Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [38]
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.
How to Become a Retired Engineer in
Just Five Short Years
Deep Play: whereby what [one] stands to win from a gamble can never equal the enormity of what [one] will lose.
—JOE SIMPSON, Dark Shadows Falling
IN THE YEAR after my encounter with the stalking black bear in the Grand Tetons, I selected three climbing projects that would come to occupy my entire recreational focus: I would climb all of the Colorado fourteeners; I would climb all of them solo in winter (something that had never been done before); and I would ascend to the highest point in every state in the U.S. In late June 1997, I started my job at Intel, which seemed like a piece of cake compared to being hunted by a winter-thin bear.
Compensating for the banality of my new career in mechanical engineering, I created adventure in my life by exploring Arizona’s vast variety of public lands—canyons, mountains, volcanic cones, meteor craters, deserts, and forests. I met my friend and mentor Mark Van Eeckhout through a college classmate. We both worked at the same clean-room facility in southern Phoenix, and over lunch we would plan out hiking and camping trips.
My college girlfriend, Jamie Zeigler, gave me Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire, which fanned my passion for desert adventure. I became a founding member of the Intel Adventure Club in 1998 when four of my friends from work, including Jamie Stoutenberg and Judson Cole, drafted a plan to hike across the Grand Canyon twice on consecutive days. Starting from the South Rim, we would descend five thousand feet in seven miles via the South Kaibab Trail to cross the Colorado River near Phantom Ranch, then continue fourteen miles on the Bright Angel Trail to the North Rim, climbing six thousand feet up to our campsite. After resting, we would turn around and do it in reverse, North Rim to South Rim. We called it the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, or R3 for short.
Just before the trip I was reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild. The story of young Chris McCandless dropping out of mainstream society to travel around the country entranced me with dreams of living out of the back of a truck and “rubber tramping” across the U.S. I was so caught up in the adventures of Alex Super-tramp, Chris’s nom de voyage, that I carried the book with me across the Grand Canyon on the R3 trip. One passage in particular—from a letter that Chris sent to an older friend he’d met on the road—read like a manifesto:
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
I wanted to taste that joy, to experience that passion for adventure, to cast away the security of my job and let my spirit roam. This meant I needed to get educated on outdoor living; I needed to gain experience before tackling major expeditions; and I needed to be prepared and mitigate risks. Even more directly, I needed to get a truck and then leave my job. But I had a ways to go before I would be ready to do that.
Another of Krakauer’s books, Into Thin Air, captured my imagination in the winter of 1998. It documented the Mount Everest disaster, in which eleven people died, so compellingly that I felt transported to 26,000 feet on the South Col with Neal Beidleman’s group of lost climbers, just a few hundred yards from Camp IV, wondering what I would do in their