You’ve got to love the life you live, and live the life you love.
– JERRY GARCIA BAND, “(I’m a) Roadrunner”
THE DAYS AND WEEKS following my rescue were nothing short of extraordinary. Even before my dad arrived in Grand Junction, my story was headline news across the globe. I had lost forty pounds and a liter and a half of blood in the canyon and had a long recovery ahead, the progress of which I could watch on the CNN scrolling news ticker: “Colorado climber who amputated own arm in critical care.” After three surgeries in five days and more pancakes than had ever been consumed by a patient in the St. Mary’s intensive care unit, the floral arrangements and I outgrew the ICU and had to be moved to a room upstairs, where, during my brief episodes of consciousness, my dad read to me from stacks of letters that came from my friends and from strangers, from just around the corner and from all the way around the world. One woman from Salt Lake City sent a card telling me she had flushed a stockpile of her deceased husband’s sleeping pills down the toilet. She wrote, “Your act of bravery has inspired me to hold on more dearly. I had promised myself that I would end my life if things had not gotten better one year after my husband’s death. I know now that suicide is not the answer. You inspire me to stay strong, remain brave and to fight for life.” My parents and I wept over that letter every time we read it; it was a reminder in difficult times of the greater ripple effects that my rescue and recovery were having on people.
Throughout that week, there were few moments when my parents left my side. With their love, the encouragement of thousands of prayers, special stealth visits by many of my friends, and the excellent care of the St. Mary’s doctors and nurses, I slowly regained enough mobility that by Wednesday, May 7, I was ready for my first journey outdoors since my accident. The hospital’s recreational therapist would have taken my dad and me to the park across the street, but because an armada of journalists and photographers guarded the hospital doors around the clock, we instead enjoyed a commanding view of Grand Junction’s greenery and canyon escarpments from a couple of folding chairs perched on the hospital roof. The air and the colors held a sweet vibrancy throughout the half hour we spent swapping outdoors stories and talking about baseball. It was one of my favorite memories from a lifetime of special moments with my dad.
Also that afternoon, I received a package in the mail: a gift from my friend Chris Shea, who lives in Portland. Opening the box and unwrapping the tinfoil coverings, I found a chocolate cake slathered with icing-in the shape of my right hand. When a group of my Aspen friends drove out to see me that night, bringing binders full of music for me to enjoy while I was laid up, my mom cut the cake and served it up with milk from the hospital cafeteria. It was an oddly funny moment, watching my friends smile and laugh as we joked, “Take this, eat; do this in memory of my hand.” We named the reunion the Last Dessert.
Thursday, I donned my own clothes for the first time in a week and borrowed my mom’s camera for a special occasion. Heavily stoned on three prescribed varieties of the best narcotics known to mankind, I rode with my parents in a hospital car to an auxiliary building half a block away and walked into a room filled with some five dozen reporters and possibly twice that many camera crews and photographers. I couldn’t help myself-I had to take a couple of snapshots. This was the way the world met me, and I guess a lot of first impressions were made during that twenty-minute news conference. I’d just like to say, in my own defense, that I was higher than a lost kite in a hurricane. When a reporter asked me what three things I was most looking forward to and I said, “Going home with my parents, taking a walk with my friends, and sipping back on a tall, cold, salted, frosty margarita,” that’s because it was the truth. I can’t say how many times I thought about margaritas when I was trapped-probably not as much as I thought about my family and my friends, but it was a lot.
Immediately after the press gathering, I talked with my photographer friend Dan Bayer, who had come to Grand Junction to take pictures for the Aspen Times. Earlier in the week, he had gone into Horseshoe Canyon and hiked the seven miles to the rappel site at the Big Drop. Along the way, he had found my harness and belay/rappel device where I’d abandoned them, and he returned them to me. He told me he had seen the pool of water at the bottom of the rappel, the one I drank from, and he asked me, “Did you see the dead raven floating in it?”
Once I was off the most potent narcotics, St. Mary’s released me. My parents and I drove home to Denver, where friends from six states had flown in for a surprise reception. In one weekend, I fulfilled two of the three things on my “looking forward to” list. It wouldn’t be until I weaned myself off the eighteen pills I was taking each day that I would be able to enjoy a big ol’ salty marg.
By Thursday, May 15, I was in the hospital again, this time St. Luke’s Presbyterian Hospital in Denver. Only two days earlier, my doctors had discovered a potentially lethal bone infection in my right arm. The same dirty knife that had saved me was now killing me. After yet another surgery, I was put on the strongest intravenous antibiotics available (needles), and then had battery after battery of blood tests (more needles) to check that the drugs were fighting the infection. The next day, Friday, was to be my sister’s graduation from Texas Tech University. With more tests and another surgery pending, I cried with my parents as it became clear that I wouldn’t make it to Texas to see Sonja receive her diploma. Then, just twenty hours before the ceremonies in Lubbock, my doctors and nurses came up with a plan that would allow me to leave the hospital for three days. With intricate instructions on how to inject the intravenous antibiotics ourselves, my parents and I sped off on a ten-hour midnight drive to Lubbock, Texas. While my dad steered us down the two-lane highways of the Texas panhandle at 70 mph, my mom ran my IV system from the backseat, hanging the drip bags on the coat hook above the side window. By the time we arrived in Lubbock, the car looked like a MASH unit, littered as it was with spent supplies and torn packaging, but we were in time for the Honors College awards banquet where Sonja was honored as the Texas Tech Outstanding Student of the Year. Once all the weekend festivities were over, my parents and I helped my sister pack up her belongings, and then we sat down with my grandma Ralston for a family tradition: playing round after round of euchre. It was just like old times.
Back in Denver, I had one last surgery, and an interesting one it was. I needed an angiogram, which is not, as one might think, a message personally delivered by a singing cherub, but a procedure that started with a curiously smiling prep nurse shaving off the right half of my pubic hair, and then inserting a catheter into my femoral artery until it slid up into my chest. The nurses used the catheter to pump X-ray-sensitive dye into my bloodstream, whereupon I could watch the veins of my right arm appear periodically on a television screen. That was just the warm-up round. Once the results from the angiogram were in, the plastic surgeon knew which of the three retracted arteries to go after in my arm. My tourniquet had damaged one, but the others were in good shape. This was important, because subsequently, the surgeon transplanted a four-inch-long segment of muscle from my inner left thigh onto the end of my right stump, and after fishing out the arteries in my arm, he connected their blood supplies to the slab of raw meat stitched onto my forearm. For the finishing touch, he sliced a rectangular section of skin from my right thigh and patched over the whole end of my arm. This little ten-hour surgery I did not get to watch on television. (It was preempted by the war in Iraq.)
The hours after I came up from the anesthetic proved to be the lowest point of my recovery; I hit bottom that night. I had seven tubes running in and out of me, three new sources of pain from the donor sites as well as my right heel (pressure from my foot’s weight had pinched a nerve in my heel during the surgery); I couldn’t sleep, and wasn’t allowed to eat or drink, so I complained mercilessly. How was it that I had cut off my arm without so much as a whimper, and yet now all I could do was whine? The nurses upped my narcotics hour after hour, but they couldn’t touch the pain. Eventually, though, I couldn’t put three words together to form a sentence; I wanted to tell my mom and dad I was sorry for being such a bitch, but it only frustrated me more to try and talk. My mom sat through it all for six hours until dawn, forgoing sleep and trying to comfort me, though my suffering was relentless despite the drugs. When the morning light came through the drapes, it illuminated her face in a saintly glow, and I cried at her beauty until I finally passed out.
By May 25, I had spent seventeen days in the hospital, but at last I went home for good. I was fixed up, I’d put on almost all of my lost weight, and the bone infection was retreating. However, being on the IV antibiotic program meant that once every eight hours, I had to lie down and get connected to a drip bag for half an hour. This went on for six weeks. Even when it meant getting up in the middle of the night, my mom and dad were always there to make sure I got my medications at the right time. All I had to do was sit still, but I hated that IV system and the weakness that it represented, and I rarely let an opportunity to complain about it pass me by.
Convalescence was hard on me. Not just the drip-bag routine but the whole thing. I hurt all the time from both phantom and real pain, even with the drugs. While I was continuously medicated, I never rested well. Usually, I would lie in bed all night semi-comatose-not really awake, but not sleeping, either. Narcotic stupor doesn’t allow your mind to reset properly. As each dosage came on, I would involuntarily crash-in doctors’ offices, between occupational and physical therapy sessions on a bench in the clinic’s workout room, or while sitting in traffic as my mom shuttled me home. When I revived, it was because the drugs were wearing off, and then all I had was anguish. My frustrations and the drugs turned me into such a bossy and grouchy snot that even I was sick of hearing myself.
My being at home again was difficult for all of us, too. Though we were thankful to have one another and felt blessed to be together as a family, the workload took its toll. My parents each had their businesses to tend to besides looking after me. Add in my appointments, drugs, and insurance issues, and on top of it all, the media and public attention-we had to leave the phone off the hook for almost two months, and called the local authorities to fend off the television station vehicles that staked out the house-and we were all worn threadbare.
For the first four weeks, I was as dependent as a toddler. I found myself easily fed up by the effort involved with my new life, in which rest, recovery, and rehab had replaced skiing, mountaineering, and concerts. Everything was so time-consuming; one clinic appointment occupied an entire morning of preparation and commuting for my mom and me. And there were a hundred appointments, all of which had to be coordinated around my drug schedule. I didn’t get out of Blue John Canyon to spend my life in a groggy blur of structured confinement perforated with agony. Yet that’s what my life had become.
The challenge in the canyon had been severe but straightforward. Once I was out, the challenges became more complex, and at first, I felt unprepared to adapt to my new circumstances. I wanted to get my life back, but that meant I had to learn how to cope with my frustrations and turn them into motivation for action. The drugs were my first targets. In June, with most of the post-operation pain fading, I gradually weaned myself off the painkillers. I could once again enjoy a few choice freedoms-driving my truck, going running with my friends, enjoying a big ol’ salted margarita. I regained more and more of my self-sufficiency and “grew up” again in a process akin to a second adolescence. My mom didn’t want to let me go, and I couldn’t blame her, but I had to get my independence back, for both our sakes.
Once I was off the narcotics, things got better quickly. I learned how to tie my shoelaces and even tie a necktie one-handed. Improving rapidly, I practiced my left-handed print and cursive (I had been a righty prior to my accident) and began typing on my laptop with just five fingers. My occupational therapist got me a rocker knife so I could cut meat. With either adaptive equipment or new techniques, I relearned how to do just about everything I needed. I figured out how to put on my watch and fasten that tricky left wrist button on my dress shirts using my teeth. Still, there were things I needed help with. Sometimes my independence drove me not to ask. Other times, though the offered help was well meant, I wanted to figure things out for myself. In the kitchen one afternoon, I caught my sister trying a little too hard to be sensitive while watching me start to peel an orange.
“Do you need a…” She let the question die.
“Do I need a hand?” I finished for her. “Of course I do, silly; I’ve only got one now.” I smiled at her, and she blushed. Getting out my rocker knife, I cut the orange into unpeeled eighths, just like I used to eat at Little League soccer. I secretly stuck a slice in my mouth so it covered my teeth and started hopping around doing my impression of a gorilla. Just at the moment my sister thought I’d totally lost my marbles, I flashed my goofy grin at her, revealing the orange peel. It caught her right as she was taking a sip of water, and she snorted back into her glass, splashing her face. After that, it was a joke for us, her asking me if I needed a hand even when I wasn’t doing anything.
Because of my margarita comment at the press conference, people sent me all sorts of related gifts: twenty-dollar bills with yellow stickies labeled “Margaritas,” gift certificates to Mexican restaurants with reputations for making good margs, even bottles of tequila. Periodically, I got large packages that usually turned out to contain margarita supplies. When I opened one particular box, the contents briefly stunned me. I called my sister into the kitchen. There, besides the bottles of tequila, triple sec, and margarita mix, was a box containing a Black & Decker rechargeable-battery-powered blender. No way. My sister and I became giddy imagining the possibilities-hiking up high peaks, pulling out the backcountry blender, and making margaritas right from the snow. How cool was that? I called out, “High five,” and raised my arms, facing my sister. She put her hands up, ready for contact, and at the last split second, as we both realized the problem, she redirected to give my left hand a high ten. “Ha-ha! You totally forgot!” I teased her. “No, you put it up there, you forgot, too.” She was right, I had. We still laugh about our whiffed high five.
Highlights from the next few months sound so improbable that I can barely believe they happened to me. Four of my friends and I were invited to dinner with our rock idol, Trey Anastasio, and his eight-piece band before their June performance at the Fillmore in Denver. Another of my favorite bands, the String Cheese Incident, ran a major benefit auction and poster sale at Aron’s Incident, a July concert held in my name in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that raised seventeen thousand dollars for the five volunteer search-and-rescue groups in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico that assisted with my rescue. Kristi and Megan, the two women from Moab whom I met in Blue John Canyon, came to the concert, as did my sister and my parents, and about two gazillion of my friends.
I made my return to the mountains with a visit to the avalanche site on Resolution Mountain, where we recovered the belongings Chadwick, Mark, and I lost in the Grade 5 slide in February, including my Sony digital camera, which, when I changed out the battery-despite the shock of the avalanche and the facts that it melted through a ten-foot-deep snowpack, was exposed to four months of rain and sun, and got chewed on by marmots-started working again on the spot. It’s still taking great pictures. (Well done, Sony.)
In July, I went on David Letterman’s show, met a dozen of the biggest names in broadcast journalism, saw five concerts around the West with my friends, went rock climbing with my new prosthetic arm in Castlewood Canyon near Denver, and hiked a contiguous series of five fourteeners in thirty hours in central Colorado. August saw me rock climbing with my fellow amputee and friend Malcolm Daly in El Dorado Canyon near Boulder, pacing my friend Rich Haefele to his first ultramarathon finish in the Leadville Trail 100, and surviving two hair-raising back-to-back days of intense photo shoots for GQ’s “Men of the Year” issue and Vanity Fair’s “People of 2003” issue.
On August 31, I gave a reading at my sister’s wedding, about how love is like a dance. She looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her as she said “I do” to her husband, Zack Elder. During the reception, Sonja and I boogied together to “Climb,” her favorite String Cheese Incident tune, laughing and smiling as we let our freak flags fly in front of all our relatives.
Four days after the wedding, I climbed the standard route on Mount Moran in Wyoming with a team of eight of my friends. The special treat for me was leading the majority of the difficult sections of climbing using the one-of-a-kind prosthetic device that I designed with the production help of three amazingly generous companies: Hanger Prosthetics, Therapeutic Recreation Systems, and Trango (a climbing equipment company). Two weeks later, I competed in Minnesota’s Adventure Duluth race with my two teammates, finishing in the middle of the pack after twelve miles of sea kayaking, four miles of white-water canoeing, and twelve miles of trail running.
In September, my mom and I watched the video I’d made in the canyon. We cried together-it was hard for my mom to see my suffering on the tape, but it made us both thankful to still have each other in our lives. We sat on the couch and held hands, saying “I love you,” over and over.
And then there was the return to Blue John Canyon. I took four of my friends, Mark Van Eeckhout, Jason Halladay, Steve Patchett, and Kristi Moore, as well as an entire team from Dateline NBC, through the slot where I was trapped from Saturday, April 26, until Thursday, May 1, 2003. In one of those odd synchronicities of life, I stood on top of the boulder that had crushed and pinned my hand exactly six months to the minute of when it fell on me. Once everyone else cleared out down through the canyon, I held a solitary ceremony in which I distributed the cremated ashes of my hand in the accident site and rubbed out the visible remnants of the “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03” inscription on the southern wall, two days before my twenty-eighth birthday. Later that night, back at our helicopter-supported encampment, I dropped a plastic cup of red wine on Tom Brokaw’s shoe.
Over the course of the summer, my sister and I had joked repeatedly about my new status as a pirate, practicing our “arrs” and our “me-hearties” together. Imagine our amusement, then, when we discovered that September 19, 2003, had been officially designated as “International Talk Like a Pirate Day.” A month later, I went as Captain Funhook for Halloween in Aspen, and was delighted when I ran into a fellow climber dressed up as Aron Ralston, post-self-surgery.
Through the fall and winter, I returned to lead climbing on rock, mountain biking, ice climbing, backcountry telemark skiing, cross-country skate skiing, and solo winter mountaineering. I solo-climbed Mount Wilson and El Diente Peak on March 17 and 18, 2004, in official winter, making my first solo winter fourteener ascents since my accident and bringing my project total to forty-seven of fifty-nine. In the next two seasons, I plan to finish the project, potentially becoming the first person to solo-climb all fifty-nine of the Colorado 14,000-foot peaks in winter. By the end of the season, I was performing at, near, or even in some cases, above my ability levels prior to my accident. My roommate and friend Elliott Larson and I raced together in the Elk Mountains Grand Traverse, the ski race from Crested Butte to Aspen, and took six hours off the time Gareth Roberts and I set in 2003, when I had both my hands. Next year, I’m going to cut off my left arm and see how much faster I can go.
For all that has happened and the opportunities still developing in my life, I feel blessed. I was part of a miracle that has touched a great number of people in the world and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, not even to have my hand back. My accident in and rescue from Blue John Canyon were the most beautifully spiritual experiences of my life, and knowing that, were I to travel back in time, I would still say “see you later” to Megan and Kristi and take off into that lower slot by myself. While I’ve learned much, I have no regrets about that choice. Indeed, it has affirmed my belief that our purpose as spiritual beings is to follow our bliss, seek our passions, and live our lives as inspirations to each other. Everything else flows from that. When we find inspiration, we need to take action for ourselves and for our communities. Even if it means making a hard choice, or cutting out something and leaving it in your past.
Saying farewell is also a bold and powerful beginning.