Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [71]
With a hundred feet between us, Chadwick and I marched quickly up the slope toward another terrain roll fifty feet above. Chadwick had come to a stop. To my right, he blurted out, “Forty-eight! I’ve got a hit!”
Mark! We pushed harder, thighs burning, lungs stinging, legs sinking, stumbling in the debris. Mark! No time to catch a breath. I crested the rollover, and my beacon lit up—38, 37, 34…28…24. I was closing in. Then I saw a small object, a ski tip. I could discern the K2 insignia.
“I’ve got him! I see a ski tip!” With more ground to cover than me, Chadwick had slowed in the debris, falling farther and farther behind. I shouted out, “Mark! We’re coming!”
Chadwick shouted, “Aron, take the shovel!”
I was close. 18…15…I couldn’t turn back to get the shovel. “No! Get your ass up here!” As I charged toward the ski tip, my beacon beeped faster and at a higher tone, like a detonator about to explode. 11…8…4…Over the insistent shrill, I heard a weak moan, then another.
“Mark, I’m here!” I traced back five feet from the ski tip and lifted a briefcase-sized block of snow from the source of the moaning. A tangle of yellow hair and a red piece of cloth protruded from a pile of cementlike snow.
“Mark! Can you hear me?” Mark couldn’t spare the time it would take me to be delicate with my next task. I roughly knocked his head several times while brushing the snow away from his face, quickly clearing a breathing space. When I moved the red glove bunched up in front of his mouth; Mark’s leaden skin tone arrested my action. I was staring into the ashen face of an entombed ghost. Of the four dead people I’ve seen in my life, all had more color than Mark did at that moment.
I cocked Mark’s head up and fished the icy blockage out of his mouth. It had been twelve minutes since the avalanche stopped, and Mark had been without adequate oxygen for most of that time. He was still alive but at the lowest level of alertness. I was relieved when he responded to my questions, but all he could tell me was that he was cold and tired.
I jumped up from my crouch and ran halfway to Chadwick, who threw the shovel to me. Catching it in the air, I turned and raced back to Mark. With his airway clear and him still breathing on his own, my next concern for Mark was his body temperature. Hypothermia could pull Mark from consciousness at any moment and shut down his breathing. I dug first at Mark’s partially exposed left arm, then at his back and left leg, calling out my finds as I made slow progress. Mark was buried more deeply than I had been. Chadwick arrived and talked to Mark as I dug feverishly, scooping snow downhill. I needed help to move all the heavy snow. After exposing Mark’s backpack, I unfastened his shovel and tossed it in front of Chadwick. “Help me dig!”
“I can’t. My hands are frozen. I can’t hold on to anything.” Chadwick had lost both his gloves in the avalanche, and the combination of excavating me and then clawing up through the debris field had rendered his hands unusable. I had only my left glove and liner. Tearing off the outer shell, I gave it to Chadwick against his protests: “My hands are gone—save yours!”
“Take it! Turn it inside out and put it on your right hand. I need your help digging.” Next I yanked off Mark’s gloves, gave Chadwick the left one, and took the right one myself.
For the first time, I saw movement over at the hut, nearly a third of a mile across the mountainside to our right as we looked uphill. I cupped my hands and shouted at the top of my lungs to the people I could see milling around outside: “HELP! HELP! HELP! HELP!”
Faintly, I heard a voice reply, “We’re coming!