Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Aron Ralston
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2004 by Aron Ralston
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-0510-5
ISBN-10: 1-4165-0510-5
First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2004
ATRIABOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Helene Berinsky
Text permissions
Credits for insert 1: pg. 1 courtesy of Elias Fallon; all photographs appearing on pg. 2 of insert, as well as pg. 3 (top and bottom right) are courtesy of the Ralston family; pg. 4 (bottom right) courtesy of Howard Huang.
Credits for insert 2: pg. 2 (top) courtesy of Kristi Moore; pg. 3 (top and bottom) courtesy of Greg Funk; pg. 7 (top) courtesy of Eric Meijer; pg. 7 (bottom) courtesy of Ron Elberger; pg. 8 courtesy of Tony Angelis.
All other photographs are courtesy of Aron Ralston.
Maps by Guenter Vollath
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Passion: That which I suffer, allow, endure, is done to me.
But once your crew has rowed you past the Sirens
a choice of routes is yours. I cannot advise you
which to take, or lead you through it all—
you must decide for yourself—
but I can tell you the ways of either course.
On one side beetling cliffs shoot up, and against them
pound the huge roaring breakers of blue-eyed Amphitrite—
the Clashing Rocks they’re called by all the blissful gods.
No ship of men has ever approached and slipped past—
always some disaster—big timbers and sailors’ corpses
whirled away by the waves and lethal blasts of fire.
On the other side loom two enormous crags…
One thrusts into the vaulting sky its jagged peak,
hooded round with a dark cloud that never leaves—
And halfway up that cliffside stands a fog-bound cavern
gaping west toward Erebus, realm of death and darkness—
past it, great Odysseus, you should steer your ship.
Scylla lurks inside it—the yelping horror,
yelping, no louder than any suckling pup
but she’s a grisly monster, I assure you.
She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,
packed tight—and armed to the hilt with black death!
…with each of her six heads she snatches up
a man from the dark-prowed craft and whisks him off.
The other crag is lower—you will see, Odysseus—
Atop it a great fig-tree rises, shaggy with leaves;
beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.
Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down,
that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down—
not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.
No, hug Scylla’s crag—sail on past her—top speed!
Better by far to lose six men and keep your ship
than lose your entire crew.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
Prologue:
Circulating with the
Robbers Roosters
He was a better boatman than a cowboy, and a better cook than a train robber, but John Griffith, with the distinguishing mark of one blue eye and one brown eye, became a favored extra hand with the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy’s gang, during his time in the Robbers Roost country of eastern Utah. Blue John, as his first employer called him, found entry into the area as a cook for the Harris cattle operation near Cisco, about sixty miles west of Grand Junction. After fewer than two years of legitimate work, the thirty-five-year-old fell in with Jim Wall, alias Silver Tip, and “Indian Ed” Newcomb on a cattle roundup for the 3B outfit in the spring of 1890. The 3B herd ranged the Roost under the infamous foreman Jack Moore, who proffered hospitality to the Wild Bunch during their frequent gatherings in that country bounded by the Dirty Devil, San Rafael, Green, and Colorado rivers. Sometimes dropping into the Roost for the entire winter, to set up a base camp prior to or after a raid, or to help with the 3B stock, the Bunch always had a welcome in the Roost.
Silver Tip, Blue John, and Indian Ed circulated with the Bunch as a trio of second-tier accomplices, contributing their skills to whatever was in the works, be it horse thievery, robbery, or wrangling. In 1898 they helped Moore rope in the remaining 3B cattle of J. B. Buhr’s failing operation before they left for a horse-rustling escapade in Wyoming. The return trip cost Moore his life in a shoot-out. Early the next year, as the group returned to the Roost after delivering the stolen horses to Colorado for sale, Silver Tip, Indian Ed, and Blue John lifted another batch of the country’s choicest horseflesh from ranches around Moab and Monticello. Not that the Wild Bunch boys paid much attention to posses—who were careful not to get too close to the Roost in general—but the outlaws knew that the law was after them for this most recent spree.
In a side canyon of Roost Canyon, on a late February morning, Indian Ed climbed across the rocks below the overhang where the team had spent the night with their cache of stolen goods—two pack animals and a half-dozen head of horses. Suddenly, a rifle shot split open the morning stillness, the .38–.55 slug flattening against a rock before ricocheting to pierce Ed’s leg above the knee. He dropped to the sandy wash and crawled behind brush to the alcove where Blue John and Silver Tip were exchanging fire with the posse who had found the outlaws via their tracks and evening campfire. Blue John kept the posse engaged while Silver Tip sneaked out from the alcove and climbed to the canyon rim, where he put three shots just over the heads of the sheriff’s men. The posse bolted back down the main wash of Roost Canyon to their horses and fled at full speed to their ranches and homes with a tall tale of their shoot-out with the Wild Bunch.
It was the last time the three bandits worked together or participated in any outlawry. They hung up their rifles and changed their ways, each peaceably fading into history after shaking things up, leaving their trails for others to follow. Indian Ed Newcomb healed his leg and was thought to have returned to Oklahoma, disappearing into obscurity. Silver Tip escaped from custody after serving two years of a ten-year sentence in Wayne County, Utah; he eventually settled in Wyoming to quietly pass the rest of his days. Blue John Griffith was last spotted in the fall of 1899, departing Hite on the Colorado River, heading for Lee’s Ferry down one of the most beautiful and intimidating stretches of river in the West. While it is speculated that he quit the river along the way to head for Arizona or even Mexico, he was not seen to arrive at Lee’s Ferry and was never heard from again.
Of the three, only one left a permanent mark on the land. Blue John Canyon and Blue John Springs, across the watershed from the site of the fateful ambush attempt, are named for the sometime cook, sometime wagon driver, sometime horse thief who roamed the Roost for a decade just before the turn of the twentieth century.
“Geologic Time Includes Now”
This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, known or unknown, actual or visionary…. There’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home cal
ling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of inter-stellar space.
For myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it—the canyonlands. The slickrock desert. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky—all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.
—EDWARD ABBEY, Desert Solitaire
FRAYING CONTRAILS STREAK another bluebird sky above the red desert plateau, and I wonder how many sunburnt days these badlands have seen since their creation. It’s Saturday morning, April 26, 2003, and I am mountain biking by myself on a scraped dirt road in the far southeastern corner of Emery County, in central-eastern Utah. An hour ago, I left my truck at the dirt trailhead parking area for Horseshoe Canyon, the isolated geographic window of Canyonlands National Park that sits fifteen air miles northwest of the legendary Maze District, forty miles southeast of the great razorback uplift of the San Rafael Swell, twenty miles west of the Green River, and some forty miles south of I-70, that corridor of commerce and last chances (NEXT SERVICES: 110 MILES). With open tablelands to cover for a hundred miles between the snowcapped ranges of the Henrys to the southwest—the last range in the U.S. to be named, explored, and mapped—and the La Sals to the east, a strong wind is blowing hard from the south, the direction I’m heading. Besides slowing my progress to a crawl—I’m in my lowest gear and pumping hard on a flat grade just to move forward—the wind has blown shallow drifts of maroon sand onto the washboarded road. I try to avoid the drifts, but occasionally, they blanket the entire road, and my bike founders. Three times already I’ve had to walk through particularly long sand bogs.
The going would be much easier if I didn’t have this heavy pack on my back. I wouldn’t normally carry twenty-five pounds of supplies and equipment on a bike ride, but I’m journeying out on a thirty-mile-long circuit of biking and canyoneering—traversing the bottom of a deep and narrow canyon system—and it will take me most of the day. Besides a gallon of water stored in an insulated three-liter CamelBak hydration pouch and a one-liter Lexan bottle, I have five chocolate bars, two burritos, and a chocolate muffin in a plastic grocery sack in my pack. I’ll be hungry by the time I get back to my truck, for certain, but I have enough for the day.
The truly burdensome weight comes from my full stock of rappelling gear: three locking carabiners, two regular carabiners, a lightweight combination belay and rappel device, two tied slings of half-inch webbing, a longer length of half-inch webbing with ten prestitched loops called a daisy chain, my climbing harness, a sixty-meter-long and ten-and-a-half-millimeter-thick dynamic climbing rope, twenty-five feet of one-inch tubular webbing, and my rarely used Leatherman-knockoff multi-tool (with two pocketknife blades and a pair of pliers) that I carry in case I need to cut the webbing to build anchors. Also in my backpack are my headlamp, headphones, CD player and several Phish CDs, extra AA batteries, digital camera and mini digital video camcorder, and their batteries and protective cloth sacks.
It adds up, but I deem it all necessary, even the camera gear. I enjoy photographing the otherworldly colors and shapes presented in the convoluted depths of slot canyons and the prehistoric artwork preserved in their alcoves. This trip will have the added bonus of taking me past four archaeological sites in Horseshoe Canyon that are home to hundreds of petroglyphs and pictographs. The U.S. Congress added the isolated canyon to the otherwise contiguous Canyonlands National Park specifically to protect the five-thousand-year-old etchings and paintings found along the Barrier Creek watercourse at the bottom of Horseshoe, a silent record of an ancient people’s presence. At the Great Gallery, dozens of eight-to-ten-foot-high superhumans hover en echelon over groups of indistinct animals, dominating beasts and onlookers alike with their long, dark bodies, broad shoulders, and haunting eyes. The superbly massive apparitions are the oldest and best examples of their design type in the world, such preeminent specimens that anthropologists have named the heavy and somewhat sinister artistic mode of their creators the “Barrier Creek style.” Though there is no written record to help us decipher the artists’ meaning, a few of the figures appear to be hunters with spears and clubs; most of them, legless, armless, and horned, seem to float like nightmarish demons. Whatever their intended significance, the mysterious forms are remarkable for their ability to carry a declaration of ego across the millennia and confront the modern observer with the fact that the panels have survived longer and are in better condition than all but the oldest golden artifacts of Western civilization. This provokes the question: What will remain of today’s ostensibly advanced societies five thousand years hence? Probably not our artwork. Nor any evidence of our record amounts of leisure time (if for no other reason than most of us fritter away this luxury in front of our television sets).
In anticipation of the wet and muddy conditions in the canyon, I’m wearing a pair of beat-up running shoes and thick wool-blend socks. Thus insulated, my feet sweat as they pump on my bike pedals. My legs sweat, too, compressed by the Lycra biking shorts I’m wearing beneath my beige nylon shorts. Even through double-thick padding, my bike seat pummels my rear end. Up top, I have on a favorite Phish T-shirt and a blue baseball cap. I left my waterproof jacket back at my truck; the day is going to be warm and dry, just like it was yesterday when I biked the twelve-mile loop of the Slick Rock Trail over east of Moab. If it were going to be rainy, a slot canyon would be the last place I’d be headed, jacket or no.
Lightweight travel is a pleasure to me, and I’ve figured how to do more with less so I can go farther in a given amount of time. Yesterday I had just my small CamelBak with a few bike-repair items and my cameras, a measly ten-pound load for the four-hour loop ride. In the evening, paring out the bike gear, I hiked five miles on an out-and-back visit to a natural arch out toward Castle Valley, carrying only six pounds total of water and camera equipment. The day before, Thursday, with my friend Brad Yule from Aspen, I had climbed and skied Mount Sopris, the 12,995-foot monarch of western Colorado, and had carried a few extra clothes and backcountry avalanche rescue gear, but I still kept my load under fifteen pounds.
My five-day road trip will culminate on Sunday night with an unsupported solo attempt to mountain bike the 108-mile White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park. If I carried the supplies I’d used over the three days it took me the first time I rode that trail in 2000, I’d have a sixty-pound pack and a sore back before I went ten miles. In my planning estimates this time around, I am hoping to carry fifteen pounds and complete the loop in under twenty-four hours. It will mean following a precision-charted water-management plan to capitalize on the scarce refilling opportunities, no sleeping, and only the bare minimum of stopping. My biggest worry isn’t that my legs will get tired—I know they will, and I know how to handle it—but rather that my, uh, undercarriage will become too sensitive to allow me to ride. “Crotch coma,” as I’ve heard it called, comes from the desensitizing overstimulation of the perineum. As I haven’t ridden my bike any extended distance since last summer, my bike-saddle tolerance is disconcertingly low. Had I anticipated this trip prior to two nights ago I would have gone out for at least one long ride in the Aspen area beforehand. As it happened, some friends and I called off a mountaineering trip at the last moment on Wednesday; the cancellation freed me for a hajj to the desert, a pilgrimage for warmth to reacquaint myself with a landscape other than wintry mountains. Usually, I would leave a detailed schedule of my plans with my roommates, but since I left my home in Aspen without knowing what I was going to do, the only word of my destination I gave was “Utah.” I briefly researched my trip options by consulting my guidebooks as I drove from Mount Sopris to Utah Thursday night. The result has been a capriciously impromptu vacation, one that will even incorporate dropping in on a big campout party near Goblin Valley State Park tonight.
It’s nearing ten-thirty A.M. as I pedal into the shade of a very lonesome juniper and survey my sunbaked surroundings. The rolling scrub desert gradually drops away into a region of pa
inted rock domes, hidden cliffs, weathered and warped bluffs, tilted and tortured canyons, and broken monoliths. This is hoodoo country; this is voodoo country. This is Abbey’s country, the red wasteland beyond the end of the roads. Since I arrived after dark last night, I wasn’t able to see much of the landscape on my drive in to the trailhead. As I scan the middle ground to the east for any sign of my destination canyon, I take out my chocolate muffin from the Moab grocery’s bakery and have to practically choke it down; both the muffin and my mouth have dried out from exposure to the arid wind. There are copious signs of meandering cattle from a rancher’s ongoing attempt to make his living against the odds of the desert. The herds trample sinuous tracks through the indigenous life that spreads out in the ample space: a lace of grasses, foot-tall hedgehog cacti, and black microbiotic crust cloak the red earth. I wash down the rest of the muffin, except for a few crumbs in the wrapper, with several pulls from the CamelBak’s hydration tube fastened to my shoulder strap.
Remounting, I roll down the road in the wind-protected lee of the ridgeline in front of me, but at the top of the next hill, I’m thrust into battle against the gusts once more. After another twenty minutes pistoning my legs along this blast furnace of a road, I see a group of motorbikers passing me on their way to the Maze District of Canyonlands. The dust from the motorbikes blows straight into my face, clogging my nose, my eyes, my tear ducts, even gluing itself to my teeth. I grimace at the grit pasted on my lips, lick my teeth clean, and press on, thinking about where those bikers would be headed.
