Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [78]
Taking off my pack, I fish out the small black cloth sack in which I stowed my digital camera. Holding the sack’s open end in my teeth, I take my knife in my left hand and punch out the stitched end of the bag, trying to keep from stabbing myself in the face. The lightweight material tears easily, and I thrust my left forearm into the fabric tube. Tugging with my teeth, I pull the closer end of the sack up over my elbow, creating a makeshift long sleeve for my left arm. I dismantle the runners from their spot in my pulley station and retie two more lengths of purple webbing around my right arm, pulling the strands between my forearm and the wall where I can’t situate the insulated CamelBak. Also from my anchor system, I take in my teeth the extra length of yellow webbing and, applying tension against the tied-off loop, slice off a five-foot strand with my knife. I put the remaining two thirds of my first burrito in my left pocket, drop the unopened whole one into the bottom of my backpack, and wrap my right biceps in the plastic grocery sack that I was using to store my food. I tie off the plastic bag with the yellow webbing and have a long sleeve for my right arm, too.
Now to do the same for my lower half and somehow make pant legs out of the remaining 170 feet of my climbing rope. The dirty green and yellow line lies in a heap on the rock shelf in front of my knees. It takes me twenty minutes for each leg, but I manage to wrap them both from my thighs to my socks with about thirty neat loops of rope. I laugh at myself. The ropes stack like coils of potting clay; it looks like I’ve been attacked by two identical half-inch-thick green pythons. The coils gather and pinch at my knees when I sit in my harness, so I loosen them and make an adjustment on the daisy chain fixing me to the anchor, lifting me two inches higher in my seat. This is the most comfortable I’ve been since I was trapped.
With the ropes wrapped around my calves, I can lean in to the rock shelf in front of my shins—the one I was afraid I would trip over backward if I’d tried to move out of the way of the falling chockstone. Even if I had fallen, I would’ve been better off with a tib-fib fracture. Did I think about that, or was I worried about my head? It happened so fast, but it happened so slowly, too. How much time had I really had to react? There had been a lot to consider in that fraction of a second when I made my decision to push against the falling rock. Why did I do that? Maybe I thought I could steer the chockstone away from my head, like I had done with a similar-sized boulder on the Crestone Needle.
That time I certainly had no choice. If I hadn’t redirected the boulder, it would have crushed my chest, and I would have plummeted from 14,000 feet in free fall. I had been making a traverse on the ridge between Crestone Peak and the Needle in the spring of 2000, after soloing the Northwest Couloir on Crestone Peak with hiking poles and sans crampons. I was in a ballsy mood, and instead of taking the documented and cairned route of least resistance on the traverse, I made up my own variation of adventure along which I found myself covering a considerable stretch of ground on the north side of the summit-to-summit ridge. The normal route never crosses onto the north side, and for good reason: Twice I was on-sight soloing broken and loose fifth-class rock in my mountaineering boots. I felt every inch of the three thousand feet from my position down to the Upper South Colony Lake. Cliffed out by the Black Gendarme in front of me, I knew I had to find my way over the ridge crest to the south side and easier ground. Fifty feet above me, a