Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [69]
Chadwick and I stood at the edge of the trees, looking up to Mark traversing into the bowl just below our entry tracks, bouncing on his skis. He was ski-cutting the snow, trying to preemptively trigger a slide by simulating the impact of his weight as he compressed in a turn. Seemingly satisfied at the snow stability, Mark made three turns in the upper slope, fell, tumbled over, and stood up, still skiing but sitting back on his skis. He recovered and finished his run smiling. Exhausted, Mark plopped down into the snow about thirty feet from the trees instead of turning to a stop. A hollow whoomph escaped from the snow under Mark, and we each jumped through our skin—hearing the whoomph of collapsing snow often means you’ve triggered an avalanche. But the snow around us remained in place without fracturing. Relieved, Chadwick joked, “Did you hear that? Mark’s butt just whoomphed.”
“Ha! Hey, Chadwick, drop forward on your knees—I want to get a picture of you in the snow.”
A diesel engine—or maybe it was the whispered roar of a jet plane—sounded above us.
As I lined up Chadwick in my viewfinder and depressed the shutter release, I noticed a swirling cloud of thick airborne spindrift over his head. Then the diesel rumble registered in my ears, and in the same fraction of a second that I realized the growling and the spin-drift were related, I was shoved hard from behind my right shoulder, lifted from my feet, and slammed downhill onto the slope on my left side. My world went black.
Accelerating from zero to thirty as if a truck had hit me, I opened my eyes to a dense soup of white. I knew immediately that I was sliding downhill headfirst, buried in a teeming mass of snow, but several seconds passed before I understood that I was being carried away by an avalanche. I opened my mouth and sucked in a mist of snow that lined my throat, choking me. Spitting out the snow, I waited until I saw a patch of sky through the avalanche, then inhaled deeply and held my breath. I fought the pull of the current, trying to rotate my body to get my head uphill so I could swim against the roiling white flood, but my skis dragged through the accelerating debris, anchors shackling my feet above me. Relaxing to save my oxygen until another window opened in the suffocating tide, I silently wondered when my life would start flashing through my mind; fortunately, it never did. My next thought was “So this is what it’s like to be in an avalanche.” I was expecting to be rolled over in a terminal somersault, but I simply continued to slide on my left side. Several more seconds dragged on. I needed to breathe again. I waited for a chance, but there was no blue window this time. I gasped and filled my mouth with snow.
Then I sensed the deceleration as the avalanche slowed, and I yanked my arms to get them above the snow. Because of the ski poles tethered to my wrists, only my right hand came up. It ripped free from my glove, with my forearm and elbow interred in the stiffening snow, like the rest of my inundated body. As I stopped sliding, I jerked my head up and thrust my hips forward, arching my back like a scorpion. I was peering down the hillside, eye level with the rubble. The thought struck me: “I’m alive!”
My torso heaved relentlessly for air. The asphyxiating conditions of the avalanche and a mouthful of compacted snow had starved my body of oxygen. Spitting out the snow, I continued to hyperventilate but managed to yell out, “I’m okay! I’m okay!” between overwrought gasps. The avalanched snow had promptly consolidated, encasing me in an unyielding cast that constricted my chest and held my body motionless except for my right hand and my head. Brushing away what little debris I could from in front of my face, I looked to my left and saw the hut; to my right, the hillside. Avalanche debris was everywhere, but I saw no sign of either of my partners. “Chadwick! Mark!”
Above me, Chadwick screamed in response. “Aron! Mark!”
I craned my head as far to the left as I could and caught a glimpse of Chadwick