Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [170]
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