Between a Rock and the Hardest Place (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2003

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Between a Rock and the Hardest Place (Cont.)

ARON RALSTON CLEARLY used his head, but would a medical kit or an informed friend have saved his right hand? Probably not. His experience lies at the outer limits of the backcountry-accident bell curve. "You are exponentially more likely to be hit by lightning in the backcountry than to be forced to amputate your arm," says Eric A. Weiss, emergency physician and associate director of trauma at the Stanford University Medical Center and author of A Comprehensive Guide to Wilderness and Travel Medicine. "Lightning is the number-one natural-hazard cause of death, and a sprained ankle is the most common backcountry injury."

Statistics from NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, bear this out. From 1998 to 2000, NOLS had 465,753 program days and only 526 injuries, 48 percent of which were either sprains or strains caused by slipping on the trail. Wounds, bruisings, and bee stings accounted for another 21 percent, fractures and dislocations a mere 7 percent, and head injuries 2 percent. Frostbite, dental pain, burns, and infections made up the rest.

Even so, it's the fluky, once-in-a-lifetime accidents that keep us up at night, and it's the survivors' ingenuity—not their errors—that leaves the most lasting impression.

In 1997, Doug Goodale, a 33-year-old Maine lobsterman, cut off his right arm above the elbow after getting it caught in a winch. In 1993, while fishing near St. Mary's Glacier, in Colorado, Bill Jeracki, an ER technician, was pinned to the ground when a boulder crushed his left leg. Snow was forecast, and he'd left his warm jacket in his truck, 300 yards away; Jeracki, 47, didn't believe he would survive the night. Fashioning a tourniquet out of his flannel shirt, he cut his leg off at the knee with his pocketknife, "like you fillet a fish," using metal clips from his fishing kit to clamp the bleeding arteries. Then he dragged himself out to his truck and drove into town to find help.

That same year, bulldozer operator Donald Wyman was clearing trees from a forest in western Pennsylvania when a massive oak crushed his left leg. Using a rawhide bootlace as his tourniquet (which he tightened with a chainsaw wrench) and a three-inch pocketknife as a scalpel, Wyman amputated his broken leg below the knee.

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