Desert dawn
Rise up early, lift your song
On the breath of life that rises from the
Glowing stone
Feel the rock of ages, smooth against your skin
Smell the breath of flowers dancing on the wind Dancing on the wind.
– STRING CHEESE INCIDENT,
with lyricist Christina Callicott, “Desert Dawn”
AS THE MORNING HEATS UP, I no longer have to unproductively hammer my knife into the rock just to stay warm. My aching grip cries out for a change of routine, so I leave the hacking and chipping for another time. Even without sleep, I feel an increased energy from the ambient light in the canyon. It boosts me in the same way that dawn has done when I’ve hiked through the night. Today, though, there is no end in sight. This isn’t a climb with a final pitch or an endurance hike that will be over after a set length of time. My struggle against the boulder is open-ended. I will be here until I solve this problem or I die.
From desert survival stories I’ve read, I know dehydration can kill you by slightly variable mechanisms, but fundamentally, they all entail your organs not receiving adequate nutrients to the point that they shut down. Some people expire once their kidneys fail and their body’s own toxicity kills them; other people last until their heart collapses. Under exertion in hot environments, dehydration can lead to overheating, and you effectively cook your brain. Whatever way death might come to me, convulsions and severe cramping will most likely herald it. I start to speculate…
I wonder what kidney failure will feel like? Not good, probably. Maybe like when you eat so much you get cramps in your back. Only worse, I bet. It’s gonna be a rough way to die. Hypothermia would be better, if it’s fast onset. At least then I could slip off in mind numbness and not feel it. The temperature didn’t dip that low last night, though, only about 55 degrees. Not cold enough for severe hypothermia. Maybe death by a flash flood would be better? Not so much. Is it better to go out with a scream cut off by a wall of muddy water, to fade silently into a cold-induced coma, or to have the final experience of the gasping spasms of heart failure? I don’t know…
But I’m ready for action, not for dying. It is time to get a better anchor established, one that I can use to rig a lifting system and try to move the boulder. If I can rotate the front of the chockstone up, maybe as much as a foot, I can pull out my hand, though that’s a long way to move a rock this size. Maybe I can budge the boulder backward enough to ease its grip and create a two-inch gap-that’s all I need to get the thicker pad of my thumb out of its trap. I know it’s going to hurt worse than the accident itself, because it will be slow and self-inflicted. The hand is done for; I’ve already written it off. But what happens when blood starts circulating in it again? Will it carry the decay back into my bloodstream and poison my heart? Medically, I’m uninformed about the potential threat involved, but spreading toxins seems like a logical result if I’m able to suddenly free my hand. It’s a risk I accept, and one I can only hope to face.
My first move in attempting to create a second anchor is to unclip my stowed fluorescent yellow webbing from its carabiner on the back of my harness and unwrap the tidy chain of storage loops. I untie the knot holding the two ends together and string the twenty-five-foot length back and forth across the top of the chockstone, trying to keep it stacked neatly apart from the ropes of my current harness support system. Facing upcanyon from my manacling point, I guess at the contours and edges that may or may not exist on top of the chockstones that form the shelf above and in front of me. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to their shape when I was up there yesterday afternoon. It appears to me that a shallow triangular horn sticks out in the middle of the shelf nearly six feet over my head. Perhaps if there is a substantial enough in-cut feature on the back of the horn, a strand of webbing could catch and drape over each side of the horn without pulling over the top of it.
My attempts to toss the webbing up over the horn founder; the material doesn’t have sufficient heft for me to throw it in the air accurately. When I can get it high enough, the yellow fabric pulls itself off the horn, almost bouncing off the rock like it’s somehow become spring-loaded. I puzzle over a solution and decide to tie the currently unused end of my climbing rope to one end of the webbing and try throwing the rope over the horn, then drawing the webbing over the horn with the heavier leader. The next dozen attempts-each a prolonged and tedious effort of recovering and reorganizing the rope and webbing, and getting my body back into position so I can try again-all fail as well. I can get the rope over the horn, but as the knot slides over the top, it loses precious centimeters. Subsequently, the webbing is too far forward on the point of the shelf to securely catch on the smooth sandstone. Time after time, the webbing pulls free and falls to the sand on the other side of my chockstone.
A fissure on the right side of the horn catches my eye. Maybe I can slip the webbing into that slot and give it a better angle to slide around the back of the horn more steadily. The next time I throw and pull the rope, right as the knot is about to crest the horn, I put the rope leader in my teeth and gently twitch the webbing. It responds by slipping back into the slot. Aha! This time, I tug the knot over the shelf’s lip. I can see the difference in how the webbing drapes farther over the back of the salmon-colored horn. Slowly reeling in the leader, I know I’ve got a workable setting for my anchor. Untying the knot connecting rope and webbing, I slip a metal rappel ring over the yellow strap and tie a series of overhand knots in the webbing until it hangs in a loop with the ring at the bottom. I tug on the loop with my left hand, tightening the knot and testing its placement around the outcropping. The webbing doesn’t creep at all as I apply more and more of my body weight. It’s set.
Checking my watch, I note that it’s already after eleven on Sunday morning. I’ve spent two hours just getting the anchor reconfigured, but the endeavor has been an unqualified success so far. My prescribed sip of water enhances my feeling of satisfaction. I’m using discipline well, and I’m pleased with myself over the accomplishment of setting an anchor from below-and single-handedly at that-around an unlikely feature.
Good work, Aron. Now all you’ve got to do is move the boulder. Don’t stop now.
Cutting my climbing rope about thirty feet from one end, I loop one end of the short piece around my chockstone and tie it to itself. Next I thread the other end up through the rappel ring-I can just reach the ring with my left hand. Without expecting any movement of the boulder, I yank on the rope. Sure enough, nothing.
Well, at least the anchor is holding.
I need to fashion a pulley system to create some mechanical advantage. With the single bend in the rope, I’m not lifting the boulder with as much force as I’m pulling on the line. Friction at the rap ring is actually making this setup a mechanical disadvantage system. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pulleys with me; I do have carabiners, though they’ll have a much greater friction loss. Attempting to tear down the ’biner-block anchor that I was previously using to suspend my harness, I flip the rope again and again until the jumbled mess of interconnected links unwedges from the crack.
Time lapses unnoticed for me now; I’m wholly attuned to my endeavor with the rope system. I call upon my training in search and rescue and design a scheme in my mind that will replicate the technical hauling systems we use to evacuate immobilized patients from vertical rock faces. The Albuquerque rescue team taught me two standard systems, and I choose between them, deciding on a Z-pulley system with an additional redirection of the haul line. Modifying the typical system layout for my space and equipment constraints, I add Prusik loops of tied runners clipped to carabiners to connect the rope back to itself. With two such changes in direction, I’ve theoretically tripled the force applied at the haul point-a mechanical advantage ratio of 3:1. Due to my improvisations, the friction in my system is probably halving that advantage, but 1.5:1 is still better than 0.5:1, like my first attempt.
Still, the system is too weak. The boulder ignores my efforts. At the end of the haul line, I tie a set of slipknots that slide onto stopper knots, creating foot loops. Stepping into the loops makes me about two feet taller in the canyon, and though I’m in an awkward position due to my stuck hand, I can now put most of my body weight into service on the haul line. I’ve probably tripled or quadrupled the force that I could apply when I was gripping the rope with one hand. The haul line is taut, even through the bends at the carabiners, and my system is working as designed. However, because I’m using a dynamic climbing rope, meant to stretch and absorb the energy of a climbing fall, I lose much of the force I’m exerting on the haul line. Flailing through hours of taxing work, and several unsuccessful iterations of raising the anchor webbing a few inches by tying another knot above the rap ring, I never once budge the rock. I’m doing the best I can with my available materials. Maybe I could rig a 5:1 system-I have enough carabiners and webbing-but I would need another foot of space between the anchor and the rock to fit all the bends of the larger system. Discouraged from the effort and the lack of measurable progress, I stop for a break and glance at my watch. It’s after one o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m sweating and panting.
Suddenly, I hear distant voices echoing in the canyon. My mind swears in exhilarated surprise, and my breath abruptly catches in my dry throat.
Could it be? It’s the right time of day-a group would get to this part and be able to return out to the West Fork or to Horseshoe Trailhead in daylight. And just like you figured, the odds are better that others will come through on a weekend day. After all, that’s how you came to be here yesterday afternoon.
Even reasoning it through, I’m afraid I may be delusional, that the sounds are in my head. Holding my breath, I listen.
Yes! The noises are distorted and far off but familiar: shoes scrabbling on sandstone. It’s probably a group of canyoneers descending the first drop-off, back at the S-log.
“HELP!”
The caterwauling echoes of my shout fade in the canyon. Forcing myself not to breathe, I listen for a reply. Nothing.
“HELLLP!”
The desperation of my quivering shout disturbs me. Again I hold my breath. After the dying fall of my shout, there is no returning sound besides the thumping of my excited heart. A critical moment passes, my hopes evaporate, and I know there are no people in this canyon.
My morale slumps in a pang, like the first time a girl broke my heart. Then I hear the noises again. This time I know better and I wait. The echoes I took to be approaching canyoneers resolve into the scratchy sounds of a kangaroo rat in his nest in the debris jammed around the suspended chockstone above and behind my head. I rotate and see his tail whip across a pile of twigs as he disappears into his hole.
In that moment, I promise myself that I will yell for help only once a day. Hearing my voice’s shaky timbre nearly panicked me, and to yell out any more often would undermine my effort to maintain a calm and clearheaded demeanor. Rationally, I know there will be no one coming down this canyon until perhaps the next weekend, when the search teams will be scouring the backcountry for my body. Since my voice can be heard fifty yards away at most, and the nearest people would be five to seven miles away, it serves no positive purpose to shout myself scared.
Around two o’clock, I reconsider my status and my options. Waiting, chipping, and lifting have all played out unsuccessfully. For the first time, I seriously contemplate amputating my arm, thinking through the process and possible consequences. Laying out everything I have on the surfaces around me, I think through each item’s possible use in a surgery. My two biggest concerns are a cutting tool that can do the job, and a tourniquet that will keep me from bleeding out. There are two blades on my multi-tool: The inch-and-a-half blade is sharper than the three-inch one. It will be important to use the longer blade for hacking at the chockstone and preserve the shorter blade for the potential surgery.
I instinctively understand that even with the sharper blade, I won’t be able to saw through my bones. I’ve seen the hacksaws that Civil War-era doctors used for amputating patients’ legs and arms in battlefield hospitals, and I don’t have anything that could approximate even a rudimentary saw. I’ve made an assumption that I want to amputate as little of my arm as possible. This unstated parameter leads me to think strictly in terms of cutting through the bones of my forearm, as opposed to going through the cartilage of my elbow joint. The latter possibility never occurs to me, preemptively eliminating the likeliest method.
A vivid memory from a movie of a heroin user shooting up, with a length of surgical tubing wrapped around his arm, gives me the idea to experiment with a tourniquet of tubing from my empty CamelBak. I cut the tubing free from the reservoir and manage to tie it in a simple knot around my upper forearm, just below the elbow. The placement comes to me without consideration of the pressure points nearer my biceps. I’m thinking I will have to twist the tubing so tightly that it will permanently damage part of my arm; therefore, I should put it as close to the cutting site as possible. The knot in the tubing is loose, and I can’t cinch it down even after redoing it three times: The plastic material is too stiff to allow a small knot that would stay snug around my arm. I look around for a stick to put in the tourniquet, but there aren’t any thick enough for my needs. To tighten the tubing will require a force that would snap any stick I can reach.
So much for that idea.
I have a piece of purple webbing knotted in a loop that I untie and wrap around my forearm. A five-minute effort yields a doubled knot, but the loops are too loose to stop my circulation. Again, I need a stick…or I can use a carabiner and twist the loops tighter with that. I clip the gate of my last unused carabiner through the loops and rotate it twice. The webbing presses deeply into my forearm, and the skin nearer my wrist takes on the pallor of a fish belly. I’ve fashioned an effective tourniquet, and seeing my makeshift medical setup working brings me a subtle sense of satisfaction.
Nice work, Aron.
What else will I need? Basic first aid says to put direct pressure on a wound, so I’ll need something to wrap the end of my arm, minimizing any blood flow that sneaks past the tourniquet. The cushioned crotch of my biking shorts would make a good absorbent pad, and with the four feet of unused yellow webbing that I could cut from the anchor, I can secure the shorts around the end of my arm. Then I can stick my stump into my CamelBak mini-backpack, and with both straps around my neck, the pack will act like a sling, immobilizing my arm across my chest. Perfect.
Despite my optimism, there’s a darker undercurrent to my brainstorming. Though my mind is working on the amputation scenario, the operation is still only a theoretical possibility. I’m thinking, “If I cut off my arm, how will I stop the blood loss?” and “If I cut off my arm, how will I pad and sling my stump?” Because my knife is too dull, the rest of the plan is no more than an idle mental exercise. Until I figure out how to cut through the bones, amputation isn’t a practical choice; it’s more a point of theory that allows me to follow through on all my options. I wonder about my courage level and how my mental state will change if I can solve the riddle. As a test, I expose the shorter blade of my multi-tool and hold it to my skin. The tip pokes between the tendons and veins a few inches up from my trapped wrist, indenting my flesh. The sight repulses me.
What are you doing, Aron? Get that knife away from your wrist! What are you trying to do, kill yourself? That’s suicide! I don’t care how good a tourniquet you have, you’ve got too many arteries in your arm to stop them all. You’ll bleed out. You slice your wrist, and it’s as good as stabbing yourself in the gut. If you manage to get through the bones and free yourself, say you make it down as far as the rappel. That tourniquet won’t make a damn difference-the rescuers will find your depleted body sometime next month, pecked clean by buzzards down in that canyon. Cutting your arm off is just a slow act of suicide.
I feel vaguely ill and drop my left hand, allowing the knife to ease away from my skin. I can’t do it. Maybe I’m not ready to pursue amputation any further at the moment. Maybe that argumentative voice is right, though, maybe it is suicide. I’ll have to be a lot more strung out to go through with the amputation. Who knows, maybe some random person will come along tomorrow. All I can be certain of at this point is that, should the need arise for a prolonged and nasty operation-such as hacking through my bones like I was doing to the chockstone-my fortitude will have to be at an all-time high. I shudder at the thought, my eyes close softly, and my mouth gapes open. I can picture my blood spilled on the canyon walls, the torn flesh and ripped muscles of my arm dangling in gory strands from two white bones pockmarked with divots, the result of my last efforts to chisel through my arm’s structural frame. Then I see my head drooped to my sagging torso, my body lifelessly hanging from the knife-nicked bones. It’s like watching the closing sequence of a film, but it doesn’t fade to black. It’s my waking nightmare, a premonition that causes me to set my knife down on the chockstone’s shelf and retch.
Slowly, I blink. My vision blurs in a nauseating swirl, but then it stabilizes and my equilibrium returns. With the sickening surgical practice session over, I review my situation. I no longer have any options that I haven’t already examined and tabled as ineffective or deadly. Even though I’ve followed each potential scenario through its preliminary stages, I can’t presently go further with any of them. I’m stymied at every turn. I’ll die before help arrives, I can’t excavate my hand, I can’t lift the boulder, and I can’t cut off my arm. A sinking depression hits me for the first time. The optimism that has graced me for the last day is gone, and I feel lonely, angry, and scared. I whimper to myself: “I am going to die.” Probably in another two days, not that it matters when.
I will die here.
I will waste away here.
I will shrivel up, slumping here with my arm trapped in this place, when dehydration decides to stop toying around and finally kills me.
Why do I even bother drinking my water? It’s only prolonging my ordeal. Dismally, I wish for a flash flood to end it all. The thought of intentionally slitting my wrists fleetingly dashes in and out of my mind. My despair turns to adolescent anger. I hate this boulder. I hate it! I hate this canyon. I hate the morgue-cold slab pressing against my right forearm. I hate the faint musty smell of the greenish slime thinly glazing the bottom of the southern canyon wall behind my legs. I hate the breezes that blow grit in my face and the dim half-light of this claustrophobic hole where even the sandstone looks menacing.
“I…hate…this!” I punctuate each word with slaps of my left palm against the chockstone as tears well in my eyes.
The echoes of my anguish reverberate up the canyon and vanish into the afternoon. Then another voice, this one inside my head, speaks coolly.
That boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. That’s their nature. It did the only natural thing it could do. It was set up, but it was waiting for you. Without you coming along and pulling it, it would still be stuck where it had been for who knows how long. You did this, Aron. You created it. You chose to come here today; you chose to do this descent into the slot canyon by yourself. You chose not to tell anyone where you were going. You chose to turn away from the women who were there to keep you from getting in this trouble. You created this accident. You wanted it to be like this. You have been heading for this situation for a long time. Look how far you came to find this spot. It’s not that you’re getting what you deserve-you’re getting what you wanted.
Understanding my responsibility for my circumstances placates my anger. My despondency remains, but I stop striking out against the rock. One thought in particular circulates over and over in my mind: “Kristi and Megan were angels sent to save me from myself, and I ignored them.” Everything happens for a reason, and part of the beauty of life is that we’re not allowed to know those reasons for certain, though on this question, my conviction grows. They might not have had wings and harps, but Kristi and Megan came into my life to fulfill a purpose. They were trying to spare me from my accident. I am convinced that they somehow knew what was going to happen to me. Again and again I think about Kristi’s last question-“What kind of energy do you think you’ll find down there?”-and about their repeated urgings, but my stubbornness and ambition had closed my brain in a lock. I did get myself into this. Somehow, in some convoluted way, it’s what I’ve been looking for in my life. How else did I come to be here? We create our lives. I don’t fully understand why, but little by little I get that somehow I’ve wanted something like this to happen. I’ve been looking for adventure, and I’ve found it.
I remember the conversation Megan and I had about a time when she’d gotten lost on Cedar Mesa, a region of southeastern Utah littered with canyons and ancient cliff-dwelling ruins. She and a friend had huddled over a fire of juniper branches through the long night. In return, I told her the story of when I, too, got lost on Cedar Mesa, coming out from a canyon after dark. Unable to find the footprints we’d counted on following back to my truck, my friend Jamie Zeigler and I had stumbled around disoriented for an hour. By a stroke of luck, we found my vehicle on the open mesa top. Then I told Megan about an episode in February when my friend Rachel Polver and I attempted a twenty-mile circuit of Chute and Crack canyons in the San Rafael Reef of central Utah. Fifteen miles into the loop, we came to a sandstone slide that Rachel couldn’t ascend. For an hour, I tried boosting her, coaching her, pulling her, even letting her stand on my back, but she couldn’t get up the ten-foot rise in the slot. We went back the way we’d come until we found a 150-pound log that we then carried two hundred yards back up the canyon to use like a ladder. The entire conversation about being stuck and lost in canyon country had been an unwitting presentiment of my entrapment. After all that talk, I should have known that I was jinxing myself and gone with Kristi and Megan.
Such thoughts are ridiculous, but the fatigue of being awake for thirty-two hours has assuredly started to cloud my mind. I feel sluggish and stupid, the sleep deprivation exaggerating my depleted condition. Before I slip into some sorely needed perversion of a nap and hurt my arm, I clip my daisy chain into the rap ring suspended on the anchor and adjust it to take the weight off my legs again. The numbers on my watch silently change to 2:45 P.M.
I don’t know if I was purposefully waiting for an occasion to pull out my mini-DV camcorder and record some videotape, but just after three P.M., I decide to video myself for the first time. Using my now-standard procedure for taking off my backpack, I slip the strap through its friction clasp and swing the ruck around to my knees. Besides the burritos, my cameras are the only useful items left in the pack. I still have the CD player, the battery collection, and the empty CamelBak reservoir jumbled in the bottom, but everything else is in use. Turning on the palm-sized unit, I flip the digital screen around so I can ensure that I’m in the viewfinder and press the record button before setting it on top of the chockstone.
Just start at the beginning. Assume whoever sees this will find it after you’re dead. You can leave it out on top of the rock with an etching in the wall, “Play me,” and an arrow or something pointing at the camera. Maybe it will be separated from your body in a flood. Tell them everything.
I begin. “It’s three-oh-five on Sunday. This marks my twenty-four-hour mark of being stuck in Blue John Canyon above the Big Drop. My name is Aron Ralston. My parents are Donna and Larry Ralston of Englewood, Colorado. Whoever finds this, please make an attempt to get this to them. Be sure of it. I would appreciate it.”
I take long blinks and rarely check the camera’s screen. I’m un-kempt from four days of scruffy facial-hair growth since the last time I shaved at home in Aspen. But what really makes me avert my glance is the haggard look in my eyes. They are huge, wide-open bowls reflecting the harrowing stress I’ve been through in the last day. Loose rolls of flesh sag and tug at my lower eyelids.
My slurred words come listlessly between labored breaths. I struggle to enunciate clearly.
“So…I was hiking Blue John Canyon yesterday…Saturday…at about two-forty-five to three, somewhere in there, I got to where the lower section of Blue John slots up again. Did some free downclimbing…not too bad…got to the second set of chockstones. And that’s where I am still right now. Because one of the chockstones pulled out as I was pulling on it, climbing off of it, and it slid down, smashed, and trapped my right hand.”
Picking up the camera, I point it first to where my forearm and wrist disappear in the horrifyingly skinny gap between the chockstone and wall. Then I pan the camcorder up over the pinch point to get a view down on my grayish-blue hand.
“What you’re looking at there is my arm, going into the rock…and there it is, stuck. It’s been without circulation for twenty-four hours. It’s pretty well gone.”
I swing the camera up to the anchor webbing and rap ring.
“The ropes you see are set up to give me a seat so I don’t have to stand up all the time. I was not rappelling at the time of the accident, although I did get my harness on afterwards, and I’ve been sitting.
“I’ve been putting a lot of effort into staying warm. I have very, very little water. I had less than a liter when I got here. I have about a third of a liter now. At that rate I will be out before morning.”
Another breeze sweeps over me, and I shudder uncontrollably for five seconds.
“My body’s having a difficult time controlling its temperature.
“Unnhhhh…I’m in deep stuff.” I wince, grimace, and choke on the weight of my words.
“Nobody knows where I am except for two girls that I met yesterday while hiking Blue John. Kristi and Megan of Moab…with Outward Bound there. They went out the West Fork of Blue John, and I continued on.
“I had ridden my bike, which is still parked and locked-the keys are in my pocket here-about a mile southeast of Burr Pass, at a tree that’s about a hundred and fifty yards off the side of the road, the left side of the road as you’re heading southeast. It’s a red Thin Air, Rocky Mountain. It’ll still be there.”
The breeze picks up, and I squint into the gust, trying to keep grit out of my eyes. Wind noise obliterates my voice on the tape, so I stop recording. After gathering my thoughts, I start the tape again to explain my options.
“So the way I see it…there’s kind of four things happening. Ummm, I’m shuddering. Unnhhh…I tried to move the rock with the rigging. I set an anchor and put some foot lines in so that I could stand in them and try to move the rock. It wouldn’t budge.”
Shaking my head in defeat, I yawn, battling the fatigue that comes in waves.
“I tried chipping away at the rock. The progress I made in twenty-four hours, with a lot of work, it would be a hundred and fifty hours, if ever. I think part of the problem is, is that my hand is actually supporting the rock. Which means every time I chip away part of the rock, it moves a little bit and settles onto my hand again. I can’t feel it happening, but microscopically, it seems to be, because the little gap over here between the rock and the wall-right there-is actually, well, at least I think it’s gotten smaller as I’ve been working on it. So, there you can see the chip marks under the rope. I removed a lot of that rock where the rope is right now. And even some you can’t see anymore because my arm is now covering it. Again because the rock moved.”
Pausing to lick my dry lips, I try to swallow, then give a long and despondent sigh. When I rehash my situation, I hear the downheartedness in my voice. The failure of my options trounces my spirit into dejection.
“So, those two things out, the third thing left was to cut my arm off.”
I grimace. My face wrinkles into a contortion that takes ten seconds to straighten out before I can continue with a wholeheartedly dejected explanation.
“I worked a tourniquet up and got into place a couple times with all my plans and what I was going to do…but it’s pretty much suicide. It’s, uh, four hours from here to my vehicle. It would be…if at all possible-because of the fourth-class climbing involved-to go back out the way I came in, it would be about four hours that way, to where I don’t have a vehicle, well, I have a bike, but…um…To go out the West Fork, it would be a couple hours later…er, less…two hours, maybe two and a half hours, but again, fourth-class climbing, which would probably be impossible with one hand. Between the blood loss and my dehydration, I think I’m ruling that out. I think I would die if I cut off my arm.
“Umm, the fourth thing that could happen is someone comes. This being a continuation of a canyon that’s not all that popular, and the continuation being even less so, I think that’s very unlikely that that will happen before I retire from dehydration and hypothermia.
“It’s odd…The temperature is sixty-six degrees, at least it was yesterday at this time; I think it’s a degree or two colder than that now. It got down to fifty-five overnight, which wasn’t bad. I spent a lot of time shivering, though. When I would wake up, I would chip at the rock…I didn’t really wake up, I sat and I tried to sleep.”
I begin my familiar recitation of the most likely rescue scenario.
“So, either somebody notices I’m missing because I don’t show up at the house for the party on Monday night or I don’t show up for work on Tuesday, but they don’t really know anything more than I went to Utah. I think maybe my truck will be found. I think it will be Wednesday, Thursday, at the earliest when someone figures out where I might be, what I’ve done, and gets to me. That’s at least three days from now.
“Judging by my degradation in the last twenty-four hours, I’ll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.”
I know with a sense of finality that I’m saying goodbye to my family, and that regardless of how much I suffer in this spot, they will feel more agony than me. After a long pause, I stumble through an explanation, trying to apologize to my family for what I know they will go through because of my disappearance and demise.
“I’m sorry.”
With tears brimming, I stop the tape and rub the back of my knuckles across my eyes. I start the tape once more.
“Mom, Dad, I love you. Sonja, I love you. You guys make me proud. I don’t know what it is about me that’s brought me to this. But this is…what I’ve been after. I go out looking for adventure and risk so I can feel alive. But I go out by myself and I don’t tell someone where I’m going, that’s just dumb. If someone knew, if I’d have been with someone else, there would probably already be help on the way. Even if I’d just talked to a ranger or left a note on my truck. Dumb, dumb, dumb.”
I stop the tape for the last time and I turn off the camcorder, then pack it away. As I said on the tape, my best option is to wait for a potential rescue. My strategy shifts. I need to stay warm, manage my water intake, and most importantly, conserve my energy. Rather than trying to actively extricate myself, I am now waiting to be found.