Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [35]
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