It was like having sex with death.
– BARRY BLANCHARDon his team’s attempt to climb the 15,000-foot-high Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat, in Pakistan
IT’S 11:34 A.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003. I set my knife on top of the chockstone and package my stump in the plastic grocery sack that had been stuffed between my right arm and the wall. Wrapping the white sack with the yellow webbing I have around my neck, I stuff my arm into the empty CamelBak backpack, throwing the tightened straps over my head to hold my amputated arm to my chest in a makeshift sling. It doesn’t cross my mind to stop and remove my biking shorts for additional absorbent padding; at this point, I just need to get moving. I clean two carabiners out of my pulley rigging and clip them to a loop on my harness, then frantically toss a few necessary loose articles into my pack-the empty water reservoir, the mostly full bottle of urine, the video camera, my pocketknife-and pause as I pick up my digital still camera. Some instinct inside me pulses, and I turn on the camera. In five seconds, I take two close-up photos of my severed hand. It is an unsentimental goodbye. Turning off the camera, I replace the lens cover, stuff it in the pack, and carefully cinch the cord shut. After a brief survey of the chockstone vicinity to make sure I’m not leaving anything critical behind, I sloppily grab two dozen coils of my climbing rope in my left hand and stumble off down the canyon.
After careening from wall to wall continuously for the first fifty feet, I have to stop and restore my calm. My heart is raging, beating three times its normal resting rate, but with only a fraction of its regular pressure. I’m in danger of blacking out.
Settle down, Aron. You can’t pass out now.
It will do me no good to rush and overexert myself. First I have to get to water. I deeply inhale and exhale three breaths, compose myself, and go on, dragging the rope behind me in an ever tangling mess. It takes me twenty minutes to cover the next 150 yards. What light was here two hours ago, when the sun dagger made its appearance, is gone, but my eyes are used to the dimness, and I don’t bother to turn on my headlamp. The serpentine slot canyon is less than shoulder width for most of the distance; I carefully scoot sideways through the passage so I don’t bump my right arm. In at least ten different places, I have to single-handedly perform an intricate series of semi-technical scrambling maneuvers, first tossing the rope through each narrow twist in the canyon and then clawing my way through after it. I slide on my butt down into a toilet-bowl feature where water has scoured out a round pothole at the bottom of a pair of S-curves. Thankfully, it is a shallow bowl, with an easy shelf to clamber over at the exit. I worry that a smooth-walled pothole even just a few feet deep could be an insurmountable obstacle for me now. My mood is frenetic; I’m trying to move as quickly as I can, but at the same time, adrenaline and endorphins are warping my mind. This hundred yards of slot stretches out to twice its actual length, and I expect to exit the narrows four or five different times before I finally burst into the sun on a rock shelf midway up a sheer-walled amphitheater some 150 feet deep. I walk out into the middle of the shelf and look around. The position is spectacular, like in The Temple of Doom, when Indiana Jones rides the railcar out of the underground mine and he’s cliffed out halfway up an unscalable face. Fortunately, I am prepared for this: I have my harness, rappel device, and a sufficient length of beefy rope. To my left are two bolts drilled into the rock with a recently tied-off loop of webbing threading through the bolt eyelets, and a floating rappel ring that drapes down to a point some three feet back from the edge of the rock shelf. This is the Big Drop rappel.
Standing in the sun for the first time in six days makes me slightly light-headed. I wobble to the leading edge of the queen-bed-sized shelf to peer down the Big Drop. There, in the sandy bottom of the amphitheater directly below the Drop, is a bathtub’s amount of water in a shallow and turgid pool. My head is baking in the sun, and at the enticing sight of water, I swoon and almost lunge headfirst over the precipice, but catch my balance before I fall over the edge.
Whoa, Aron, slow down. No stupid mistakes.
I hastily clip myself into the anchor with my daisy chain and set to work untangling the 170-foot remaining length of my originally 200-foot rope. Using my left hand and my mouth to shuttle-feed the sandy rope, I tediously work one end at a time back through the knots I’ve unintentionally formed over the past five nights of coiling the rope loops around my legs, and then dragging the whole mess behind me through the slot for the last twenty minutes. Out of sight to my left, little by little, one end of the rope inadvertently slides over the lip of the rappel ledge until its mass has enough tension to tug the rest of the rope precariously close to the shelf’s edge. I hear the distinctive zip-zip of the slinking rope and turn to watch it slithering out of sight over the edge. Instinctively, I jump on the tail of the rope with my left foot, pinning it tight to the sandstone shelf with my running shoe. If I drop the rope, the game is over. This ten-and-a-half-millimeter-diameter lifeline is a sine qua non of my escape from Blue John Canyon. Without it, I would be forced to exit up the canyon, where I know there is no water, journeying in my handicapped state up rough terrain for four hours until I could theoretically flag down assistance on the dirt Maze road. That is, if I lived that long, which I wouldn’t. If I drop the rope, I might as well chuck myself off the ledge and follow its free-falling arc in a terminal swan dive into the shin-deep puddle sixty-five feet below.
Don’t drop the rope, Aron. No stupid mistakes.
I tie a figure-eight on a loop near the middle of the rope and clip the knot into the anchor. This second potentially fatal near-miss in under five minutes has me sharply focused on setting the rappel and getting to that pool of water. Every minute I’ve spent untangling the rope has parched me more and more. Now that I’m fully exposed to the sun’s warmth, I feel the dehydration accelerate threefold; with each pass of the gritty rope through my lips, my tongue and palate increasingly turn to grating sheets of sandpaper. One knot extracted from fifty feet up the rope requires three dozen bites. Finally, I figure out a better method-to hold the knot in my mouth and reverse the rope through the loop. I still have to hold the cord in my lips and override my tongue’s instinct to lick at it every few seconds. My respirations strip the last moisture from my body, and though I’m only five minutes away from the puddle, I have to drink something immediately.
Spitting out the rope, I pinch it between my knees and sling my backpack off my left shoulder, then carefully lift the right strap off the end of my padded stump. Down in the bottom of the main compartment is my charcoal Nalgene bottle, three quarters full of piss. Whereas I previously have only sipped or taken a mouthful at a time of the decanted orange urine, now I gulp three, five, seven ounces down in ten seconds and retch violently at the foul taste of the repugnant liquid. But the sensation that I am shriveling up on this ledge abates, and I can continue preparing the rope.
After fifteen minutes of sorting the rope into two knot-free stacks, it is ready to go over the edge. I check the knot, clipped into the single carabiner secured on the purple webbing of the anchor, and, one at a time, toss each pile of rope over the cliff. Ordinarily, I would remove the knot and let the rope dangle from the anchor. This would allow me to pull the rope down once I reached the bottom; today, however, I intend to abandon it. I won’t need it after this, and right now I’m truly unconcerned about littering.
Standard practice would have me back up the anchor carabiner with a second one, the gates opposite and opposed, but I’m not worried that this one will accidentally open or fail. There is nothing the ’biner can catch on, and its rating is strong enough that I could hang two pickup trucks off of it. The webbing is new within a month, and I’m satisfied with its strength as well; it hasn’t been chewed on or chafed or significantly degraded by the sun. If I didn’t trust the webbing, I could clip my rope on a ’biner directly into one of the bolt eyelets, but I decide the setup is plenty sufficient to hold my weight on the descent.
Next, I take my Air Traffic Controller (ATC) rappel/belay device and bend each rope strand through one of the twin slots in the mouth of the device. Once they’re through, I clip my main carabiner through the rope loops. After I tighten down the lock on the carabiner gate, I’m finally on rappel. I unclip my daisy chain from the anchor webbing and back up until my weight comes onto the rope and anchor system. Checking my harness, I see that I haven’t doubled back the waist belt through the D-ring that holds it in place. Theoretically, the belt could pull through the ring, and then my weight would be suspended entirely by my leg loops. If I had two hands and weren’t in the process of bleeding to death, I would double back the belt, but right now, with water waiting below, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Looking down at my feet, I back up in jerking motions, feeding six inches of the ropes through my ATC with each stuttering step. At the edge, I can peek down between my legs at the dizzying six-story drop and see that the ledge I’m departing hangs out over the rest of the cliff. I’m slightly nervous about doing this rappel with just my left hand. If my grasp slips or for some reason I let go, I have no backup; I’ll accelerate down the rope, only slightly slower than in free fall, and take a hard landing next to the pool, probably breaking my legs or worse. It’s very important that I take the overhanging section slowly.
Just ease back. Little more. Little more. That’s it, Aron. Step down onto that block. No, left foot first. Good. Steady. Now your right foot. Excellent. Lean back on the rope. Trust it. Push your butt out. Straighten your legs. Now feed a little more rope out. Slowly. Sloooowly. Good. Now hold on tight.
The pucker factor is high on the upper part of the rappel. With the rope’s weight putting additional friction on my rappel device, I have to fight and pull the strands to feed them through the device bit by bit-a significant effort that saps my remaining strength-but not so much that I slide down the rope and lose my balance. It’s like trying to drive a car in 5-mph stop-and-go traffic while pressing the accelerator to the floor and controlling the vehicle’s speed by releasing the hand brake. I have to let off the brake to get going, but it’s dangerously easy to release it too far and lose control. Doing it one-handed means I don’t have any way to reach out and stabilize myself when I start to swing one direction or the other as I move my feet over the awkwardly uneven lip of the shelf. I’m most worried that I’ll let too much rope through, fall off the lip, and hit the edge of the shelf with my shoulder or my head, then let go of the rope. The poached air sucks my pores dry, and I’m tortured for three minutes as I make a prolonged series of infinitesimal adjustments and maneuvers to get my body under the shelf. Finally, I let a little more rope through the ATC, my feet cut loose off the lower edge of the shelf, and I’m dangling free from the wall on my rope, some sixty feet off the ground. A moment of giddy delight replaces my anxiety as I spin around to face the amphitheater, floating comfortably in midair. Gliding down the rope, moving faster as I get closer to the ground, I notice the echo of my ropes singing as they slide through the ATC.
Touching down, I pull the twenty-foot-long tails of my ropes through my rappel device and immediately lunge for the mud-ringed puddle. I move out of the sun and into the cool shade, brusquely swing my pack off my left side and then more delicately over my right arm, and once again retrieve my Nalgene. When I open the lid this time, I toss its contents into the sand off to my left and fill it in the puddle, scooping up leaves and dead insects along with the aromatic water. I’m so parched I can taste the elevated humidity around the pool, and it piques my thirst. I swish the liquid to rinse out the bottle and then dump that to the side as well.
Scooping the bottle through the pool twice, I again fill it with the brown water. In the time it takes me to bring the Nalgene’s rim to my lips, I debate whether to sip it slowly or guzzle away and decide to sip then guzzle. The first droplets meet my tongue, and somewhere in the heavens, a choir strikes up. The water is cool, and best of all, it’s brandy-sweet, like a fine after-dinner port. I drink the entire liter in four chugging swallows, drowning myself in pleasure, and then reach to fill the bottle again. (So much for sipping.) The second liter follows in the same manner, and I refill the bottle once more. I wonder if the water would taste as wonderfully sweet to a normally hydrated person. If the water really is this delicious, what makes it that way? Are the dead leaves stewing the liquid into some kind of desert tea?
I sit at the edge of the puddle, and, for the moment, I am enjoying myself, as though my thirst is all that really matters, and now that it’s taken care of, I am totally at ease. Everything disappears. I even cease noticing the pain of my arm. I daydream as if I’m on a picnic, sitting in the shade after a long lunch, with nothing left to do except watch the clouds roll by.
But I know the relief will be short-lived. As relaxed as I am, I have eight miles of sandy hiking in front of me to reach my truck, and I need to steel myself for it. I notice several sets of hoofprints in the sand off to my right. Someone, or a group of someones, has ridden up into and out of this box canyon since the last storm. My heart leaps to think I might come across a party of cowboys somewhere along my hike, but I know better than to yell out or hold those hopes too closely. The dried-out road apples dotting the wash for fifty yards downcanyon tell me it’s been over a day since those horses came through here. And tourists on horseback aren’t likely to spend the night.
I quaff the third liter more conservatively, even nestling the hard plastic bottle in the sand for a minute or two to rummage through my pack and sort out what I can leave behind. I set aside my broken Discman and the two scratched CDs, and decide that everything else will come with me. With my digital still camera, I take a picture of my doubled rope hanging down the Big Drop and then hold the camera out in my left hand for a self-portrait with the pool in the background. It’s 12:16 P.M. I am elated to have come this far, but the photo records a grungy eight-day beard, specks of gore from the operation, and a haunted grimace. After putting the camera and the video camcorder in the outer mesh pouch of my backpack, I work at fitting the bite valve back on the tubing stub at the bottom of my CamelBak reservoir and then fill up the container with two liters of the syrupy water.
Still drinking my third liter, I get out my folded guidebook photocopy and measure the distance to the first landmark on my journey, the confluence of Blue John with Horseshoe Canyon. The map is delineated in kilometers, and doing the conversion I estimate it’s a solid two miles from where I’m sitting to the confluence. After that, a short half mile will bring me to the boundary of Canyonlands, and two miles after that, I’ll pass the Great Gallery, which the caption under the photo on the left side of my photocopy describes as “probably the best [pictograph panel] in the world.” Another three quarters of a mile, or maybe a mile, and I will come to the first water seep in the Barrier Creek drainage. That means it will be at least two hours until I get to the next place that could possibly have water. I don’t know for sure if there will be anything there-it will depend on the water table and any rains that came the week before I arrived in Utah-but I’ll need water by then, whether it’s there or not.
The best I can do to prepare for the coming march is fill my CamelBak and Nalgene and seal them closed. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I stand up and feel the water sloshing in my stomach. I wish I could rest and let the water enter my system, but I’m slowly bleeding out, and I have three, maybe four hours to go from here. I made my choice an hour and forty-five minutes ago when I cut into my arm. Now I resolve to follow that choice through to its conclusion-reaching my truck and then getting to a clinic or, failing that, a phone.
Marching into the wide-open, sunny, sandy canyon bottom, I start my eight-mile trek. The heat instantly saps what little rehydration I accomplished at the pool, and within two hundred yards, I have to take a sip of water. After going through the rigmarole of digging my Nalgene out of my pack, I take my last remaining nonlocking carabiner off my harness’s gear loop and clip the gate through the bottle’s cap loop, then snap the metal link onto a strap hanging off the left side of my backpack’s padded waist belt.
Continuing on, I walk past several large cottonwoods and a thicket of tamarisks that testify to the substantial runoff that passes through this part of the canyon. In another hundred yards, the brush subsides. I tire of walking in my harness, with the belay device and daisy chain dangling in front of my thighs, so I tear the belt back through the safety ring and wiggle my legs out of their loops one at a time until the harness and the attached accoutrements drop behind me to lie in the sand like a pile of dead snakes. “That’ll be someone else’s little score,” I think, “some fine canyoneering booty, that.” Through the first meanders of the canyon, I find myself crossing the fifty-yard-wide floor to take advantage of the shade at the edges of the wash, but still, the effort of walking at even a moderate pace leaves me parched within a minute of sipping at my water. After a single mile, I’m as thoroughly dried up as I was at the top of the rappel, and I’ve already drunk a full liter, a third of my water supply.
Not ten minutes after leaving the puddle, my bowels wake up for the first time since Saturday morning. I know what’s coming, and I know it’s coming quick. I rush over to an alcove along the edge of the wash where the occasional flood action has carved out a bench on the outside curve of the stream course, and hurry to undo the belt on my shorts. I strip down my three layers of shorts, biking shorts, and underwear just in time as I desecrate the slickrock. The water I’ve drunk has spilled over out of my stomach and flooded my bowels.
Oh, dude! Jeezus! That’s horrendous, man!
As if I weren’t in enough distress already, now I have to try and clean myself up. It’s pointless to try to wipe; I have nothing except my clothes, and I kind of need those. I pull up my underwear but take off the biking shorts and stuff them in the top of my backpack. I put my tan-and-blood-colored shorts back on and feel ten degrees cooler without the black padded shorts. No time to dwell; the episode is past.
Hiking again, just before the canyon swerves to the right in a sweeping gooseneck bend, I take a left into a side canyon, thinking it to be the main drainage, but within forty steps, I feel an added strain on my debilitated system and realize that I’m actually walking upgrade and turn around.
No stupid mistakes, Aron. Pay attention here. You knew this wasn’t Horseshoe Canyon. It’ll be obvious when you get there. Keep track with your map. You know how to do this.
Suddenly, I feel a wetness spreading across my lower back. My CamelBak is leaking. I stop and drop to my knees, swinging my backpack around to the front. Sure enough, the bite valve is leaking water out of the bottom of the CamelBak. It’s not designed to hold back pressure at the bottom of the reservoir, and since I sliced away the tubing that would usually connect there, I have a problem. I open my empty Nalgene and squeeze the bite valve into its mouth, pouring half the remaining contents of the reservoir into the bottle. “Now what?” I wonder. If I leave the water in the CamelBak, it’ll leak out and be gone before I get to Horseshoe. I screw the lid back on the Nalgene, clip it on my backpack strap, and decide the best thing I can do now is drink the rest of the water in my CamelBak and go the rest of the way on what’s in the Nalgene. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than wasting the water.
Now my new reality sets in. I have drunk five liters of water in under an hour and covered only a mile of the canyon. I have one liter of water left, six miles to go, it’s only going to get hotter, and I’m only going to get weaker. I have to figure out a better way to do this, or I’ll be dead before I get halfway to the Great Gallery. A memory comes to mind, a story I read in a running magazine maybe a few years ago, about the legendary Mexican Indian tribe of the Tarahumara. I remember being impressed not just that the tribesmen would run distances of fifty miles in a day, often in their bare feet, and through the heat of the desert, but that they would undertake these ultramarathons without any support-they wouldn’t even carry any food or water. Their trick was to take in a mouthful of water at the start, not swallowing it but rather carrying it in their mouth, allowing that single swallow to humidify the air going into their lungs. As long as they kept their pace below their sweating threshold, they would lose only the humidification that they exhaled. I decide it’s worth a shot and take two ounces of water in my mouth and hold it there while I walk myself closer, yard by yard, to my truck hidden somewhere up on the tablelands to the north.
I immediately sense that the trick is working. Although I’m still thirsty, I’m breathing well and don’t feel a tenth as parched as I did when I was drinking the water outright. This might just help me conserve the rest of my water supply.
At mile two of my march, at 1:09 P.M., I come to the confluence of Blue John and Horseshoe canyons and take a left toward the Great Gallery without missing a stride. However, in another five minutes, the sand in my left shoe builds up enough that I decide to stop and take it off. It’s been grating my sole raw, and I can’t stand it anymore. My left foot is much worse off than my right because I left the tatters of my left sock at the chockstone, stretched over the hammer rock’s top. Getting my shoe off and emptying it are the easy parts. I still cannot tie the laces, so I pull them tight and tuck the loose ends into the sides of my shoe next to my bare foot. Good enough. From here forward, I am as diligent with my steps as I can be to avoid the sand, both for ease of travel and to avoid getting more grit in my shoe.
At mile two and a half, I come across a barbed-wire fence hanging across the wash, suspended by burly cables sunk into the rock on either side of the streambed. This must be the boundary for the national park, I figure, as I duck through a cutaway section in the middle of the fence where the boards are loose at the bottom. Right after I step through the fence line into the Horseshoe Canyon District of Canyonlands, my bowels start shouting, and my sphincter clenches. I charge over to a suitable spot in the shade of another shelf where I can lean and purge my intestines. Diarrhea won’t usurp blood loss as the primary threat to my life, but if it keeps up, it could dehydrate me even more. Round two over, I hike up my plaid boxers and shorts and march onward. The water trick continues to help me hike briskly while minimizing my intake. I swallow every five or ten minutes, but the good news is that I still have over twenty ounces left in my Nalgene.
At mile four, I pass a three-hundred-foot-high wall on my left with dozens of broad-shouldered figures painted to enormous scale in all shades of tan and maroon. These are the pictographs of the Great Gallery, which I acknowledge now merely as a milestone on my march. Just down the canyon, amid a small coppice of reeds, cattails, and bulrushes, I step into soft waterlogged ground covered by a thick growth of grasses. A few paces farther through the marsh, I push aside some sedges and find a short stretch of open water. Hallelujah! It’s 1:55 P.M. when I stoop over a muddy rivulet six inches wide and two inches deep and try to refill my water containers. It’s a frustrating enterprise but worth every effort; I was down to just five ounces in my bottle, and now I can stock up again. I have to build a small mud dam so I can scoop my CamelBak reservoir through the muck. I kidnap a pair of tadpoles in my water bottle, but I figure why bother trying to get them out? I’ve probably consumed several hundred thousand invisible swimmers up to this point. What’s the difference of two more, just because I can see them?
The blood from my stump is dripping quickly now, despite my tourniquet and wrappings, and several dozen red splotches appear in the sandy mud as I try to get more water into my CamelBak. The pain in my arm aches insistently around the tourniquet, and it takes on a mountainous presence of its own in my mind, repeatedly sending its single-minded message: “Your arm is severely injured; you need to make it better.” The pain tempts me to sit and regain strength, but I know I have to press on. At least I have more water now.
Other footprints join together to form a gradually more distinct path through the sand dunes and tunnels of cottonwoods in this part of the canyon. Cairns appear beside the path. It makes sense that this part is more traveled, since it’s the approach to the Great Gallery. I can’t discern the age of any of the footprints, only that there have been dozens since the last rain or flood. Still, following the lesson I learned during my entrapment, I decide not to yell out. If there are people in this canyon, I’ll find them, but it’s best not to elevate my hopes.
At mile six, I make a left turn heading toward a colossal alcove that must be a hundred yards wide and at least that tall, overhanging a good hundred feet at its deepest point. Nearing the mammoth roof, the streambed turns to the right, and an unexpected sight shuts down my motor system as if the main breaker tripped in my head’s fuse box. There, seventy yards ahead of me, walking side by side by side are three hikers, one smaller than the other two. Other people! I can’t believe it. Up until this moment, I wasn’t at all certain I would see another person in the canyon. I swallow the water in my mouth and shake my head, trying to determine if they are heading toward me or not. For the briefest moment, I wonder if they are really there. They seem to be walking away.
Quick, Aron, call to them. They’ll help you.
I have to signal them before they get too far off. I try to shout, but my voice catches in my throat once, then twice, and I merely gargle the remains of my last mouthful of water. Finally, I manage a feeble “Helllp!” After a deep breath, I make another, stronger shout: “HELP!”
The group stops and turns back to face me. I keep walking and shout again, “HELP! I NEED HELP!” All three of them start running toward me, and I feel as though I am about to cry. I’m not alone anymore. This thought is a major relief, and while I still have a good reserve of gumption left, I feel a boost of confidence: I’m going to make it. I know now that I won’t have to drive myself anywhere once we get to the trailhead. These people are going to help me.
I’m going to make it.
We close the distance, and I see what I presume is a family: a man and a woman in their late thirties, and a boy who I guess is their son. They’re all dressed in shorts, T-shirts, hats, and tall hiking boots. The woman has a fanny pack around her waist with two water bottles in the side holsters. The man has a midsize backpack on, nearly the same size as mine, but it looks light and is probably mostly empty.
As we get close enough that I can talk to them, I begin telling them, “My name is Aron Ralston. I was trapped by a boulder on Saturday, and I’ve been without food and water for five days. I cut my arm off this morning to get free, and I’ve lost a lot of blood. I need medical attention.”
I finish my announcement, and we come to a stop, face-to-face, a few feet away from each other. I’m coated in blood on my right side from my shirt collar to my shoe tip. I look at the boy-he can’t be more than ten years old-and fear that I’ve just scarred him for life.
The man speaks, his single short sentence coming through to me as through a mental fog until something clicks in my mind. Realizing he has a Germanic accent, I decipher the six words:
“They told us you were here.”
It takes me a good five seconds to process the full meaning of his statement, and the next thing I know, I’m hiking at full speed down the canyon, barking at this innocent family to start hiking. “We have to get moving. We’ll talk while we walk. Can you understand me all right?”
The dad nods but protests, “You should stop and rest.”
I reiterate my command-“No, we need to keep hiking”-and then begin barraging them with questions: “Who are ‘they’? Who told you I was here? Do you have a phone of any sort that works down here?”
The family trots to catch up to me as the dad replies, “There are police at the parking. They told us to keep an eye out for you. We told them we would.”
“Do you have a phone?” I ask again. They do not. The dad has a GPS on a string around his neck. “Can you tell me how far is it to the trailhead?”
“It is, ahh, three kilometers.”
Oh, man, how can that be? I check my map, and it looks much closer than that, maybe a mile to where the trail leaves the canyon bottom and another mile of steep hiking. “Are you sure?”
He shows me the GPS screen. He’s benchmarked the route, and the display indicates that we are now 2.91 kilometers from and 220 meters below the trailhead. The elevation will be the devastating part. I can feel the strain that comes with hiking up over the ten-foot-high sandbars where the trail cuts the corners off the meandering wash channel. I start to have doubts that I will make it to the trailhead after all. Maybe it is the knowledge that there are rescuers there, and that they might be able to come get me, but I begin to understand my body is failing. I’ve lost too much blood. Even minor obstacles cost me a great deal of energy and cause my heart rate to skyrocket.
Thinking through the sequence of events that will most quickly lead to definitive medical care, I ask the hikers for their names so I can plan what I’m going to ask them to do.
“I am Eric, and this is Monique and Andy,” the dad replies. “We are the Meijers, from Holland.” (That explains the accent as well as the excellent English.) I haven’t yet heard Monique or Andy speak, but I can safely assume their English is just as good as Eric’s.
“OK, Eric, you guys look pretty fit. I need one of you to run ahead and get to the police at the trailhead.” I am fairly certain that the people there aren’t actually police, but that’s what he called them. “I need them to send down a litter and a team of people to help carry me out. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it out of the canyon. Will you do that?”
“Monique can run-she is fast.”
Still hiking along, I look to his wife, and she nods. “Do you understand what I need?” I ask.
“Yes, a litter and a-”
I interrupt her. “Wait. Did the police have radios and phones?” The two adults nod. “OK, I need you to ask them for a helicopter.” Why I didn’t think of this first, I don’t know-maybe because of my fatigue-but a helicopter will be much better than a litter team. All I’ll have to do is get up to a place where a helicopter can land, and then wait. I think I can manage that. I look at Monique. “Please, now, go fast.”
[The following passage is from a letter from Eric Meijer, giving his account of our unplanned rendezvous.]
On Thursday May 1st, our family [my wife, Monique, our son, Andy, and myself, Eric Meijer] planned a trip to the Horseshoe Canyon, a remote section of Canyonlands N.P. in Utah. At the start of the trailhead we talked to a ranger who told us about a car that was parked in the area already for several days and that the owner might be missing in the canyon. We joked that we would keep our eyes open and that we would try to find him.
After a hike of 3.7 miles to the Great Gallery (Indian rock art) where we took some pictures, we returned and suddenly heard a noise behind us, and after that a voice that cried “Help, I need help!”
Monique and I immediately realized that this had to be the missing person. We didn’t find him, he found us! A bit unstable but pretty quickly he walked nearer and we saw that the right-hand side of him was full of blood.
His arm, or better what was left, hung in a self-made sling. We ran towards him and he spoke clearly: “Hello, my name is Aron. A boulder fell on me on Saturday. I have been stuck for five days without food or water. I cut off my hand four hours ago and I need medical attention. I need a helicopter.”
We decided that my wife and our son would try to get out of the canyon ASAP to get help, whilst I remained with Aron to move with him in the same direction, giving him food and water and supporting him mentally at the same time. Aron asked me to carry his backpack and by continuous talking I tried to find out as much as possible about his further well-being. It was important to direct him ASAP out of the narrower part of Horseshoe Canyon towards the wider area near the climb out where a heli could possibly land.
As Monique takes off at a jog, Andy follows her. I almost ask the boy to stay with us so Monique can go faster, but more immediately, I think of asking Eric if he has any food. He thinks and calls out to Monique, and she stops. “We have a couple Oreos left, but Monique has them,” Eric explains to me, and shouts to her to get out the cookies as we catch up to her. She hands over the clear plastic sleeve that held fifteen cookies with an apology that she and Andy ate most of them already. She and the boy turn and run off again.
There are only two Oreos left, but they are heaven-sent, and I dispose of them in a single chomp each, pausing after the first one to unscrew the lid on my water bottle and take a swig of tadpole water to wash it down. After I munch the second cookie, Eric hands me an unopened half-liter bottle of distilled spring water. It doesn’t taste as good as the Big Drop puddle water, but it’s a vast improvement over the sandy sludge currently in my Nalgene. I thank Eric for the water, and I ask him if he will carry my pack. He says certainly, and I shrug it off, lightening my burden by a few pounds.
Eric talks with me and asks a few questions about what happened. I’m trying to walk with the water in my mouth still, but each time I reply to one of his questions, I swallow the water. When I finish talking, almost always keeping my answers short, I take another few ounces into my mouth and hold them there. After a half-dozen rounds of inquiries, I let Eric know that I need to stop talking and focus on hiking.
About five minutes after Monique and Andy leave us the second time, Eric and I come across another hiker, in his early forties, headed in the opposite direction with an older woman who looks to be his mother. He asks if we need any assistance, and I reply with a question: “Do you have a cell phone or a satellite phone?” He does not have a phone of any kind, but he offers that he is medically trained. Relieved to have come across someone with more medical knowledge than my meager education by osmosis from search-and-rescue missions, I ask him to join us as we hike. He leaves the woman who continues hiking and introduces himself as Wayne, and I engage him in a back-and-forth to double-check that I’m doing everything I can at the moment to help myself. We walk together through endless stretches of tamarisks that whip at my arm and face, as I ask questions like “Is it OK that I eat?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, sure”) and “Should I worry about drinking too much water?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, you’ll be OK.”)
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 river 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.
Before Steve can ask any more questions, the anesthesiologist returns, this time carrying a loaded syringe and a needle that looks to my eyes like it’s big enough to inoculate a horse. I know what she’s going to do, and I interrupt her in a firm voice. “Whoa, I need to tell you something. Sometimes I have reactions to needles. I’ve passed out from shots, and I fell out of a chair once after having my blood drawn. My doctor told me to tell people that before I get a shot. In my condition now, I don’t know what might happen to me. I could go into shock.”
The doctor, stopped cold in her tracks at my first words, absorbs what I am telling her with a fixed stare. All I can see are her eyes, which are wide open with disbelief, even as she says, “You mean you’re not in shock?”
“I don’t know, clinically, maybe, I don’t-”
She shortcuts my wavering with a direct question: “I’ve got this morphine ready. Do you want it or not?”
“Oh hell yes!” I exclaim. “Give it to me. Just hold me on the table if I start slithering around, OK?”
I look over at Ranger Steve as the doctor injects the needle. A mild burning courses up my arm as the narcotic enters my vein, but I never lose consciousness. Steve and I resume our debriefing as I describe my intended route from the Horseshoe Canyon trailhead down the Maze road, through Blue John Canyon, over the Big Drop, and back to my truck via Horseshoe Canyon. Explaining the dimensions of the section of slot where I was trapped, I reiterate the size of the rock and tell Steve how I was stuck in a standing position but that I rigged up an anchor so I could take the weight off my legs. I fill in the time line as best I can before I get drowsy from the morphine, outlining when I ran out of water, when I ran out of food, and when I figured out how to break my arm bones and amputate my arm. Then, as I hear a new voice, a man’s baritone, asking what the items are covering my right arm, I feel someone tugging at the CamelBak pack that I used as a sling, and I hear Ranger Steve say, “There’s a tourniquet or two under there. The rest is just padding.” With the world diving into a tunnel, I manage to slur, “Juss one, on my forearm,” before my streak of 127 hours of uninterrupted experience ends at three forty-five P.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003.
Ranger Steve Swanke takes my map and the notes from our discussion and walks into the reception area. After he collects himself from the surreal twenty-minute conversation he just had with me, his first action is to unclip his Park Service-issued cell phone from his belt and call my mom. She answers on the second ring, “Hello, this is Donna,” her voice stronger and more hopeful than the first time Steve heard her answer the phone with those words.
“Donna, hello. It’s Ranger Steve again. I have some good news and some bad news. We’ve found your son; he’s alive and he’s going to live.” Steve pauses and then issues the more difficult half of the update: “He was forced to amputate his arm to get out of the situation he was in. He’s in Moab now, but I’m sure he’ll be headed to Grand Junction shortly.”
My mom exhales heavily, as if she had been holding her breath for the last two days. “Thank God.” She instantly feels the relief of a mighty burden lifted. Her prayers have been answered: Her son is alive, and he’s going to be OK.
Still holding the phone, she turns to Sue Doss, who is at the kitchen table. “Sue, they found him! He’s going to be OK!” Never in her life has she been more full of joy than in that moment. For my mom, even the bad news is a blessing in that it isn’t any worse. She gathers herself, and the words rush out to Steve: “Oh, thank you, thank you. Thank you for bringing him back. We’ll leave right away.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Please be in touch as you know more.”
“I’ll do that. Anything else?”
A second request forms slowly in her mind, and she teases it out. “You’ll probably have to file a report or talk to the media about Aron. Please don’t be judgmental.”
Taking a few minutes to assess his notes, Ranger Steve sorts through the facts, looking for causes and contributing factors. As an experienced outdoorsman himself, he reflects for a few moments about how many times he has gone out hiking and kayaking by himself. “What is this all about? I go out and engage in risk activities by myself without always telling my wife where I’m going. It’s happening in Canyonlands today. There are people out there on their own involved in risk activities, solo, without anyone knowing where they are.” He fingers the map, knowing from my website that I am an experienced canyoneer and that Blue John Canyon is not a difficult canyon. Usually, Steve expects that an accident’s severity will be proportional to the terrain-extreme consequences befit extreme environments-but this event was catastrophic relative to the ease of the topography. “This is five-one canyoneering; it really doesn’t get any easier than this. I move rocks hiking in the canyons all the time, I can relate to that. We dance with these canyons with white gloves on, like we’re walking on eggshells. That’s what canyoneers do. We’re always conscious of it: ‘Is this rock going to move?’ or ‘Is that rock going to move?’ ”
Steve peers through the window in the door of the ER, watching the nurses and the doctor bustling around my unconscious body, thinking about what makes the difference in those thousands of decisions on any given outing. “Most of the time we judge it right, and on occasion we judge it wrong,” he deliberates, “and most of the time when we judge it wrong, the consequences are pretty inconsequential. On occasion, the consequences are pretty significant.” He concludes, “This was someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, an extreme case of bad luck. It’s just bad luck.”
After talking with Captain Kyle Ekker, my friend Rachel Polver calls Elliott, her voice ringing with excitement. “They found Aron! Are you sitting down?”
“Yeah, sure,” Elliott lies, pacing around the living room of the house at Spruce Street.
“He’s alive…but he cut off his arm.”
Elliott’s muscles stop propelling him around the room. His stunned reaction is “Holy cow, I should have been sitting down for that.”
Immediately after landing, pilot Terry Mercer calls in a fuel truck from the Grand County search-and-rescue group. DPS flies for enough rescues in the Moab area that the local SAR team has access to a small tanker. One of the team’s rescue leaders, Bego Gerhart, drives the truck to the hospital, since Terry doesn’t have enough fuel left to take off and fly to the airport just ten miles north of town. As the helicopter refuels, Ranger Steve asks Detective Funk and Sergeant Vetere to pick up a soft-sided cooler from the hospital and fill it with ice. The ER doctor, Dr. Bobby Higgins, wants to see what he can do to save my hand for a possible reattachment. Greg and Mitch’s next assignment is to return to Blue John Canyon, find the place where I had been trapped, and retrieve my severed right hand. Mitch doesn’t want to fly any more than he has to to get back to his vehicle at the trailhead, so Terry yells over to Bego at the fuel truck, “Hey, you wanna go for a ride?”
Bego is up for the trip and joins Greg in the back of the helicopter for the fifteen-minute flight back to Horseshoe Canyon. Terry drops Mitch at the trailhead at four-thirty P.M., and then Terry, Greg, and Bego take off to find the slot. With the map I gave Steve, and with Bego’s knowledge of the area, they are able to land precisely on a sandstone knoll above the hidden slot. Once in the canyon, Terry is out of his element, but as a more experienced canyoneer, Bego coaches him along. They figure they’ll need all three men to roll the boulder off of my hand. They scramble down past the entry drop-off, run the chockstone gauntlet, twist through the meandering narrows, and in five minutes, come to an installation of ropes and webbing hanging from the point of a ledge at their feet. This must be the place.
Climbing down from the lip of the drop, the trio easily determines that they will not be able to move the chockstone without significant mechanical aid. It’s not sitting on the ground, as they imagined, but wedged between the walls, and they estimate it to be closer to half a ton than the two hundred pounds I reported. For the time being, the decomposing remains of my long-dead hand cannot be retrieved. After Greg takes a few photographs for evidence, they collect the yellow webbing, green and orange rope, and other artifacts of my six-day tenure in that hole, and scramble back up the slot to the helicopter, leaving behind the fresh smear of blood on the canyon wall where my hand is crushed beside the fallen chockstone.
After untold hours of unconsciousness, I come to. I’m lying in a dark hospital room, with fluorescent light from the nurses’ station filtering through the translucent drapes pulled across the window to my left. My vision is blurred, but I can see that I am alone. Before I pass out again, my single thought is “I am alive.”
Sometime later, I wake up again. A nurse walks into my room and says in a cheery voice, “I thought I heard some rustling.”
“I’m alive,” I say to her in a gasp. I know I’m alive because I am in pain. My right arm aches, my legs ache, my left hand aches; in fact, there is nary a part of me that doesn’t ache.
“Yes, you are alive. Your mom will be happy to know that when she comes back.”
“Mom?” I say, my voice rasping just above a whisper, delicate and weak. The word releases an internal torrent of love that courses through me, overwhelming my drugged brain and loosing a deluge of sobs.
Mom.
It hurts my body to cry, but I have no control. As the tears recede, I see a clock on the wall but I can’t read the time. Someone has taken out my contacts. I squint and make out both clock hands pointing somewhere to the left of down. It’s shortly after seven- or eight-thirty, only four hours since I was rescued. Moab is at least a seven-hour drive from Denver. Despite the sedation, my mind works well enough to know the math doesn’t add up.
“She’ll be back. She was here last night after your surgery. She’s probably having breakfast, and she’ll be in in a half hour or so.”
Last night? Breakfast? I ponder those concepts for a long moment, perplexed in my fatigue. It must be morning. “What day is it?”
“It’s Friday morning,” the nurse explains while finishing up her duties, moving precisely about my bed.
“Oh,” I say, but it comes out as a soft moan. I am stumped by my inability to link together any experience since I lost consciousness on the table in the ER. It seems like I just blinked, and now I’m in a different room. Moab is a long way from Denver. Did my mom fly here? “How did she get here so fast?” I manage to ask, my throat chafing with dryness.
“Where did she come from?”
“Denver.”
“It’s only about four and a half, five hours to drive here.”
Five hours? That can’t be. “Five hours to get to Moab?”
“Oh, you’re not in Moab, dear, you’re in Grand Junction. They flew you over last night.”
“Oh,” I mutter, trying to orient myself. I have no recollection of another flight after that amazing helicopter ride. But Grand Junction, I understand that. I’m in Colorado.
I am immobilized by exhaustion, which is a good thing, considering I have a full octopus’s compliment of tubes, insulated wires, and other unnatural tentacles running across the sheets into various parts of my arms and head. Before I can entertain any further explorations of my environment, I pass out again.
When I come around the next time, Sue Doss is at my bedside. I am pleased and comforted to see her. In her soft Texas twang, Sue says, “Your mom is right outside,” and she steps out the door to get her.
My mom walks into the ICU room. The harsh light of the fluorescent boxes embedded in the ceiling bathes her in a glorious glow. I can’t distinguish her features-but I can see her take two steps to stand beside me on my left side. I lift my left hand, and she takes it in both of hers. Her hands are cool, soft, and trembling ever so slightly. She bends down and kisses my forehead. At close range, I can see how much worry I’ve caused my mom, and though I can barely speak, I scrape out “Mom, I’m sorry I scared you. I love you.” She shakes her head, and before either of us knows it, we are crying together.
Regaining her ability to speak as the sniffles subside several minutes later, my mom tells me, “Sue and I were joking that if it wasn’t a broken leg that had kept you from coming home, you were going to have two broken ones by the time we got done with you.”
We both choke out a laugh and smile at each other. Love passes between us, reaching that spot that can be touched only by the reunion of a son with his mother, a mother with her son. I know we both want it to be a long time before we leave each other’s side again.