‘It was a hundred times worse than any pain I’d felt before. It recalibrated what I’d understood pain to be.’
ARON RALSTON
CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK, Utah, 26 April 2003.
The dusty, sand-filled canyons are parched. The wind, which has had 100 miles of open land to whip up speed, is fierce. A lone, 28-year-old man struggles against it on his mountain bike, pounding the pedals as hard as he can.
He’s wearing cycling gear and carries a heavy backpack. Inside, he has all the gear he needs to rappel down into the deep, treacherous canyons in this remote part of North America. Rope, carabiners, belaying devices, a pocket-tool with two blades and a pair of pliers.
He’s hardly ever had to use that final item, but it’s good to be prepared.
He has three litres of water in his CamelBak pouch, an extra litre in a water bottle, and enough food to last him for the day. Because that’s how long his little expedition into the hard-baked desert of Utah is going to last. A day.
Aron abandons his bike – he’ll collect it later – and hikes for a few hours towards the main object of his day’s trek: the ‘Big Drop’, a 65-foot rappel down to the floor of a weather-beaten canyon.
First, though, he has to lower himself down a narrow slot. There’ll be some down-climbing, and at one point he’ll have to squeeze himself through a section where the two walls of the canyon are no more than a claustrophobic 18 inches apart.
But that’s OK. Aron is an experienced canyon man. He’s doing it solo, no problem.
So now, Aron is on his own. He is far from the beaten track. A lonesome part of the world. He hasn’t told any of his friends where he is. To all intents and purposes, he’s off the grid.
Many people like it like that. And it’s true that out there, surrounded by the bleak but magnificent desert landscape of red dust and deep canyons, there is a unique peace to be found.
But what happens when things go wrong and you need your buddies around?
Aron Ralston was about to find out. Big time.
You’ve heard me say it before: survival is rarely pretty. So, if you’re of a squeamish disposition, stop reading now!
*
At the edge of the slot, Aron gets his gear together. Rope, belay device, harness, multi-tool and water bottle. He fits a lamp to his head – important, because it will allow him to check any cracks in the rock for hidden snakes or scorpions before he puts his hand into them. You don’t want a bite at any time, but especially not during a solo rappel.
But, as Aron lowers himself deeper and deeper into the canyon, there are no snakes. And, to start with, no problems. In places he finds himself chimneying – where you climb down the narrow gap between two rock faces by pressing your body against one face and your feet against the other, then slowly edge your way down, as if free-climbing down a chimney.
He reaches a ledge. Just below it, a large boulder is wedged fast between the two vertical rock faces. Nine feet below the boulder is the canyon floor. If Aron can step out on to the boulder, he reckons he’ll be able to hang from it, then simply fall that short distance to the ground.
He chimneys down to the boulder. Before he steps on to it, he kicks it to check it’s not loose.
The boulder doesn’t budge.
He lowers himself on to it.
A slight wobble, but it feels pretty secure.
Moving carefully he grabs hold of the boulder and lowers himself over the edge.
Then the boulder shifts with his weight. This is bad news. Aron immediately lets go, and allows himself to fall.
He thrusts out his right arm – almost a reflex action to stop the boulder crashing on to his head.
But then the boulder bounces off one wall and slams with a sickening thud into his right arm, crushing it against the opposite wall. And holding it fast.
Silence. Just the sound of his frenzied heart beating and his breath coming in short, terrified gasps.
Then the pain hits – deep and burning, like lightning bolts of pure agony flashing up his arm – and he screams.
But even as the pain is consuming his mind, he knows what he must do while his blood is rich with adrenalin: try to move the boulder.
He grabs it with his left hand and yanks it with every ounce of strength in his body. It shifts just a tiny fraction of an inch. Then it judders back down heavily on to his right arm.
Another searing blast of pain.
Then everything is silent – and still.
*
Aron is sweating profusely. Anyone would be. He needs water, but his CamelBak is empty. He has a litre water bottle in his backpack but it’s strapped over his right shoulder. He has to wriggle his head through the straps to gain access, then instinctively gulps down several mouthfuls.
Bad move. He’s just consumed a third of his remaining water and he doesn’t know how long he’s going to be here. Without water, in the desert heat, he can expect to be dead in three days. If he’s lucky.
He turns his attention instantly to the arm. It’s already going numb. He can see his right thumb. It has turned grey. He doesn’t think any bones are broken, but the soft tissue is mangled and mashed. More importantly, it’s completely trapped between the boulder and the rock face.
He looks on the positive side. At least he’s not bleeding. Sure, he can see some patches of blood on the rocks above where he scraped his skin during the fall. But there’s no blood loss from his crushed right hand.
With his free hand he pulls out his multi-tool and extends the larger of the two knives. Maybe he can hack away at the rock and loosen the limb. He gives it his best shot, but the rock is just too hard.
The afternoon wears on. He tries to use the file on his multi-tool to crack into a fissure on the rock. He creates a little powder, but more than anything he’s just blunting the file.
He tries not to dwell on the hard truth that he’s trapped.
And he tries not to think about the stark reality that, the way things are looking, he has only one option if nobody comes to rescue him: to hack off his own arm.
But surely it won’t come to that.
Night falls. Aron keeps hacking at the boulder. A small piece comes away. But it’s just that: a small, insignificant piece. The arm itself is still stuck fast.
The temperature drops. He empties his rucksack and wriggles it back over his head again. Desert nights can be cold. The pack will help insulate him a little.
At 1.30 a.m. he allows himself a mouthful of precious water. It refreshes him, but he’s getting exhausted. He’s been standing for more than twelve hours. His knees are threatening to collapse beneath him.
In survival mode, sometimes you have to improvise. He wriggles into his harness and creates a makeshift grappling hook from his mountaineering gear, which he slings upwards. It bites into the rocks above and creates a swing that takes the weight off his feet.
But the relief doesn’t last long. The harness starts to cut off the blood flow to his legs. He has to stand again.
The night-time drains all the warmth from him. Exhausted, he makes it through till morning.
With the sun warming his cold skin, he continues chipping away at the boulder. He doesn’t really think he’ll have enough time to break through it before he dies.
But the alternative is too awful to think about.
*
Day two.
The daytime heat rises. Aron is no longer chilled. He’s burning hot.
He tries to improvise some sort of lever system with his climbing gear to move the rock. No luck.
He thinks he can hear climbers and screams at them to help him. But it’s just a wild animal scurrying through the canyon.
It would be easy to despair. He doesn’t. Instead he turns his mind to the gruesome possibility of amputating his own arm.
Not a fun prospect by anyone’s standards.
Aron instantly sees that there are problems. Obviously he’d need some sort of tourniquet to staunch the flow of blood if he ever got free. He improvises with a piece of webbing and a carabiner, which he twists tight around the region just below his elbow. But the resulting tourniquet doesn’t feel tight enough to stop the blood flow completely.
And, in any case, he’s jumping the gun. His little knives might be up to cutting through the flesh, but he’d need some kind of saw to get through the bone of his forearm. He has nothing of the sort.
And even if he managed this monstrous surgery, he would still have to rappel down the Big Drop, and then hike eight miles to where he had left his truck.
It would be impossible.
Once he realizes this, his morale saps.
He’s going to die here.
He has a camcorder in his pack. Reaching for it, he switches it on and records a farewell message for his mum and dad, explaining what has happened, and that he loves them.
Then he settles down and concentrates on staying alive.
*
On the third day, he prays, begging God for guidance as crowds of mosquitoes swarm around him and suck at his flesh. But, for now, it doesn’t seem as if the prayer is going to be answered. The day plods excruciatingly into night. The temperature drops again. He shudders violently, and his teeth chatter.
When he allows himself a sip of water, he has to fight the urge not to gulp down what remains. And now, when he chips away at the rock, he does so because the movement warms him up – not because he thinks he has any hope of shifting the rock.
By 7 a.m. he calculates that he’s been trapped for forty hours.
His mind turns once more to amputation.
His CamelBak is insulated with neoprene tubing. He removes it and uses his left arm to tighten the neoprene just below the elbow. His forearm turns white. This could be an effective tourniquet.
He picks up his multi-tool and extends one of the knives. Then, slightly gingerly, he slices the blade across his forearm.
Nothing happens. It’s too blunt even to break the skin. He gives up that line of attack, for now.
He feels the need to urinate, and does so on the canyon floor. Later that afternoon, the urge to pee comes again. He realizes that he shouldn’t waste this precious resource. He urinates into his CamelBak. It’s fouler smelling and more concentrated than this morning’s urine, but that can’t be helped. Over the next few hours, it separates into layers: golden liquid at the top, thick sludge at the bottom.
At midnight he has his first taste. It is cold and bitter, but he thinks he can stomach it when the water runs out. Which it will, soon – he only has a few mouthfuls of fluid left.
The night passes, slowly, painfully. The next morning, Aron picks up his multi-tool. If he can’t use the blade to slice through his skin, maybe he can use the point to gouge into the flesh.
Almost before he knows what’s happening he has slammed the knife point deep into his forearm.
The blade is jutting out perpendicular from the arm now. It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. He can feel it against the bone in the middle of his arm.
Slowly, he pulls the knife out. There isn’t much blood – the flow has been cut off – but he can see the yellow layer of fat beneath the skin. He reinserts the knife and taps it against the bone. It vibrates up and down his arm. Pain. And the feel of it confirms what he knows to be true. He can’t cut into the bone, nerves and tendons. It just won’t work.
He awards himself another gulp of water. Now it’s all gone.
*
At midday on the fourth day he prays again. Not for guidance this time, but for patience as he waits for death.
*
As night-time approaches yet again, his mind is filled with hallucinations, a result of sleeplessness, pain, dehydration and severe cold. In his moments of clarity he sips at his stash of urine just to moisten his mouth. Then he falls back into a horrific trance.
He starts to hallucinate. He imagines he’s with his friends, that he’s being given refreshing drinks. It’s almost as if he’s at a dinner party, surrounded by people he loves.
Except, of course, he isn’t. He’s deep in hell.
The long, horrific night turns into another long, horrific day. At 2 p.m. he picks up his camcorder to record his last requests. And as another freezing night falls, he carves his name and date of birth into the rock face. Then he carves the date: 30 April. It’s his own memorial, because he fully expects not to live to see morning.
But he does.
And it’s on the sixth day trapped by the rock that the solution comes to him. Like a revelation. An epiphany.
There’s no way he can cut through the bones in his forearm with his knife. But if he can put enough pressure on his upper arm, perhaps he could snap the bones in two.
He barely gives his new plan a second thought.
Aron crouches down. He presses his left hand against the boulder. Then, with his crushed hand fixed in place, he slowly, but with great force, yanks the right arm down and to the left.
Then, crack!
The sound of the first bone breaking in his forearm is like a gunshot. It echoes around the canyon.
He uses his good fingers to feel the break. There it is. The snapped bone is sharp and jagged. His fingers confirm what the terrible pain is telling him: it’s definitely broken.
There are two bones in the forearm: the radius and the ulna. He’s broken one. Now he has to do the other.
Crack!
Another gunshot.
Aron screams with the pain. Sweat mingles with his agony. Then he touches the break point and feels a strange kind of elation. He can twist his upper arm while the forearm stays solid.
The bones are broken. But the forearm is still attached with veins, sinew and skin. To complete the amputation he has to cut through this with the blunt knife of his pocket tool.
He saws at the skin around the break point, trying to slice cleanly. Once this is done, he inserts his good fingers into the gory hole he’s created. He explores the warm wetness inside his arm, feeling for the break and the exact sinews he needs to cut in order to butcher himself as cleanly as possible. He slices, trying to avoid the bigger arteries. He’ll leave these till the end. For now, it’s a matter of patiently slicing through the pink, bloody strands of sinew to cut himself free of his useless, dying hand.
Twenty minutes pass like this. He cuts through one artery. Then a second. His blood is starting to ooze out more aggressively now. He comes to a particularly tough tendon, so he takes a break from his bloody work to reapply his improvised tourniquet.
Then back to the tendon. It’s too tough for the knife, so he folds that back in to the multi-tool and removes the pliers. Little by little, he clips and twists tiny clumps of tendon.
Back to the knife. He concentrates hard on the bloody mess his arm has become. He has one more artery and a little bit of muscle left to cut through.
And a nerve.
He knows this is going to be the most painful bit.
Just touching it makes him scream with pain.
But he cuts through. More pain than he’s ever known floods through him. Intense. Blinding. Burning. For a moment he can do nothing but give in to it.
But now he only has a few scraps of skin and gristle to go. He continues his appalling work.
And suddenly, after nearly an hour, the amputation is complete.
Aron Ralston is free.
*
But he’s still alone, and a long way from anywhere.
Leaving his amputated forearm crushed in the rock, he wraps his stump in a white shopping bag he has with him. Then he improvises a sling with his CamelBak then gets moving. Time is everything. He needs help before he bleeds to death.
With only one good arm and a whole world of pain, he somehow manages to rappel down the Big Drop to the canyon floor. Here, he finds a pool of stagnant water to rehydrate himself. Never a good move to drink water you don’t trust. But these are desperate moments for a man on the brink.
Almost immediately, his bowels expel the filthy water. Then he starts to stagger across the desert.
Mile after mile.
The intense heat burns down. Blood drips from his wounded stump, and the constant pain takes everything out of him. But he keeps walking, past the limits of endurance, for a full six miles. Then he sees figures up ahead – a family of three. He calls out to them, yelling for help. They are aghast when they see what has happened. But they run ahead and fetch help.
A helicopter finally arrives and airlifts Aron out of there. The air crew stare at him in disbelief and horror. And when he touches down at the nearest hospital, the doctors stare at him in wonder.
It is 127 hours since the rock first fell on him.
By rights, he should be dead.
*
There are so many lessons to be learned from Aron Ralston’s 127-hour feat of endurance. Some are simple – like, always let someone know where you’re going to be if you’re heading out into the wilderness.
Some are more complex.
Aron Ralston would later say that he believed if he’d amputated his arm earlier, he would have bled to death because the helicopter that lifted him to hospital wouldn’t have been in the area. At his nadir, he prayed for inspiration and patience. At the time, it didn’t seem like either prayer had been answered. But sometimes hindsight can show you something beautiful among the suffering. Aron Ralston needed patience first, and then inspiration. He was given both.
He had something else, too: an instinct for survival. When the chips were down, he would do whatever it took – literally, whatever it took – to stay alive.
That instinct for survival is buried deep in all of us. Sometimes it takes an extreme situation for it to come to the surface. And, invariably, we are all stronger and more resilient than we might imagine.
Aron Ralston discovered, through incredible pain and hardship, that as humans we are made of much more than just flesh and bone.