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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Excerpt: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Trapped (cont.)

8 P.M.
Stress turns into pessimism. Without enough water to wait for rescue, without a pick to crack the boulder, without a rigging system to lift it, I have one course of action. I speak slowly out loud:

"You're gonna have to cut your arm off."

Hearing the words makes my instincts and emotions revolt. My vocal cords tense and my voice changes octaves:

"But I don't wanna cut my arm off!"

"Aron, you're gonna have to cut your arm off."

I realize I'm arguing with myself, and yield to a halfhearted chuckle. This is crazy. But I know that I could never saw through my arm bones with either of the blades of my multitool, so I decide to keep picking away at the boulder. Tick, tick, tick ... tick ... tick, tick. The sound of my knife tapping is pathetically minute.

A breeze is blowing downcanyon, flicking sand over the ledge above me and into my face. I bow my head, and the brim of my baseball cap keeps most of the dust out of my eyes, but I can feel the grit on my contacts.

Darkness seeps from my penumbral hole and spills into the desert. I establish a rhythm, pecking at the rock at two jabs per second, pausing to blow dust away once every five minutes. Time slips past.

Before I know it, it's nearly midnight. Perhaps because of my growing fatigue, a song is playing over and over in my head. Sadly, the melody is from the first Austin Powers movie, which I watched a few nights ago, just a single line of the ending credits' chorus repeating on an infinite loop: BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC Five, BBC Six, BBC Seven, BBC heaven!

Yeah, that's not annoying at all, Aron.

Even if I wanted to sleep, I couldn't. The penetrating chill of the night air urges me to keep attacking the rock to generate warmth, and when my consciousness does fade, my knees buckle and my weight tugs on my wrist in an agonizing call to attention.

I realize that the best way to conserve my energy is to construct a seat. Getting into my harness is the easy half of the equation. Now comes the hard part: getting some piece of climbing gear hung up on a rock overhead, something that can hold my weight. My first dozen tries fall short, but then, with a brilliantly lucky throw, the carabiner bundle I've rigged hits the wide mouth of the crack, drops into the pinch point, and, with a tug at just the right moment, wedges tight.

A wave of happiness washes over me. With two adjustments of the knots, I can finally lean back and take some weight off my legs. Ahhhhh. Fifteen minutes later, however, my harness begins restricting the blood flow to my legs. I alternately stand and sit, establishing a pattern that I repeat in 20-minute intervals.

In the coldest hours before dawn, I take up my knife again and hack at the chockstone. Just after eight o'clock, I hear a rushing noise filtering down from above. I look up as a large black raven flies over my head. At the third flap, he screeches a loud ca-caw and then disappears from my window on the world. I can see bright daylight on the north wall, 70 feet above. I turn off my headlamp. I've made it through the night.

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