Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [70]
“I don’t know!” Chadwick sounded scared, and the shouting wasn’t helping.
“Are you free?”
“Yes, not yet, I’m digging my feet out!” Chadwick had somersaulted in the avalanche several times, but landed on his feet and stood up as he came to a stop. He had already unclipped his shovel from his backpack and was excavating his boots and ski bindings as I continued to yell for Mark.
“Chadwick, can you see anything of Mark?”
“No!”
My goggles, shovel, and camera were gone, torn off me during the tumult. My probe poles and right glove were gone, too, buried in the debris. I was hoping Mark might have lost some equipment and that a visible trail of gear would suggest his location, but neither of us could see any personal effects amid the debris field.
“Switch your beacon to search and come dig me out. We’ll need both of us to find Mark,” I shouted. Protocol might suggest that Chadwick should try to find Mark by himself, but I couldn’t unbury myself enough to get to my beacon and switch it to search mode. Until I could do that, Chadwick’s beacon would be receiving my transmission on top of Mark’s, making it difficult to pinpoint him.
Within two more minutes, Chadwick was at my side, digging out my left hand. “Stay with me, Aron!” Chadwick was very emotionally shaken. I reassured him that I was okay and directed him to dig at my legs and then to free my boots from the ski bindings.
Rolling out of my hole, I stood up and saw the extent of the vast slide. It hushed my voice. “Oh my God, Chadwick. Look at it.” Five hundred vertical feet above us, a gargantuan fracture cut across the top of the bowl, as high as a two-story house on the right. Blocks the size of refrigerators littered the mountainside; a few monstrous chunks were as big as railroad cars. At first glance, the slide looked to be several hundred feet from side to side. Then I saw how it continued to the left, behind the island of trees where we’d been blindsided, arcing almost a half mile to the far southeastern ridge. Untold thousands of tons of snow had crashed down the hillside. My knees weakened at the scale of the avalanche. That two of us were coherently mobilizing a rescue, after a slide of this magnitude had swept us two city blocks down the mountain, was almost unimaginable. But where was Mark?
Chadwick was still surveying the bowl when I ran down to a terrace in the hill thirty feet below us. The rollover blocked our view of the lower snowfields. At the edge, I scanned the debris for any visual clues, but there were none—the avalanche had swept down the bowl another thousand feet below our position, all the way to the creek. With my beacon set to search mode, I frantically wished for a signal, but there was no feedback on the display. I shouted back to Chadwick, who had started moving to the right and was over a hundred feet away from me. “What’s your range?”
“I don’t know.”
“Switch your beacon to transmit.” I wanted to identify how far apart we could be and positively pick up a transmission. With Chadwick transmitting and my beacon receiving, we could establish our working range.
“Do you get me?” he yelled. I could hear the desperation in both our voices.
“Not yet—come back toward me now.”
“Okay! I’m coming! I’m coming!”
“There; thirty-eight!” My beacon had picked up Chadwick’s frequency at thirty-eight meters. “Switch back to search!” We had a range of just over a hundred feet and a slide path over two-thousand-feet wide. If we could trust our beacons to consistently perform at the working range with a minimum overlap in our search pattern, it would take us five trips up and down the length of the slide zone to cover the whole debris field. But there was no time for that.
Think, Aron. Think.
“Chadwick! We were together at the top. Look where you and I ended up. We’re in line. Mark should be in that same line. Is he above us or below us?”
Chadwick didn’t respond. I ran back over to the edge of the rollover and double-checked the lower mountain. The vast majority of people who