Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [149]
Terry spent about an hour flying down the canyon, until they reached the Green River. Greg and Mitch hadn’t seen any sign of a hiker, though they figured they only would have seen someone who was out in the open or up and walking around. There were too many boulders, trees, and shadows for them to have a high probability of detecting me if I were injured and unable to signal the helicopter or slightly hidden from overhead view.
At 2:50 P.M., Terry turned the helicopter around and started quickly working back up Horseshoe Canyon to the trailhead. He had about a half hour of fuel left and would have to land and take off, dropping the officers at the trailhead, before making a twenty-minute dash over Canyonlands to refuel at Moab. It would be a close call to get to the helipad within the time limit.
For the time being, Terry had done all he could do. As he pulled the helicopter up out of the canyon, Mitch took his first easy breath in an hour, looking forward to putting his feet on terra firma once again.
Fifteen
A Date with Destiny
It was like having sex with death.
—BARRY BLANCHARD on 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