Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [147]
Sue had come directly from Hope UMC, where she heard about my mom’s request for support during the crisis. My mother quickly told Sue the limited amount she knew about my situation. There were more tears and hugs and sobs, but shortly, Sue, Ann, and my mom were ready to get back to work.
The threesome began a long-distance distribution of the freshly made poster. My mom asked the office administrator at Hope Church to fax over a phone list of United Methodist churches in Grand Junction. Juggling two phones to collect fax numbers, my mom also got the fax machine warmed up. At nine-forty-five A.M., they were about to go into high gear when my mom’s cell phone rang.
The voice on the other end belonged to Acting Chief Ranger Steve Swanke of Canyonlands National Park. It was the first time my mom had spoken with Ranger Steve, as he introduced himself—he had just become involved in the investigation within the hour—but she was ecstatic to hear his startling good news.
“Mrs. Ralston, we have located your son’s vehicle,” Steve said in a friendly drawl honed by a career of interacting with the public.
With a gasp, my mom relayed the news in an escalating din of excitement just short of a scream: “They found his truck! Thank God! They found his truck!” After Steve gave my mom the full situation update, she and her friends hugged, then they sat on the back porch, knowing that now there was nothing more they could do but pray the rescuers found me and that I was alive and OK.
In a coordinated effort between the NPS and the Emery County sheriff to command the incident response, Ranger Steve Swanke and Captain Kyle Ekker requested helicopters, search dogs, a climbing team, ground personnel, and horse-mounted search teams for the effort in Horseshoe Canyon. At the Unified Command Headquarters in Moab, Swanke assigned two investigators to research a subject profile on me. One of their first actions was to go on the Internet and enter my name in a search engine. They immediately turned up my website, with links to my mountaineering projects, canyoneering trip reports, and photo albums of rock art panels in New Mexico. They deduced that I was an experienced outdoorsman but not necessarily familiar with the area around Horseshoe Canyon, providing one of nine factors that go into the subject profile evaluation.
The National Association of Search and Rescue (NASAR) guidelines help incident commanders assess the relative urgency of a subject’s absence, based on the number of subjects and their age, medical condition, equipment, and experience, along with factors for the weather, terrain, and history of rescues in the area. Assigning values of 1, 2, or 3 to each factor, search leaders can measure their response appropriately. A 1 indicates a higher urgency than a 3. A very old (1) and inexperienced (1) subject with a history of heart disease (2) who is lost by himself (1) in a storm (1) with only the clothes on his back (1) in a region of steep, rocky terrain (1) that has a history of incidents (1) with a low probability of a bogus search (1) would earn a total profile score of 10. Any score of 9 to 12 dictates a first-degree emergency response.
From the information available on me, the relative urgency work-sheets in the incident command guidelines suggested a second-degree measured response, which differs from an emergency response only in the speed and number of people and equipment initially committed to the field. However, because of my extensive experience with solo-climbing winter fourteeners and the nearly weeklong duration of my absence, Ranger Swanke increased the urgency to an emergency response.
On Swanke’s request, New Air Helicopters, a charter service out of Durango, Colorado, launched a helicopter for Horseshoe Canyon just before noon on Thursday. Subsequently, the NPS requisitioned a another bird from a Forest Service firefighting crew in southern Utah, effectively commandeering it for assistance with the