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.
Minutes after twelve o’clock, Elliott arrived at the Ute, leaning his silver road bike against the bike rack in front of the store. Elliott rarely drove around town, as he could usually bike to the Aspen core in less time than he could drive and find a parking spot. After Elliott jogged the stairs up to the office, Brion handed him the ’03 Denali folder and summarized his most recent activities. “Here’s the file of people he’s going to Denali with. I’ve been getting replies from a few of them, and I’ve talked with one of them, Jason Halladay. His number’s on a piece of paper in the folder. Aron’s mom’s number is there, too. Also, this is his e-mail address and password. His mom wants us to send an e-mail to everyone in his address book.” Brion was going full speed, and yet he was barely keeping his head together in the midst of the most hectic firestorm he’d ever experienced.
“Who’s the contact at the police?” Elliott asked.
“Oh yeah. I’ve talked to them a couple times. Here’s the number of the guy over there, uh, Adam.”
“What have you told them?” Elliott was thorough and wanted to know everything that everyone involved knew.
Brion gave him a pass-down of the information he’d told Adam up to that time. Elliott sat down at Brion’s cluttered desk and pondered what he was going to do next while Brion walked through the shop to check on the shorthanded staff.
Amid the stack of e-mail printouts Brion had made that morning and handed to Elliott was the response from Jason Halladay. Jason had replied fifteen minutes after Brion’s initial e-mail, clarifying about our May 1-4 Denali training trip. At 11:03 A.M., he had written, “We have not heard from him since last week. The last e-mail I have from Aron here at work is from April 22 but he did not mention his upcoming plans.” Jason was going back to his town house for lunch and had typed out, “I may have a more recent correspondence from him at home and I will check on that as soon as I get home.” Just over a half hour later, Jason had sent in another message, with excerpts from the seminal e-mail I’d written to him in January, inviting him to join me for any of a slew of slot canyons, as well as the climbing expedition to Denali. Sitting at Brion’s desk, Elliott read this e-mail:
From: Jason Halladay
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 11:40 A.M.
To: Brion After
Subject: RE: Looking for Aron Ralston
Brion,
Hello again. I checked my home e-mail and last I heard from Aron was April 23rd reporting on his trip on Quandary. He didn’t mention plans for the upcoming weekends but earlier this year he mentioned the following canyons as trips he’d like to do in Utah:
Canyons:
Black Box of San Rafael;
Virgin River in Zion;
Cable/Seger canyons (San Rafael area);
And any other technical slots listed as “best of” in Kelsey’s books (do you have the San Rafael Swell book?-it’s excellent).
You’re right, he may just not have known about his work schedule and hopefully we see him tomorrow night in Georgetown but it would be out of character for him to forget his work schedule and not keep in touch with at least someone.
Thank you, again, for contacting us,
Jason
Brion came back in the office and discussed with Elliott whom to call next. Brion offered, “From what I know, Brad Yule was the last person who saw Aron. But I don’t know how to get ahold of him.”
Elliott exclaimed, “You gotta be kidding me. I’ve got his cell-phone number right here.” Whipping his cell phone out of his pocket, Elliott looked up Brad’s number and then called him on one of the office lines, catching him at the Denver airport, ready to board the connecting leg of his flight to Atlanta.
“Hey, Brad. I’ve got a question for you. Aron didn’t show up for work yesterday or this morning, and we’re really starting to worry about him. We’re trying to get information to give the police so they can start a search. It seems like you were the last person to see him. Do you know where he went? What’s the best information you have from him when you talked?”
Brad recalled the ski trip on Mount Sopris for Elliott, including the information that we’d gotten my truck stuck on the drive out, and that I’d departed for the desert but I hadn’t been specific about my destination.
“We thought we were going to hear from him before the party Saturday, but he didn’t call, and then we didn’t really make it to the party, either.”
“OK. Do you remember what he had in his truck?”
“He had his mountain bike and his skis on his roof rack, and he had his climbing stuff with him and his skiing stuff and camping gear.”
“Was he going out for more skiing?”
“No, I’m pretty sure he was going to do some canyoneering.”
“Oh, OK. The police want to know what his stuff looks like. Like his backpack and jacket.”
“I don’t remember, exactly, but hey, Elliott, I’m on the plane, and I have to go. I’ll think about it and call you when I get to Charlotte.”
On the plane, Brad got out his digital camera and reviewed the pictures from Mount Sopris, double-checking which backpack I’d had with me that day and which jacket I had been wearing, making some mental notes to share with Elliott when he landed in North Carolina.
Just before talking with my sister, at 11:43 A.M., my mom sent a message to the Denali team members from her account. Using the addresses from an e-mail she and Michelle had found in my in box, she requested any info they had, as Brion had already done. Jason Halladay called her from the Los Alamos National Lab, where he had returned to his job as a computer technician, to give her the same information he had sent to Brion. My mom went down to the basement and retrieved a road atlas, marking down the locations of Zion National Park and the San Rafael Swell on the map. Jason tried to help her as best he could, but he didn’t know the exact locations of a few of the canyons. He needed his canyoneering guidebook, but that was back at home.
Elliott relayed my last known point and subsequent direction to Adam at the APD, who asked if there was a more specific location other than simply the Utah desert. Elliott pulled out the list of possible Utah destinations provided by Jason and read that to Adam. Crider recognized Zion National Park from the list and located the San Rafael Swell on a map of Utah. Although the lead was from an uncorroborated three-month-old e-mail, it was the only specific information collected up to that point in the investigation, and Adam followed through as best he could. Just before one P.M., he issued a teletype message to the Washington, Grand, and Emery county sheriffs’ offices and followed up with phone calls to Grand County and Zion, to ensure that the national parks received the information.
Grand County is home to Canyonlands and Arches, two of the most popular national parks in the western United States. Because of the concentration of agencies managing public lands in Grand County, it’s possible to cross three, four, or even a half-dozen boundaries on a single bike ride, four-wheel-drive outing, or day hike. To better coordinate incident response and provide a greater quality of service to the public, the Park Service, Forest Service, Utah State Parks, and Bureau of Land Management share a unified command and visitor information center in Moab. With Adam’s action, nearly every public resource agency in the southeastern quadrant of Utah had my vehicle information. While none of them was actively searching yet-it would be too costly to track down every vehicle that might or might not be in the state-they were on the lookout and would call the Aspen police if they happened upon my truck.
Elliott began an intense process of notifying my friends across the U.S. that I was missing. From Brion’s desk, Elliott monitored my Hotmail account, Brion’s Ute account, Brion’s EarthLink account, and his own Yahoo! account, scrolling through message after message from my disconcerted friends. By trading e-mails through the afternoon, Elliott collected a few leads but mostly just waded through replies that said, “I have no idea where Aron is, but I’m worried for him.” Standing out from the other e-mails was one from my friend Dan Hadlich, which pointed Elliott to Mount Sopris and Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado, but not to Utah.
From: Daniel Hadlich
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 12:27 P.M.
To: Brion After, Jason Halladay
Subject: RE: Looking for Aron Ralston
Brion and Jason,
I do not believe Aron was heading to Utah this past weekend. I’ve enclosed the following information I received from Aron on April 20th via e-mail:
›I’m headed out to skin up to Conundrum Hot Springs and climb
›Castleabra tomorrow. Maybe soak in the pools a little too! Then
›climbing the Cristo Couloir on Friday with Janet, skiing Sunday to close
›down Ajax for the season, and starting all over next Wednesday with a
›trip to ski Mt. Sopris, climb the Holy Cross Couloir on Friday/Saturday,
›and who knows what else from there! Spring may be here, but I’m a
›long way from hiking anywhere when I can ski or climb snow!
›
›Cheers,
›Aron
That would mean that Aron would have been on Mt. Sopris on Wed-Thurs (4/23-4/24) and the Holy Cross Couloir on Fri-Sat (4/25-4/26). Has anyone searched those areas for his vehicle? Please contact me ASAP if you hear from him. Also, let Julia and I know if additional folks are needed to drive around and look for him or his truck this weekend.
– Dan.
Although it counterindicated what I’d said to Brad, Dan had provided the only itinerary I’d left in writing, and Elliott knew he needed to follow through on the Holy Cross lead with the Aspen police. When they talked just after one P.M., Adam said he would call the police department in Minturn, the town nearest the access for Mount of the Holy Cross, to have them check the Tigiwon Road for my vehicle.
“However,” Adam informed Elliott, “the license information you gave me is invalid. We searched the computer records, and that New Mexico plate number 888-MMY doesn’t exist. I put Eagle County on the lookout for a maroon 1998 Toyota Tacoma, but we need to get the correct plate.”
Elliott said he’d call my mom and double-check the number.
Unable to eat lunch, my mom returned to her upstairs office, where she sat at her desk, organizing some papers while terrifying thoughts of my undoubtedly dire situation maddened her to the edge of a break-down. Then she fought back. Nipping off another upwelling of helplessness, my mom threw down her papers and said aloud, “I have to do something to help Aron.” For my mom, it was as though my life now depended on her actions. She was not going to sit tight and wait to hear back about how things were progressing. That just wasn’t her style.
My mom twice tried calling my dad in New York to let him know what was happening and ask for his ideas on what to do, but he didn’t have his cell phone turned on, and he was out of his hotel room, so my mom left messages for him to call her as soon as he got back that evening. On her own, with the info she’d received from Jason, my mom brainstormed a short list of groups to contact: the Aspen police, Brad Yule, the Utah Highway Patrol, and Zion National Park.
Before my mom could contact the first name on her list, her cell phone rang. It was Elliott, calling to notify her that my license information was incorrect. She pulled out the note she’d referenced previously and read the number to Elliott one digit at a time.
After the third digit, he interrupted her. “Wait, eight-eight-six, you said? OK, Brion had written down eight-eight-eight. The rest is ‘M-M-Y’? I’ll get this to the police.”
Just over a half hour later, Elliott called my mom back. The Aspen police had told him that wasn’t my license number, either-it belonged to a Chevy Blazer registered to an Albuquerque woman. Taking the initiative, Elliott had called the New Mexico Department of Motor Vehicles and tried to get them to search for my proper license number using the truck description and my name, but they weren’t able to help him. Unfortunately, my mom didn’t have any better information, so they hung up without any further plans for how to get my correct license information.
Minutes later, at three-forty-five P.M., the home line rang again. It was my dad calling from New York. My mom was now in the same position of delivering the terrible news as Brion had been that morning.
“I got a call from Aron’s manager this morning. He missed work yesterday and today, and no one’s seen him since last Friday. No one knows where he went.”
Shocked for a moment, my dad instantly began pondering what might have happened to me. He was disturbed that I hadn’t left word with anyone. Alarmed as he was, though, he knew they needed to address the immediate problem. There would be ample time later for emotions to play themselves out.
My mom told my dad what was going on. For each thing she told him she’d done, he asked a few questions to clarify whether there were any unchecked leads, but each time, they determined that she had done everything they could think of. Still, my dad wanted to come home immediately. “Do you think I should make arrangements?”
My mom replied, “No, it’s a short tour, you’ll be home in three days. By the time they get someone in there to take your place, it’ll be Saturday night, and you’re coming home Sunday. There’s nothing else you could do here, anyway.”
Comforting my mom as best he could from across the country, my dad knew she needed someone to be there with her, especially as things slowed down. “If I’m not coming home, then you have to promise me that you’ll call the church and ask for someone to come and stay with you.”
My mom resisted the idea of asking for help, saying, “I really don’t think that’s necessary.” But my dad finally convinced her to call Hope United Methodist Church, our family’s congregation in Greenwood Village, a southeast suburb of Denver. My mom agreed, then said she’d contact the sheriffs’ offices and the National Park Service.
Lastly, my dad advised, “If you haven’t done it already, you need to write everything down so you can refer back to it when you make the follow-up calls.”
“Yes, I’ve started making a phone log,” my mom told him. From their combined experience working with bureaucracies, they knew the importance of keeping track of who said what, when, so the next time, when my mom called and someone different answered, she could still be effective.
By the end of the conversation, all the other possible explanations for my disappearance-that I might be out camping along a stream with some friends, or that I’d been irresponsible and not called to let anyone know I’d decided to extend my vacation-were exhausted. There was no Pollyanna rationalization, no easy dismissal that could explain my prolonged absence. With the alarm mounting to the level of a terrible ache in my dad’s stomach, by the time he said “I love you” to my mom and hung up, he felt like he’d been shot in the gut.
Things weren’t any easier on my mom, since ringing up the church turned out to be the most emotionally challenging call she made all day. As strong-willed as she is, she wasn’t used to asking for help for herself. However, when a good friend, Ann Fort, called back a few minutes later, saying she would be over to the house by seven P.M., my mom was glad she’d made the request.
At 5:23 P.M., starting with the Aspen police, my mom began calling the names on her yellow legal tablet. She told the same story a half-dozen times in a series of twenty-minute conversations. She talked with law-enforcement representatives across Utah for two hours, beginning at five-forty-five P.M., speaking first with two state patrol dispatchers within the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and then with another two dispatchers from the Zion National Park police, submitting request after request for urgency in their assistance on my case. Each time before she hung up, she finished with the question, “Who else should I call?”
Via our network of climbing friends and search-and-rescue colleagues, Steve Patchett had received a forwarded copy of the e-mail I’d written to Jason designating the four Utah canyons I’d wanted to visit. As a rescue leader with the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and one of my many mentors, Steve was acutely aware that time was of the essence in the developing situation. The first twenty-four hours of a search are often the most critical. From his house in Albuquerque, Steve called Mark Van Eeckhout in Los Alamos, and they spoke about the canyon list at 3:38 P.M. on Wednesday, trying to figure out where some of the more obscure canyons were located. Mark typed “Seger Canyon” into a search engine that found “Tom’s Utah Canyoneering Guide.” Clicking on the link, Mark read through a full guidebook-style description, complete with driving directions and topographic maps for the canyon. On the other end of the phone, Steve marked an “X” in central Wayne County on his Utah road atlas, following the driving directions that Mark read to him off the Web page. They found Cable Canyon adjacent to Segers Hole, at the southern end of the San Rafael Swell.
Steve then called the Ute Mountaineer, responding to Elliott’s e-mail and volunteering his time. Steve and Elliott talked for almost twenty-five minutes, and Steve said he would contact the various authorities in Colorado and Utah. Elliott had received an e-mail from my climbing friend Wolfgang Stiller, and confirmed in a short phone conversation that we had canceled the Mount of the Holy Cross trip due to avalanche conditions. However, Wolfgang had acknowledged that it was possible I’d gone ahead with the attempt by myself. Elliott passed this along to Steve, who said he would call the Eagle County sheriff to close out on the Mount of the Holy Cross lead. He told Elliott his next efforts would focus on the Utah locations.
Between four-fifteen and five P.M., Steve called the Zion National Parks police and the Emery County sheriff’s office (ECSO), headquartered in Castle Dale, Utah, to initiate searches at the trailheads for the Virgin River and the Black Box of the San Rafael, respectively. The Zion police indicated that they would check for my vehicle during their evening sweeps of the trailheads. Steve spoke with Captain Kyle Ekker of the ECSO at 5:19 P.M. in his Castle Dale office. Captain Ekker took the information from Steve and then had his ECSO dispatcher enter the missing person’s report, including issuing an all-points bulletin for my truck. Additionally, Captain Ekker asked local search-and-rescue volunteers to drive out to various trailheads. By 6:07 P.M., deputies and SAR folks were en route to Swinging Bridge, Joe’s Valley, and the Upper and Lower Black Boxes. By 6:51 P.M., all four field units had reported back to the ECSO dispatcher that they were searching the outlying trailheads of the San Rafael region for my vehicle. Volunteers Russell Jones and Randy Lake of the Emery County search-and-rescue team met in the area of the Lower Black Box and took all-terrain vehicles in to check the most inaccessible trailhead that normally can be reached only by mountain bike or on foot.
After filing reports with the other counties, Steve got through to my mom at 6:38 P.M. and let her know about the trailhead sweeps. Additionally, Steve was mobilizing a group from Albuquerque to go to Utah as early as the next day. My mom said she would keep in touch with DPS and a half-dozen contacts Steve provided, to keep tabs on the leads. As Steve read off his list of names and phone numbers, my mom recognized Emery County from the list she’d made after compiling the canyon information with Jason earlier in the afternoon. Once she got off the line with Steve, she was impatient to know if they’d found anything. When she called Emery County at 7:20 P.M., the dispatcher was in the process of receiving the calls from the field deputies and asked my mom to call back just a minute later. During the second conversation, my mom learned that the posse had “negative contact with the missing person or his vehicle.”
My mom pressed the searchers to keep going after dark, but the dispatcher indicated that was unlikely, as most of the deputies were going off-shift. It seemed reasonable to the dispatcher to suggest, “Sometimes hikers get disoriented and become lost. A lot of times, they find their way back after a few days.”
“This person clearly does not know my son,” my mom thought, and she replied in a stern assertion, “He is not lost. Something has happened to him.” But she acknowledged that the manpower situation was not going to permit these rural county sheriffs to dedicate all of their night-shift patrols to the hunt for my truck. She ended the conversation politely, then considered what to do next.
In the next ten minutes, she talked with Eric Ross of the Aspen police, who had taken over from Adam at the shift change. They decided he should go to my house in town and gather my credit-card numbers. My mom called and asked Elliott to help Eric, who was on his way to Spruce Street. Once the officer arrived, he and Elliott sat down in the living room and went over what had been going on at the Ute all afternoon. Elliott had left the shop when the doors closed at six P.M., bringing the files back to the house but suspending the e-mail routine until the morning, as we had no Internet connection at the house. Elliott took Eric into my room and showed him the files with my credit-card and bank statements. Eric made notes of the numbers while Elliott looked for my checkbook, which he found on my shelves. Voiding check number 1066, he tore it out and handed it to Eric. Eric told Elliott he would call the credit-card companies to track my purchases and then go to my bank when it opened in the morning to track my debit-card transactions.
Ready for bed after an emotionally and mentally exhausting day, Elliott wrote out a note that he affixed to my room door: “Aron, you’re missing. Everybody’s looking for you. Knock on my bedroom door or call my cell phone the minute you see this note.” Then he retired for the night.
My mom spoke again with my dad at nine P.M. to tell him about the search activities. This second conversation left my dad pacing in his hotel room, certain there was something keeping me from coming back. He knew I hadn’t simply taken off or gotten lost; the only things he could think had happened were that I’d fallen and broken my leg, or I was stuck under a rockslide on the side of a mountain. Praying to me, “Hang in there, Aron, stick with it,” he fought back other, more distressing thoughts. My dad knew, or wanted to believe, that I was alive, but that meant I was injured. It hurt him to know I was suffering; however, that was better than the alternative. There was no way he was going to find enough peace to sleep-grief kept him up and moving-so he busied himself preparing notes for the rest of the New York tour, in case he did need to leave and hand over the reins to someone else.
Up in Boulder, my friend Leona was riding back with her aunt from a meditation session that hadn’t helped ease her anxiety over my disappearance. She closed her eyes and felt a connection, something beckoning to her, and then a fuzzy vision appeared, like a dream. She saw a spirit that was clearly me, visible from the waist up. She recognized me but couldn’t tell where I was. She could tell I was alive and mostly OK, but frightened. I was holding my arm tight to my chest, as if I had injured it, and I was standing in a tight, dark place, wearing a green shirt. She sensed that I was conscious of her presence and scared, not of her but of my surroundings. She saw her arms reach out to reassure me with a comforting touch, but she was petrified herself-she couldn’t reach me. I had a decision to make. And it seemed I would have to make that decision on my own. Her empathy strengthened the vision’s accompanying physical sensations: She felt cold chills, a parching thirst, and deep exhaustion. She came out of the trance and was spent, as if she had just run ten miles. Sitting in the passenger seat of her aunt’s car, she realized they were home, but she couldn’t remember any of the fifteen-minute trip since they’d left the group session. Leona followed her aunt into the house, drank three liters of water, and went to bed, praying with her hands clasped that she wouldn’t dream about the vision. She knew she was powerless to help me, and she didn’t want to have another dreadful episode when there was nothing she could do.
After talking with my sister at 10:20 P.M., my mom went to bed. She slept about an hour, then grew restless. After midnight, she lay in bed with her eyes open, thinking about me. At two A.M., having waited edgily for the shift change ever since she’d woken up, my mom called the Aspen police. She learned that the search was slowing down due to a lack of information from my credit-card use-apparently I hadn’t used any of my cards since Thursday, April 24, in Glenwood Springs, to buy gas. There was no indication that I’d gotten any farther than Eagle County. But the biggest sticking point was the license plate; none of the numbers had generated the correct vehicle description when the police had done a records search. My mom knew that, but apparently Eric had tried again. What he said next gave her a pleasing lift: He had looked up the number for the New Mexico state police on their twenty-four-hour DMV assistance line, but without knowing the registration address, which obviously wasn’t in Colorado, he couldn’t perform the inquiry himself. My mom told Eric she would make the call and get the correct license-plate information; she was excited and relieved to once again have something to do.
At two-forty-five A.M., she got through to an officer in Santa Fe who was able to manipulate the computer file systems and perform a rough search based on the vehicle make and the registered address, which my mom correctly deduced was my town home in Albuquerque. Within ten minutes, she had confirmed my license number was NM 846-MMY and relayed the information to Officer Ross. It was the best feeling she’d had since she successfully reset my e-mail password over sixteen hours earlier. As soon as the sheriffs’ offices opened in the morning, she would start through her call list for the third time. Walking across the kitchen from her station at the phone, my mother sat down on the carpeted steps leading upstairs to where her friend Ann was sleeping in the guest bedroom, and for the next three hours, she held a solitary vigil, praying to me, “Hold on. We’re coming, Aron, we’re coming. Just hold on.”