walk briskly in a wide curve to where the man is standing at the side door of the chopper. He yells, “Are you Aron?”

  I nod and shout into his ear, “Yes. Can I get a lift?” and turn to find a uniformed officer of some type sitting at the far side of an all-leather backseat, gaping at me. There are no paramedics wielding IV bags, nobody has latex gloves, and there’s not a single piece of medical equipment in sight. I wasn’t expecting a medevac flight, but I wasn’t expecting full leather, either.

  For some reason, the urgency of my own situation dissolves, and I want to give the pilot or officer a fair chance to put down a cloth or jacket before I stain the leather red. I shout into the helicopter over the engine and rotor noise to no one in particular, “I’m bleeding—it’s gonna make a mess of your backseat!”

  A voice booms, “Just get in!” and I clamber across two stacked backpacks to the middle of the backseat. I shout to the man who motioned me to the door, “Please get my backpack!” and nod to where Eric is standing with my pack in his hands some eighty feet in front of the helicopter. Running out from under the rotors and around to Eric, he then races back with my nearly empty backpack in his hands. The only contents are the water bottle and CamelBak, with a few ounces of mud in each, my headlamp, multi-tool, and two cameras, a measly five pounds total. Yet its weight had felt five times that in the last two miles before I found the Meijer family. “After carrying it all that way,” I think, “I’d hate to leave it behind.” All aboard, we fasten our seat belts, and the pilot brings the engines to full power, kicking up the dust of the canyon floor.

  Someone hands me a headset to put on, and the officers help me get it on over my blue Arc’teryx ball cap. The pilot asks if I can hear him, and I respond, “Yes,” as I settle into the leather seat, lifting my injured arm above my head. Elevated, the insistent throbs are a little more bearable. I watch droplets of blood slither down the dangling strand of webbing at my elbow. One by one, they reach the end of their rope and drip onto my already soaked shirt.

  We lift off, and my attention lifts from my shirt to the canyon. We fly higher and higher, and my gratitude again brings me nearly to tears, but dehydration has sealed shut my tear ducts. Although I’m wedged between the two passengers in the backseat, I can still see out the windows of the aircraft quite clearly. Staring straight ahead, I watch the twin black figures of Wayne and Eric recede to small blotches on the red canvas of Barrier Creek’s gravel streambed until the chopper’s window frame blocks them from view.

  As we crest the rim of the canyon, my mind fumbles when it tries to comprehend the sudden shift of the horizon. The line demarcating the edge of my universe had been claustrophobically penned in for the past six days, trapped as I was, but now it leaps a hundred miles in a single moment, receding over the magnificent landscape of Canyonlands into the haze surrounding the La Sal Mountains in the east. My vision reels.

  The vibrations of the helicopter engines mount to a dull roar, only barely muted by the headphones. “How long until we get to Green River?” I ask, unnecessarily straining to raise my voice.

  Be strong, Aron. You’re almost there. Hang on.

  The pilot comes back, clearly audible over the scratchy background static: “We’re going directly to Moab. It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”

  Oh, wow, good. “Is there any water I can have?”

  Both of the officers scramble, as if my request has shaken them out of their astonishment. I can’t blame them. If a blood-soaked guy came and sat next to me, it’d be a few minutes before I would think to offer him a drink, too. The man on my left turns up a screw-top bottle of spring water and hands it to me. After I’ve held it for a second staring at it dazedly, he realizes the top is still on, so he unscrews it and gives it back. We shift around, and the uniformed officer on my right moves a jacket under my arm to soak up the bloody runoff.

  In just two minutes, we come to a massive ri
ver below us, and from its color and our position, I’m certain it is the Green River. The pilot says over the headsets, “Keep him talking.”

  I reply, “I’m still drinking the water.” I can hardly believe I’m still able to stomach any more liquid, or that I still feel thirst. Including what I’ve got in my hand now, I’ve drunk over two and a half gallons of water in the past three hours.

  “Don’t let him pass out,” the pilot warns the officers. I’m not worried I’m going to pass out, as the pain won’t even let me rest, but I do want to get to a hospital as soon as possible.

  “How much longer do we have?” I inquire, sounding to myself like a whiny kid pleading for a bathroom break on a road trip with his family.

  “Twelve minutes from here,” the pilot says. We follow the river north for a minute or two in silence as I take another three gulps of water, finishing the bottle. When we bank to the right, I see a winding dirt road that drops over a canyon wall to the river. “See that road?” I ask.

  The man on my right looks out the window and nods. “Yeah?”

  “That’s the beginning of the White Rim, uhh, Mineral Bottom, it’s called. I biked that with some of my friends a couple years ago. It’s over a hundred miles.” The officer seems slightly slow to absorb what I’m saying. Perhaps it’s all in my perception of him, or perhaps it’s his disbelief that I’ve turned the flight into a scenic tour. We’re over the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands, heading northeast. I know this area well enough to judge our progress. I ask the pilot, “Will we go by the Monitor and the Merrimac?”

  “I don’t know what those are,” the pilot explains.

  The officer on my right asks me what happened, and I begin to tell him about my week. I wriggle around enough that I can get the map out of my left pocket, and I show him where I was stuck. I explain about the chockstone, how it moved and I became trapped, how I shivered through five nights, how I ran out of water and drank my own urine, how I finally figured out how to amputate my arm. In recounting the story, I begin to wonder about the timing of the helicopter and how it found me in the canyon at the perfect moment when I needed it. If it had been an hour later, I would have died waiting for help. Or, if I had figured out how to cut off my arm two days earlier, when I stabbed myself, there wouldn’t have been a helicopter, and I would have bled out before getting to my truck, let alone Green River. I had been right on Sunday when I said on the videotape that amputating my arm would have been a slow act of suicide.

  After six minutes or so of explaining my story, I see two thin sandstone buttes out the front window. The formations of eroded rock resemble two submarines engaged in battle, and I declare, “Look, that’s them, the Monitor and the Merrimac.” I know we’re getting close, but we seem to be banking to the right again when I was thinking town should be straight ahead. “How much farther?”

  “Less than five minutes. We’ll fly over that drop-off, and we’ll be right over town.”

  A question digs at me. “How did you find my truck? I mean, I could have been anywhere.”

  “Your mom called our dispatcher yesterday and had us searching all the trailheads.”

  Four minutes later, the helicopter bursts over the rim rock, leaving Canyonlands behind, to reveal a lush valley, green with fields, and a forest of trees engulfing thousands of buildings. We cross the Colorado River and slow down as we approach the center of Moab, Utah, passing row upon neat row of houses and streets, ball fields, stores, schools, parking lots, and parks.

  Circling around once, I see an open green lawn that we’re apparently going to use as a landing zone. As the pilot touches the bird gently down on the vibrantly green grass, I notice that the building off to the right of the lawn is a hospital.

  Oh my God, you made it.

  There is a man in a Park Service uniform standing on an asphalt driveway off the right side of the helicopter. Next to him are two women in white coats at opposite ends of a wheeled stretcher. On the pilot’s signal, the officer on my right swings the helicopter door open and hops out, holding the door for me to follow his lead. I undo my seat belt and carelessly let the headphones rip themselves off my head, then jump down onto the grass. Ducking my head, I take half a dozen long strides under the rotors, heading toward the asphalt. I approach the uniformed man who seems to accept my gruesome appearance with an expectant air, and without introducing myself, I announce in an urgent voice, “You need to know that I’ve lost a lot of blood, that I had to amputate my arm this morning after being trapped for six days without food or water, and that I’m wearing a tourniquet that I applied today. It’s around my arm inside this packaging.”

  Seemingly impressed at my self-assessment, the man replies, “Let’s get you inside,” as he turns to the women, who present the stretcher. I sit my rump on the gurney, lie down on my back, and swing my legs up. Bliss. I haven’t been prone in six days, and I immediately begin to relax. If it weren’t for the throbbing pain of the tourniquet on my stump, I could fall into a seven-year sleep.

  The nurses push me through the automated doors of the emergency entrance and into an empty hospital receiving area. Another woman shuttling supplies into an emergency room looks at me with surprise, as though I’ve caught her in a compromising situation. Recognition follows her shocked stare, and I understand why there is no one at the reception desk or in the seating area. This is not a major metropolitan hospital where critically injured patients walk in off the street every few minutes; this is a quiet rural hospital on a Thursday afternoon in the early season. These three women probably constitute a significant portion of the present hospital staff. The trauma team is most likely on call; hopefully, they aren’t far away. By current appearances, the hospital staff probably realized they had an inbound patient only a few minutes before the helicopter landed on the front lawn. One of the women tells the Park Service man to follow us into the emergency room as they cart me inside the sterile room and park the gurney next to the ER table under a large circular lamp hood in the middle of the room. The nurse at my head asks me if I can transfer myself to the table on my left side, which I manage while holding my right arm steadily off my chest.

  Except for the Park Service man, the others disperse. One woman returns in a minute to tell the others who have brought in more supplies that “the anesthesiologist will be in in five minutes.” The nurses remove my shoes, sock, and hat, then cover me with a gown. Next, the man speaks to me. “Aron, I’m Ranger Steve with the Park Service. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  It isn’t the question I am anticipating, but I think first of my mom. “Can you let my mom know that I’m OK?” Thinking of how she must have been involved in this and what it’s done to her, my voice is but a tremulous whimper.

  “Yes, I have her phone number. I’ll call her as soon as we’re done.”

  “Thank you.” I pause and recompose myself, continuing, “I left a lot of stuff in the canyon. My ropes, my CD player, my harness, a lot of stuff. Would you be able to send someone in to clean up my stuff?”

  “We’ll certainly do that,” Steve answers.

  “Some of it’s where I was trapped, some of it’s below the rappel. My bike”—I pause, reaching under the gown for my pocket—“is by a juniper a hundred yards from the east side of the road, one mile south of Burr Pass.” I pull out the folded-up map and hand it to Steve. Digging into my zipped pocket, I retrieve the bike-lock keys as Steve orients himself with the bloodstained map. “Here, these are the keys,” I say, handing the small ring and twin keys across my body to Steve. “I locked the bike to itself, not to the tree, so in case I lost the keys, I could still get the bike back, but it will be easier to get the bike back to the road if the tires roll freely.”

  “Can you point to where your bike is?” Steve inquires, holding the map in front of me.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say, rolling over a little to extend my left hand. “Oh, no, I can’t; it’s off the end of the map. But it’s right where I said, the last tree for a mile, a
mile south of Burr Pass, which is a rise just off the edge of the map.”

  “Can you point to where you were trapped?”

  “Yeah, it’s the only east-west section of the canyon just above the Big Drop rappel. Do you see it there?” I point to the mark that reads, “Big Drop, 1550, Short Slot.”

  “OK, anything else?”

  “Just keep track of my backpack, please, it’s very important—it’s on the helicopter—and get my truck and stuff. Thank you.” I’m alert but exhausted, and I want to close my eyes, but I know I can’t sleep. Then a woman in a white smock and face mask enters the room and introduces herself as the anesthesiologist, asking what happened. I tell her the short version, and she scoots off through a side door of the ER, promising she’ll be back with some drugs.

  Steve says, “Aron, I’d like to get as much information from you as I can. How big was the boulder?”

  “I think it was two hundred pounds. I budged it just a little right after it first fell on me, but I couldn’t lift it with my rigging, so it had to be at least that, I guess.”

  “And when did it fall on you?”

  “It was about two forty-five Saturday afternoon.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I pulled it loose. It was stuck—it was a chockstone—and I stepped onto it, then climbed down off it, and I pulled it. It bounced back and forth, smashed my left hand a little, then caught my right hand. I was trying to push away from underneath it when my hand got caught.” I can hardly believe I’m telling this story. I’m dumb-founded that I’m lying on this table, given the odds that I would survive six days of dehydration and hypothermia, then survive cutting my arm off, rappelling, and hiking seven miles through the desert. And that helicopter. That was a miracle.