We know that the condemned man, at the end, does not resist but submits passively, almost gratefully, to the instruments of his executioner.
– EDWARD ABBEY, Desert Solitaire
I GLANCE AT MY WATCH; it’s 4:19 P.M. I have been trapped for an hour and a half, hammering my knife against the boulder for about half that time. There will be daylight until around nine P.M., but I already have my headlamp over my blue cap. Though it’s not on right now, I’m glad I brought the lamp on this day trip. As with my knife, I usually wouldn’t carry it on what should have been a short outing. That warning in Kelsey’s guidebook about checking for spiders and snakes was helpful, not because I’ve seen any creepy-crawlies, but because it suggested bringing a light. I’ve already used it to throw light up into the half-inch gap where my squashed wrist is caught, to further examine my hand from every angle.
One of the more important concerns I’ve been trying to address is how much of the boulder’s weight my wrist is supporting. If it’s holding barely any weight, the amount of rock I need to remove is less. The more the boulder is being propped up by my hand and wrist, the more it will settle as I remove weight-bearing material. In fact, for me to get my hand free in that case, the rock will have to settle completely onto the wall. Unfortunately, there’s a good probability that since there’s a gap between the stone and the north canyon wall immediately below and above my wrist, the boulder is not resting cleanly on the wall. The rock will settle; I’ll be working on a subtly moving target. I can only guess how much this will affect my chances of freeing my wrist, so I table the question and return to scraping and pecking at the boulder with my knife.
I try not to think about the fact that I am stuck. Though it’s an irrepressible reality, thinking about it doesn’t help my situation. Instead, I concentrate on finding small weaknesses in the face of the boulder just above and to the left of my trapped right wrist. My earlier instincts led me to etch a demarcation line above the softball-sized volume of rock that I have decided I must eradicate to gain my freedom. I’m speculating on a flaw in the rock’s structure, in a slight concavity that’s above the bulge almost six inches from my wrist; the demarcation line runs through this concavity. I start at my line, high on the face of the rock but a few inches below the top, and hack downward, attacking as near to my mark as I can manage. Tapping, then pounding, my multi-tool’s three-inch stainless-steel blade against the stone, I try to hit the same spot with each strike.
Everything else-the pain, the thoughts of rescue, the accident itself-recedes. I’m taking action. My mind seems determined to find and exploit any seams or natural cleavage of the chockstone to hasten the removal of material. Every few minutes, I pause to look over the boulder’s entire surface to make sure I’m not missing a more obvious target.
But the going is imperceptibly slow. I unfold the metal file from the tool, and for five minutes, I use it to etch the boulder. It works only marginally better than the knife, and only when I turn it on its side and saw down at the line. The rock is clearly more durable than the shallow rasps of the file. When I stop to clean the file, I see the grooves are filled with flecks of metal from the tool itself. I’m wearing down the edge without any effect on the chockstone. I inspect the boulder again, and noting the nonuniform coloring, its relative hardness compared to my knife and the walls, and its similarity to the chockstones of the gauntlet up above, I realize this boulder isn’t strictly sandstone. It seems to have come from the darker-colored layer within the Navajo sandstone that formed the overhanging lip a hundred yards upstream near the S-log at the head of this lower slot canyon, the one I’d hung from before dropping irreversibly into the sand about two hours ago.
“That’s bad news, Aron,” I think. “The rock layer formed that ledge because it’s more erosion-resistant than the rest of this canyon. This chockstone is the hardest thing here.” I wonder if it wouldn’t be faster to carve out the wall instead of the boulder, and decide to give that a try. Switching from the file back to the three-inch blade, I strike the multi-tool against the wall above my right wrist. The knife skitters across the pink sloping canyonside. Very close to stabbing myself in the arm at every blow, I conclude the geometry is prohibitive-I can’t slash at the wall in the right spot because my arm is in the way.
I pause to rest my left arm and hand and brush a little pulverized grit from my right forearm. I can’t see any change in the boulder’s position. I return to hacking at my target line in the concavity. Tick, tick, tick…tick, tick, tick. The sound of my knife tapping at the rock is pathetically minute, but all the same, it resounds through the canyon. I can strike the rock only so hard, otherwise my knife skitters off and I bash my knuckles, or I miss my target. I’m hoping to loosen the crystals around a gray knob in the chockstone and remove a quarter-sized chip in one piece. It will be an uplifting and measurable gain, but even the tiny bulge seems to be an impregnable safe. No matter what I try, I can’t crack it.
Another hour has passed. It’s six P.M. now, a little over three hours since the accident. It’s still warm, but a few degrees off the high temperature of 66 degrees back at three-thirty, according to the watch looped on my left pack strap. I blow some dust off the area I’ve been assailing with my multi-tool and look for any discernible sign of progress. I get my eyes in close to the rock and inspect the mineralized characteristics of my target zone, wondering again if there might be a place with a less durable crystal structure. Considering my negligible progress, the question is more theoretical than practical. The only way I’m going to drill my way free of this stone is if a geologist’s pick magically materializes in my hand.
I feel like I’m in the most deadly prison imaginable. My confinement will be an assuredly short one with only twenty-two ounces of water. The hiker’s minimum for desert travel is one gallon per person per day. I think again about how long I might last on my scant supply-until Monday, maybe, Tuesday morning at the outside. Escape is the only way to survive. In any case, the race is on, and all I have is this chintzy pocketknife to blast my way through this boulder. It’s akin to digging a coalmine with a kid’s sand shovel.
I become suddenly frustrated with the tiresomeness of pecking. My mind runs the analysis on how much rock I’ve chipped away (almost none) and how much time it’s taken me to do it (over two hours), and I come to the easy conclusion that I am engaged in a futile task. As I debate my remaining choices, my stress turns to pessimism. I already know I won’t be successful in an attempt to rig an anchor for a pulley system. The rocks forming the ledge are six feet above my head and almost ten feet away; even with two hands, that would be an impossible chore. Without enough water to wait for rescue, without a pick to crack the boulder, without an anchor, I have only one possible course of action.
I speak slowly out loud. “You’re gonna have to cut your arm off.” Hearing the words makes my instincts and emotions revolt. My vocal cords tense, and my voice changes octaves.
“But I don’t wanna cut my arm off!”
“Aron, you’re gonna have to cut your arm off.” I realize I’m arguing with myself and yield to a halfhearted chuckle. This is crazy.
I know that I could never saw through my arm bones with the blunted knife, so I decide to keep trying to free myself by pecking away at the boulder. It’s futile, but it’s the best of my current options. As I hit the rock, I imagine the early evening sun projecting ever longer shadows across the desert. The blue of the sky deepens while I carve unproductively for the next hour, taking infrequent and brief breaks. My understanding of the engraving above my right arm, “Geologic Time Includes Now,” changes from Gerry Roach’s intended warning to a spur of motivation. It becomes a hopeful reminder that, like an agent of geologic time, I can erode this chockstone, perhaps enough to free my hand from the obdurate handshake of the sandstone block. However, the stone has rapidly dulled my knife. I reconfigure the tool to expose the file again, and continue sawing down along the line I’ve etched above the grayish bulge at the near edge of the concavity.
While I’m filing, I think about the first time I visited Utah. I’m not sure what brings it to mind. Perhaps it’s in response to the nagging question of how did I get here, how did I end up stuck in this place? That first trip was with my family on spring break in 1990, my freshman year in high school. We went to Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Zion Canyon before swinging south to the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t that thrilled by the idea. The weeks before we left, all my friends were excited for their skiing trips or vacations to Mexico. Me? I was going to Utah with my parents.
Fortunately, our family friend Betty Darr from Ohio was with us. She was the most well-read person I’d ever known, and her passion for reading was surpassed only by her love for the outdoors-two qualities that make for an excellent traveling companion. She was also one of the most positive, insightful, and caring people I’ve ever had the pleasure to call my friend. Betty had contracted polio when she was a little girl in the 1930s, and it paralyzed her from the waist down. I don’t know if it was because of her battle against polio that she was so positive, or whether it was because she was so positive-minded that she overcame the challenges posed by her paralysis, but Betty found the light and good in every person, and she loved everyone. She spent several days a week volunteering at the county jail, where she helped prisoners learn to read and write, bringing them her magazines and working with them one-on-one. Her humanity saw in them their potential; nothing else mattered.
Betty had used arm crutches and a total leg-and-back brace every day since the polio, though sometimes she scooted around her rural Ohio house on her behind, dragging her legs and using her arms and hands to propel herself backward. She had a specially outfitted car that she could drive using hand controls. While we were visiting the national parks, she used an electric wheelchair to get around-she called it her Pony-or else my dad would carry her ninety-pound frame to the nearer spots that didn’t necessitate the Pony. Sometimes, when Betty drove her Pony, she encountered hills too steep for its electric motor. My sister and I fought over who got to help push Betty. At Bryce Canyon, I won and was pushing Betty in her Pony up the final hill to the lookout. With my arms outstretched and head level with my shoulders, I was staring down at the battery tray under the chair when I heard Betty exclaim, “Oh, look at this, Aron!”
I looked up and almost let go of her. We were at a sweeping vista encompassing hundreds of orange and pink sandstone towers filling a three-hundred-foot-deep canyon that plunged directly in front of us and stretched for a half mile to either side of the lookout. I was stunned, and can trace my fascination for canyons back to the emotions I felt at that viewpoint. I wanted to race down into the canyon, touch the towers that seemed like they would topple at any moment, and follow every path that laced around the formations until I became lost in the maze. I imagined myself standing atop the tower called Thor’s Hammer, and then, with superhuman ability, bounding to the top of the next pinnacle, and from there to the next. When it was time to go, I left with an empty feeling in my soul. At fourteen, I didn’t understand why I felt this way, but I had met a calling in my life, though it would remain unfulfilled for a long time.
Two days later in the trip, we arrived at the Grand Canyon after dark and checked in to our room at the lodge. We got up at five-thirty in the morning to watch the sunrise from the South Rim. Since we’d come in at night, I hadn’t seen the canyon itself yet, so I was grumbling, “Why do we have to do this?” It was cold, and I hated having to get up so early. We took the comforters from our beds in the hotel room and loaded the five of us into the minivan for the five-minute drive west to the overlook. I tried my best to fall back asleep in the backseat, and I almost managed to convince my dad to let me stay in the van while everyone else went to the guardrail. But Betty won me over with her subtle encouragement: “We’ll be right over at the benches when you’re ready to see the sunrise.” My mom and sister took the comforters while my dad carried Betty over to the viewpoint. Without the van heaters on, I got chilled in just a few minutes, so I walked over to my family and crawled under the blankets next to my sister.
I had never before sat and watched a sunrise for the sake of it, and I wasn’t at all prepared for how majestic it would be. There stood forty miles of the mile-deep, fifteen-mile-wide wonder of the Grand Canyon, running from our toe tips to the growing horizontal rainbow at the horizon. The rock strata of the inner canyon changed from dark umbers and black shadows to immense bands of pastel yellow, white, green, and a hundred shades of red in the mysterious chemistry of twilight. At last, a blazing crescent burst over the distant desert palisades at the epicenter of the rainbow, and the canyon exploded in an array of dozens of temples, buttes, gorges, and pyramids, brought into glowing contrast with the encompassing canyon walls by the sunrise’s glowing rose-colored light.
I didn’t know it, but that sunrise was a dream come true for Betty, one she never counted on seeing because of the thousands of miles of challenging travel it involved for her to get to the canyon. She taught me something that I must have learned despite my bratty crankiness, for I have returned to that spot and dozens of others across the West just to watch a sunrise. It wasn’t all I would learn from Betty; her positive attitude and zest for life was so instilled in me that I developed a passion and urgency to experience and discover the world that borders on obsession.
The Grand Canyon is a distant memory now. Because I’m stuck down in this hole, I’ll miss the sunrise. During a break around seven P.M., I set the knife on top of the boulder where my scratched sunglasses have been perched. I lift my shoulders, stretch my left arm above my head, shake out my stiff hand, and sigh. Flexing my fingers, I look at my left hand with a degree of awe-my hand and fingers are swollen to nearly twice their regular thickness from the crushing blow they received during the accident, when the boulder smashed my left hand before ricocheting. The swelling has so disfigured my fingers that my knuckles no longer rise above their constituent bones. There are no veins visible on the back of my hand, just this balloon at the end of my arm. Perhaps the strangest thing is that I don’t feel any pain from the injury, but it could well be that my situation is distracting me. So many other things are wrong with my circumstances that the swelling isn’t important enough to warrant attention.
My left thigh hurts more than my swollen hand, and after I inspect under the leg of my shorts, I understand why. The skin covering my lower quadriceps is bruised and abraded in a dozen places above my knee. These injuries happened while I was struggling to lift the boulder right after I became trapped. There are a few small clots but no active bleeding. I ripped through my shorts in five places where they were pinched between my leg and the underside of the boulder. The lower right corner of the pocket is ripped open enough that I can see the loop of my half-inch-diameter bike-lock key ring protruding through the fabric.
It seems important that I keep track of those keys. If, by whatever miracle gets me out of here, I end up back at my bike, I’ll need to be able to unlock the U-lock through my back tire. I reach to take the keys out of the torn pocket and put them in my backpack, but in the second before I withdraw my hand, the ring snags on my pocket lining and I fumble the keys. They fall into a hole between the rounded rocks near my left foot. “Damn!” I shout. They are not only out of my limited reach, but they’ve slipped down a narrow crack where it would be difficult to retrieve them even if I were free.
I roll my shoulders to the left, maximizing my extension, but I can only barely touch the top of the rock by my left sneaker. Dropping my feet down into the sand downcanyon of the rounded stones, I can touch this same rock more easily, and I see a faint glint of the odd-shaped keys in the sandy hole. Still, my trapped wrist prevents me from moving the planted rock or reaching into the hole. At that moment, a vague memory of a TV program that showed a man with no hands using his toes to type at a keyboard gives me the idea to use my bare foot to reach in under the rock and extract the keys. Once I get my running shoe and sock off my left foot, I step back down into the sand and begin dredging short twigs, desiccated plant stems, and other debris out from the space under the left side of the rock near the wall.
Even cleared out, the hole is too small for my size-ten foot. But I’m not discouraged; this challenge takes on an added significance. The goal of getting my keys back symbolizes the larger struggle against my entrapment. I seize upon another idea. I retrieve one of the longer sticks that I pulled out from the rocks. It’s a sagebrush stem about two feet long, thin and brittle, and with a convenient bend near the skinny end that might allow me to hook the key ring. I turn on my headlamp to cast some extra light into the hollow and dip the hooked end of my stick down into the hole. The stick easily catches the keys, but it flexes and snaps when I try to fish them up through the gap. Kerplink! The keys jingle against each other as they land back in the sandy fissure. “Damn,” I mutter.
Without the hook, I can only swat at the keys with the broken end of the stick, but I manage to flick them a few inches closer to my toes. I still can’t quite reach the ring with my foot, so I insert the stick between my big and second toes and thread it into the hole from the side. Peering down into the hole with my headlamp, I guide the stick with a series of delicate, jerking movements until it pokes about two inches through the ring loop. Tugging, I extract the keys with the stick until they slip off the end. They’re not all the way out, but I’ve moved them close enough to the crevice’s exit that I can drop the stick and claw at the sand with my toes, grasping the keys in a foot-fist. Not wanting to accidentally drop them again, I lift my left leg until I can reach under my foot with my left hand. Success! It’s the first victory of my entrapment, and it is sweet. I tuck the keys into an accessory pocket on the right side of my shorts and zip it shut.
After I put my sock and my shoe back on, not bothering to tie the laces, I decide to try a new approach to pecking at the boulder with my knife. Selecting a softball-sized stone from the pile below my feet, I maneuver it to the top. Now that it’s in reach, I stretch and grab the rock-not without a spike of pain from my trapped wrist-and set the ten-pound stone on top of the boulder next to my knife. I’ve already discounted the idea of smashing a smaller rock directly against the chockstone, as all the available rocks are of the softer pink sandstone, like the walls. Instead, I plan to use the rock to pound my knife into the chockstone, like a hammer and chisel.
In preparation, I balance my knife so the tip fits in the slight groove I’ve carved in the concavity on the upper right side of the boulder, just above my right wrist, and lean the handle against the canyon wall. I grip the hammer rock tightly to ensure I will accurately hit the head of the knife and bring the hammer down in a gentle trial tap. I’m afraid the rock will kick the knife off the backside of the boulder or down into the rocks beneath my feet. My chiseling setup is as stable as I can manage, but it doesn’t instill much confidence, so I tap the knife carefully a second and third time just to test if it will skitter away. It stays put, but I need to hit harder.
Here goes…I drive the hammer rock into my knife with ten times more force than that last tap. Karunch! The rock detonates in my hand, splitting into one large and a half-dozen smaller pieces, leaving me with a handful of crumbling sandstone as shrapnel flies up into my face. The force of the blow knocks my knife off the chockstone, and it bounces off my shorts, hitting the sand half a yard in front of my right foot. “I can’t win here, nothing’s working,” I think, but my thin discouragement is thankfully fleeting.
I lick my lips and taste the coating of pulverized grit that has stuck to the dried sweat on my face. My knife is out of reach for my left hand, and nudging it with my foot only buries it in the sand. (At least I know I can get it back.) Taking note of the crushed rock that’s all over the chockstone and my right arm, I sigh. I drop the rest of the hammer rock in front of my feet, attentive to my knife. I take off my left shoe and sock again, grab the multi-tool in my outstretched toes, and retrieve it easily.
“Come on, Aron, no more stupid stuff like that,” I chastise myself, knowing I won’t be trying the hammer-chisel approach again. “That’s the last thing you can afford, to lose your knife.” Somehow I know it will be vital to my survival. Even though I’m certain it’s far too dull to saw through my arm bones, I might need it for other things, like cutting webbing, or maybe making my backpack into a kind of wearable jacket to keep me warmer at night.
It’s going on eight o’clock, and a breeze is blowing softly downcanyon. Every few minutes, the wind accelerates, flicking sand over the ledge above me into my face. I bow my head to protect my face beneath the brim of my hat. This keeps most of the dust out of my eyes, but I can feel the grit on my contacts. After huddling from a half-dozen cycles of the breeze, I catch myself not doing anything or even thinking about anything; I’m in a fleeting daze that dissolves when I become aware of it. Coming back around to my current situation, I look at the broken-up dirt and rock pieces covering my right arm. Using my fingers, then my knife, to get to the more confined spots around my right hand, I brush off the dirt. With pursed lips, I puff the last dust particles off my hand. It’s ridiculous, this compulsion to keep my arm clean, but being tidy is one of the few means by which I can exert even a small degree of control over my circumstances.
I resume my excavation as darkness seeps from my penumbral hole and spills into the desert above me, turning dusk to night. I turn my headlamp back on and pick a new target on the chockstone-a beige-pink heart of sandstone ringed by hard black mineral features. This spot is two inches above my wrist, so I am cautious with my strikes until I can chisel out a starter hole that allows me to jab harder at the chockstone. I establish a rhythm, pecking at two jabs per second, pausing to blow away dust once every five minutes. Time slips past. I can see a tiny measure of progress as a small salmon-colored flake emerges beside the shallow trough I’m carving out of the chockstone. If I’m right, I might be able to dig out enough material around this pastel nugget so that I can pop it out as a single chip.
I slip into the flow of intent action. Before I know it, three hours are gone, and it’s nearly midnight. I have isolated the little flake on three sides-left, top, and bottom-by a channel about an eighth of an inch wide, and I’m ready to pry it off the boulder. Not wanting to accidentally break off the tip of my knife blade, I switch my multi-tool to the file. The file is not only thicker and sturdier, it’s also somewhat more expendable. With the file tip positioned in the in-cut groove, I lever the handle toward the rock and watch for the flake to come flying for my eyes, holding my breath. I feel my tool biting into my palm just as the flake crumbles and breaks away. Yes! A dimesized piece of rock pops off the chockstone and falls onto my trapped wrist. It’s not as big as I could have hoped, but I’m pleased that my strategy paid off with at least a little progress. With the flake removed, I’ve exposed some softer rock that I can extract more easily. Pecking for another hour eradicates almost as much stone as what came off in the flake. I save the largest chips that fall on my trapped arm, setting them side by side on the top of the boulder. My collection grows as I enlarge the minute crater, but as my line of chips increases, so does my fatigue. The aching pain of my arm nags at my mind too much for my grogginess to matter; I need to work at getting out of here while I have my strength. Besides, even if I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t. The penetrating chill of the night air and occasional breezes urge me to keep attacking the rock to generate warmth, and when my consciousness does fade, my knees buckle and my weight tugs on my wrist in an immediate and agonizing call to attention.
Perhaps because of my growing fatigue, a song is playing over and over in my head. The melody is from the first Austin Powers movie, which I watched a few nights ago with one of my roommates, and now just a single line of the ending credits’ chorus is repeating on an infinite loop.
“Yeah, that’s not annoying at all, Aron,” I say sarcastically. “Can’t you get something else on the juke?” It doesn’t matter what else I try to hum-even some of my favorite standbys-I can’t free myself from the mind-lock of Austin Powers.
Taking a break, I extract from my main pack the rope bag, my harness and climbing hardware, CamelBak pack, and water bottle, then strap the large backpack on my back for the first time since the afternoon. I figure-correctly-that the pack’s padding will help me retain my body heat. I remove the CamelBak’s blue water reservoir and slide its empty pack alongside my pinned arm. I can get the inch-thick insulation only a few inches past my elbow, because the boulder has my arm pressed tight against the wall from my wrist to my middle forearm. But with the small pack in place, most of my arm and shoulder is held off the cold slab. I remove my rope from its bag, leaving it neatly coiled, and stack it on a rock sitting on the canyon floor in front of my knees. With the rock padded by the rope, I can bend my knees forward and lean in to the rock, easing the weight on my legs a little. I still can’t relax, but now I can change my position from time to time and stimulate the circulation in my legs.
It’s just before one-thirty in the morning when I open my water bottle for the second time and have a small sip. I’ve been thinking about having a drink for at least two hours, but I was purposefully delaying until I made it halfway through the night. Four and a half hours down, four and a half to go. The water is expectedly refreshing, a reward for having gone so long since those first extravagant gulps some eight hours ago. Still, I worry. I know that the remaining twenty-two ounces are the key to my survival. But it’s a puzzle as to how much I should drink or conserve and how long I should try to make it last. Mulling it over, I settle on a plan to have a small sip every ninety minutes. It will give me something to gauge the time, something to look forward to as the night advances.
With fatigue buckling my knees periodically, I decide to construct a seat that I can use to completely take my weight off my legs. Getting into my harness is the easy half of the equation. Stepping into the leg loops, I pull up the waist belt and weave the thick webbing through the buckle; with the limited dexterity of my single hand, I skip the usual last step of doubling back the belt-a precaution necessary for climbing safety but more protection than I need in my current situation. Now comes the hard part: getting some piece of my pared arsenal of climbing gear hung up on a rock overhead, something suspended substantially enough to hold my weight.
I have my eye on a crack system that starts on the south wall, about six feet above and to the left of my head. The crack is actually a gap between the wall and the eight-foot-diameter chockstone suspended six feet in front of me. This is the boulder forming the twelve-foot drop-off that I reached at the end of the chockstone gauntlet, the one I was descending when I stepped onto the chockstone that pinned my wrist. I hadn’t taken much time to look closely at this chockstone earlier, but now I see two features that might help me in building an anchor. One is the crack, tapering from the upper gap to a pinch point that unfortunately flares open toward me; the other is an apparent horn that I might use as an anchor if I could lasso my rope or a piece of my yellow webbing around it. But how can I fabricate a block to throw into the crack and pull it down until it catches at the pinch point? There are two options: either clipping a few of my carabiners together in a wad on a knot in my rope; or tying a knot directly into the rope or onto a piece of webbing to jam the knot itself in the constriction. In either case, it will be very difficult to toss the apparatus with enough precision for it to slip into the crack and catch at the pinch point.
Still, it’s worth a try. First I unwrap about thirty feet of my climbing rope. At the end, I tie a series of overhand knots to make a fist-sized block. With some extra rope stacked on top of the chockstone, I cast the fist up at the crack, but it bounces off the wall. I realize the combination of my left hand’s awkward throwing abilities and the nature of the rope to fall short as it lifts more of its own weight are an unforgiving mix. I will have to make the perfect toss. Perhaps it will be easier with a heavier lead. I decide to add three carabiners from the climbing supplies on my harness to a figure-eight knot, replacing the rope fist.
Each toss takes two minutes to set up, and my first dozen tries fall short, bouncing off the wall or the face of the chockstone, or slipping out of the crack before the carabiners can wedge tightly. I refine my procedure of stacking the trailing rope so it unfurls with as little drag as possible, and my accuracy improves. Of the next dozen tries, five of them land my carabiners in the crack, but each time they pull free. I add a fourth carabiner to my improvised grappling device. With a brilliantly lucky throw on my next try, the carabiner bundle hits the wide mouth of the crack and drops into the pinch point, and with a tug at just the right moment, the block wedges tight. I test the constriction’s strength and watch the carabiners bite into the rock. I’m worried that the sandstone pinch point will break and let the ’biners loose, but the metal links jam hard against one another, and the rock holds the stress without a problem. As a wave of happiness washes over my tired mind, I tie another figure-eight knot on a loop of the anchored rope that drapes back over the chockstone near my waist, and I clip myself to the system. With two adjustments of the knot to cinch my harness a little higher and keep my weight from tugging on my arm, I finally lean back and take some weight off my legs. Ahhhhh. I relax for the first time, and my body celebrates a victory over the strain of standing still for over twelve hours.
I take my water bottle from its perch and have a small sip right at three A.M. My respite is complete but disappointingly short-just fifteen minutes until the harness restricts the blood flow to my legs and I have to stand again. There is the risk that if I sit too long, I will cause damage to my legs or cause a blood clot to form. Long before that danger manifests, the harness makes my hamstrings ache where the leg loops hold my weight. I alternate standing and sitting, establishing a pattern that I repeat in twenty-minute intervals.
In these coldest hours before dawn, from three until six, I take up my knife again and hack at the chockstone. I can chip at the rock either standing or sitting. I continue to make minimal but visible progress in the divot. After sips of water at four-thirty and six A.M., I take stock of the rock I’ve managed to eliminate during the past fifteen hours of tiring work. I estimate that at the rate I’ve averaged, I would have to chip at the rock for 150 hours to free my hand. Discouraged, I know I will need to do something else to improve my situation.
Just after eight o’clock, I hear a rushing noise filtering down from the canyon above me, a wind swoosh that pulses three times. I look up as a large black raven flies over my head. He’s heading upcanyon, and with each flap of his wings, echoes filter down to my ears. At the third flap, he screeches a loud “Ca-caw” and then disappears from my window of the overhead world. It’s still clammy cold in the depths of the canyon fissure, but I can see bright daylight on the north wall seventy feet above me. Broken strands of stratus clouds float by. I turn off my headlamp. I have made it through the night.
Around nine-thirty A.M. a dagger of sunlight appears behind me on the canyon floor. The light blade is teasingly close but still three feet behind my shoes. I haven’t yet fully rewarmed from the night’s chill, and I yearn for even a small touch of sun on my skin. After five minutes, the dagger has stabbed toward my heels enough that when I step down next to the hole where I dropped my keys, stretching my body until my arm pulls at my wrist, I can extend my left leg behind me so the sunshine caresses my ankle and lower calf. For ten minutes, I hold still, alternating between stretching out my left and then my right leg as the sunlight moves across the canyon floor. Like a yoga pose, this sun stretch welcomes a new day. The question crosses my mind of how many mornings will I be here to perform this matinal rite, but I push it back and relish the soothing warmth on my calves. Climbing up the north wall above my right leg, the light dagger bends and warps over the sandstone undulations until it ascends above my leg’s reach. Watching the beam scale the last three feet to where a suspended chockstone blocks it from my view, I realize it is the only direct sun I will get during the day.
With the sunlight’s presence, my emotional status lifts, and I feel rejuvenated for a time. Taking advantage of this positive infusion, I take up my knife and begin another two-hour cycle of pecking at the rock. I speculate on the odds of being found and the timing of when outside efforts will initiate a potential search. It looks bleak from every angle. Kristi and Megan barely know me. When I didn’t show up at their truck late yesterday afternoon, they probably thought I blew them off. They don’t know what my truck looks like, either, so even if they went over to the Horseshoe Canyon Trailhead, they wouldn’t know if my vehicle was there or not. Since I didn’t confirm with Brad and Leah that I would see them at the Scooby party, they wouldn’t be alerted to a problem. My roommates will miss me, but they don’t know where I am. If they should get so concerned to notify the Aspen police, the authorities won’t do anything until Tuesday night, at the earliest, once I’m overdue by over twenty-four hours.
It seems more probable to me that my manager at the Ute Mountaineer will call my parents to find out why I haven’t shown up for work. At that point, maybe they’ll get the police to poll my credit-card companies for my recent purchasing history and track me to Moab. This thought causes me to mentally slap myself, thinking about the purchases I made-I used my credit card only for gas in Glenwood Springs, where the highway from Aspen meets the interstate. I could have gone either east or west from there. I used my debit card to get groceries and top off my gas tank in Moab before I drove in to Horseshoe. Or did I? Maybe I used my credit card. Now I can’t remember. I hope it’s part of the missing-person’s procedure to check debit purchases, too.
If the police notify the National Park Service and the NPS initiates a general search on Wednesday, they’re unlikely to find my vehicle right away-the commanders will focus on the areas closer to Moab first. I saw a sign at the trailhead notifying visitors that rangers lead weekend tours down into Horseshoe Canyon to the major pictograph panels; the best shot for a ranger to find my truck will be when they come back to Horseshoe on Saturday, if they’re looking for it by then. A lucky strike, or more thorough second-stage canvasing, might mean they pinpoint my truck in the first day of searching, Thursday, and by the time they sweep the canyon and move all the way through Blue John, it’ll be Friday.
Friday, then, before someone pops his or her head over that chockstone ten feet in front and above me.
Friday.
But that’s at the earliest. Sunday’s more likely to be the day the searchers get to me, given the rangers’ schedule. Sunday, a week from today.
Without water, people die in a lot less than a week. I’ll be shocked if I survive until Tuesday morning. There’s no way I’ll make it to Friday. No way.
And I’ll be mummified by Sunday.