I did some research on this story this past week, and I decided to share it. It's quite inspirational.
You may not recognize his name or his face, but you probably do know his story.
On the 26th of April in 2003, a 27 year old outdoors-man named Aron Ralston went on a hiking trip in Blue John Canyon, which is located just outside of the Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah. Its location was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.
His trip was a short one, only planned for the weekend where he had hoped to mountain bike, climb the red rocks and sandstone, and explore the beautifully crafted caverns throughout the canyon.
"It was a vacation," Aron says. "I was looking to get away a little bit. It was like going to the beach for me."
He traveled alone, and being an expert with the outdoors, he didn't think that he needed to tell anyone where he was going. He had gone on several other expeditions before, some of them even life threatening, and a hike through the wilderness seemed like an afternoon walk compared to the travels he had been through.He arrived on a Friday night, parking his truck on a trail in the middle of the desert, which was at least 30 miles from the nearest paved road. On Saturday morning, he headed into the park with his mountain bike. He only took enough supplies for the afternoon, intending to return to the camp later that night.
By early afternoon, he had traveled 20 miles from his truck and camp. He was looking forward to exploring Blue John Canyon, one of the parks most unique features. It is also known as a slot canyon, and from the ground, it is almost invisible. From above, it appears to be a little more than a deep crack cutting through the desert terrain, but inside it is almost a surreal environment, with twisting serpentine walls that can stretch up to 100 feet deep.
He had only been inside the slot canyon for 15 minutes, and it was approximately 2:45 p.m. when he encountered an 800 pound boulder blocking his path. It was wedged between the canyon walls. "The easiest way for me to get down was to use that boulder as an intermediate step. So, I stood on it, kicked at it, and then stepped onto it." It seemed to be solid, but as Aron climbed over it, lowering himself over the backside of the boulder, it suddenly tumbled. 
"I was hanging from the bolder from the top of it, where the handholds were, and that was when it shifted. I dropped down here, and the boulder came and it smashed my left hand here, and then it smashed my right hand up here. And then it slid down and it actually dragged my (right) arm down," Aron says, describing the incident (see the picture to the right.) "It was coming at me. I was trying to get out of the way. My instincts were to clear my head, to get my head out of the way. It didn't even occur to me that my hands could get trapped. It happened fast...and it was the most intense pain that I had ever felt. If you've ever crushed your finger in a door accidentally," he says, "imagine that pain times 100."
It was no more than a few seconds, and when it was over, he found himself pinned to the canyon wall by the 800 pound rock. He was at the bottom of a hole in a hidden canyon, 100 feet beneath the desert surface, more than 20 miles from the nearest paved road, surrounded by hundreds of more miles of uninhabited desert.
As the boulder lodged itself into place, Aron immediately tried to free himself.
"I threw myself at the boulder for half an hour to forty five minutes...I put my knee up on another bolder and kept pushing up, resisting it every way I could, but still, my hand was trapped. Progressively, the pain faded as my hand lost sensation....I got out my water and drank about a third of it. Because of the exertion, I was sweating from trying to heave against the boulder."
It was clear that he couldn't budge the rock, but he continued to try different methods, trying to get free.
"I got my knife out and held it, and chip chip chip chip tap tap tap tap tap like that at the rock."He chipped and tapped for the rest of the afternoon into the night. As it started getting dark, he realized that he would have to spend the night alone in the darkness.
"I didn't have a lot with me to begin with and I knew what I had in my backpack. I had my water out - around 22 ounces - I had my food bag, and I knew that I had two burritos left, and that was it. And I knew that water would be the main challenge as far as a long term existence there."
He also had rope, rock climbing gear, a walk-man, video camera, digital camera, a small headlamp, as well as a dull pocket knife.
His options for survival were few. Either he could some how move the rock - either by chipping away at it or shifting it over somehow (but both seemed unlikely), or he could wait for someone to rescue him (other hikers out for the weekend, or a search party), but because no one knew where he was and because he was so well hidden, that seemed very unlikely as well. The last option would be to amputate his arm.
"Right away, I knew that (amputating my arm) was an option that I had to consider, and that I really didn't want to have to do that. I even had a little conversation with myself - I spoke out loud to myself - saying 'you're going to have to end up amputating your arm to get out of here' and then responding that I didn't have to want to do that. But it was an option from the beginning."
(A picture Aron took while stuck in the boulder.)
Aron had to prepare himself for the night ahead. He was hungry and thirsty, but he knew that he had to preserve everything he had. In the hours to come, he would allow himself only a couple bites and sips. As soon as the sun began to drop, so did the temperature - he was dressed in only a t-shirt and shorts because his warmer clothes were back in his truck. At nightfall, the canyon was pitch-black and eerily quiet. The temperature had fallen from the high 60's down to 50 degrees. The only way to stay warm was to keep active, and Aron did that by continuing to chip away at the rock, using his headlamp for light.
"I spent most of the first night doing it (chipping at the rock), and I realized that it would take me 150 hours to remove enough rock to where it would even be possible to move my hand. And I didn't have that kind of time available nor did my hand. My left hand didn't hold up very well to the task of just bashing into the rock. I was scraping my knuckles up, my hand was swollen from when the boulder had smashed part of it. From that point on, I didn't have the energy and I knew this was going to be a much longer haul."
He was already exhausted, but sleep was not an option. He was trapped in a standing position with no way to take the pressure off of his legs. He took an advantage with his training as an engineer to rig a system with his rope and climbing harness that allowed him to sit, taking the weight off of his legs.
"Essentially, the way I tried to rest was getting into this position like I am." (shown to the left) "I'd hold onto my right shoulder with my left arm and sitting, taking the weight off of my legs. I'd get in here and kind of tuck my head into my arm like this. And I'd only be able to do that for five or ten minutes at a time and then I'd get so cold that my body would start shuddering and shivering and shaking and trying to generate heat, and then I would have to start doing something - either insulating myself better or going back to work chipping at the rock."
As dawn came around with Aron still chipping away at the rock, realization came to him that chipping himself out was not an option. He had now been trapped for 16 hours and it was starting to sink in that his best chance of survival was his most dreaded option: cutting off his own arm. It was his last resort, a decision he was still a long way from making.
"Having made it through the night felt good. I knew that I could make it through another night if I needed too. It also gave birth to a hope that, well, it's Sunday. It's a day on the weekend, maybe some other hikers might be coming down."
(Person Interviewing Him): "Did you ever scream for help?"
Aron: "Once. I limited myself to one shout a day, but I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. I knew from experience that you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon."
(Aron yelling from the recently made movie, 127 Hours.)
By now, Aron realized that his crushed arm was beyond repair. The pain had somewhat subsided, signaling that the tissue and nerve endings in his lower arm were probably dead. But he was still tremendously uncomfortable, still trapped in a standing position. The same ropes and gear that he used to help him sit were also used to develop a pulley system to try and shift the boulder, but still it would not budge. His arm remained solidly pinned beneath it.
By Sunday afternoon, 24 hours had passed. In that time, Aron had worn down both blades and the file on his pocket knife. Now he re-evaluated is next two options: he continued to hold out hope that he might be found, but as the remaining hours of weekend daylight faded, so too did that possibility. It was unlikely that there would be other hikers in the area until the next weekend and Aron knew that he wouldn't survive that long. Rescue also seemed unlikely: he wasn't even expected at work until Tuesday and no one would realize that he had been missing for days, and even then, he had told no one where he was headed.
It was this point Sunday afternoon where Aron, realizing his slim chances of survival, picked up his video camera and began recording messages that he hoped would be found after his death.
He would continue to record these video messages for the next four days. It is said that his videos were too upsetting for his friends and family to see. However, you can hear some of the auditory portions of it right here.
More and more, Aron wondered if that dreaded last resort of cutting off his own arm was his only hope of getting out alive.
"It wasn't something that I was very psychologically prepared to think very hard about at that point, but I laid things out, trying to brainstorm what I was going to use, how I could use it to operate on myself, what I could use for a tourniquet, what I could use for padding, what I could use for a splint...things like that."
Going through with it...well that was something else. For now, it seemed like cutting off his arm was just another trail that would lead to certain death. "It's pretty much suicide," he had said in one of the tapes he had recorded at the time. "It's, uh, four hours from here to my vehicle...climbing it would probably be impossible with one hand. The blood loss and my dehydration, I think, are ruling that out. I think I would die if I cut my arm off."
Once again, he pushed the thought of cutting off his arm away, and instead focused on rationing his remaining food and water even further in order to survive. With only ten ounces of water left, he now limited himself to one very small sip every hour and a half. He also took pains to conserve his two burritos, eating one small bite at a time. But as Sunday afternoon slipped into Sunday night, even though small bites and sips were a luxury, he couldn't afford them.
"I would allow myself to open up my water bottle and I would hold it up to my lips and I'd tilt it just enough so the inside of my lip got wet and then I would make myself put it down."
Aron was well informed with the survival statistics. Without water, he would likely die within three days and he was already feeling symptoms of extreme dehydration. "My body wasn't operating properly. Even during the day, I would have hot flashes and cold flashes without wind. My body's temperature regulation was just out of the window."At night, it was even worse. "Even with a slight breeze, I would just shudder uncontrollably from the early stages of hypothermia. I wrapped my legs up in the rope that I had and put webbing around my neck to keep my neck warm, I had my hat pulled down, and I put my CD walk-man headphones on my ears to keep my ears warm. 9 hours of just total darkness with cloudless skies and the stars sucking the warmth out of me. The hours, especially from 3 to 6 in the morning would go very, very slowly. I would think that I had been passing as much as ten to fifteen minutes of time, and then I would look at my watch again and it had been 3 minutes since I had looked at it last. That would almost be all the activity that I would do (looking at his watch) during those last hours of the morning when it was the coldest and it was just, it felt darker."
Monday morning, Aron had made it through his second night but he still hadn't slept and now sleep deprivation was taking its own toll. "I would kind of drift off into these trances that would lead me through a surreal escape from the canyon. I would suddenly be in someone's living room or in a hallway that would lead into a cocktail party, and one time I ended up in a hospital janitor's closet. I had very little understanding of what those were all meant to convey, but in some concrete way, they helped me by giving me something to look forward too, to bolster my strength, to feel like I was not as alone, and connected."
Hunger and thirst were also taking their toll on Aron. (As recorded on Monday morning): "I can't stop thinking about how good grapefruit juice or a margarita or an o.j. or a popsicle sound -- all of these great things that I would love to have. An orange - oh, a tangelo. I can't think about that stuff."
By Monday night, he was only down to a few bites of food and a few sips of water. His desperate situation called for desperate measures. "Monday night, I started saving my urine, because I knew that it was going to be an option, if nothing else." The situation continued to grow worse, and Aron knew it as well. "I'm going to shrivel up right here over course of the next few days," he said that night.
"There was a raven that flew overhead that came each day." It was the only sign of life that he had seen for days. "With the accuracy of the timeliness...every morning at exactly 8:15, it was overhead, flying over the canyon. It kind of became my morning ritual to watch for it and to see it go." As the raven soared overhead Tuesday morning, Aron took his last sip of water. In Mythology, the raven tended to be a dark symbol, thought to foreshadow death, or to carry the soul to the next world. Was it a sign for Aron Ralston?
By then, he knew that his only chance of living would require him to do something unimaginable. "It's going to be a really long time before anybody gets to me," he said that morning. Now, he was forced to confront the decision that had loomed for days. It was time to act, to cut himself free. "What I was working through in my head was: can I actually do this? And I took the knife and I stabbed myself into the upper part of my forearm, and was able to sink the knife blade in. But I wouldn't be able to cut through the bone with this knife."
(To the left is Aron's first "attempt" at cutting off his arm.)
"I couldn't barely break the skin with this, this stupid knife," he recorded. "I tried a couple of different blades and all I did was mark myself up like...I can barely even get any blood to draw." It was a crushing realization. Now his only hope was that someone would realize that he was missing, and by some miracle, figure out where he was and find him.
It was now 9:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and back in Aspen Colorado, Aron was officially late for work. "Down deep in my stomach, I knew that something was seriously wrong," his manager Brian said. Because he knew what a skilled outdoors-man Aron was, he decided to give him a day before sounding the alarm.
Back in Blue John Canyon, Aron had run out of water and at 4 p.m, he took his last bite of food. "All I had was two bottles of urine. It certainly wasn't a pleasant part of the experience, but it helped me survive." As he waited, he wondered what would kill him first: dehydration, hypothermia, or his arm...would be able to stay off death until he was rescued? Aron calculated that even if he was reported missing, it would be days before rescuers started to look for him and days more before they found him. "My confidence in me lasting that long was very low. On Sunday, I'd say that I would be surprised if I made it to Tuesday morning, on Tuesday morning I'd say that I'd be surprised if I made it to Wednesday at noon." And the critical error that he made by not telling anyone where he was going continued to haunt him. "It was the most significant mistake that I've made." Later, he received criticism of not having a cell phone on him, but Ralston argues that given his remote location - literally underground - getting a cell phone signal would have been impossible.
As the days passed, he questioned if anything would save him. His thoughts often turned dark, his mind playing out other horrific scenarios. One of the most dangerous things for canyonier's: a flash flood. Even a moderate rainfall could trigger a torrent of water that would send rocks, trees, and debris rushing through the canyon. "I was almost wishing for it to come in one sense," he said that Tuesday. "That maybe I could get a little bit of water." He also had an even darker thought: why wait for nature? Why not just finish the job himself? "If I had a way to end it...I probably would. It's miserable. It's cold. I can't keep the wind off of me...it just blows. It's not even a stiff breeze, but it's just cold. I'm doing what I can, but this sucks. It's one of the worst ways to go, knowing its going to happen."
He readied himself for his fourth night in the canyon, hoping that he'd still be alive when the sun rose. "The nights got longer from the way that they felt, they got colder and my body just had a diminished ability to respond to the cold and to the resources as my calorie reserves were being used up." His body was slowly breaking down. Unbelievably, he had gone some 90 hours without sleep and only a few bites of food and now, a full day without water. He couldn't survive that much longer: he was slowly dying, and he knew it.
That day, he said his goodbyes to his loved ones: "So I didn't want to sign off without saying 'I love you' to Grandma and Grandpa and all my relatives back in Ohio, God bless you all."
At the same time when raven made its daily morning pass, the store in Aspen where Aron worked at, opened up for business. For the second day in a row, Aron didn't show up for work. "I pretty much made up my mind that if I didn't hear from Aron by 9:00 Wednesday morning, that something was seriously wrong," Brain said. As 9:00 a.m. came and went, Brian's fears were confirmed. He talked to Aron's roommates, who were now also concerned, but they had no information either. He sent out emails to everyone he could think of, asking for any information or when Aron was last seen. He also called Aron's parents in Denver, and at the time, Donna Ralston was working at her home office. Donna immediately took charge, setting out for a plan of action. Brian placed a missing person report with the Aspen police. Donna made several phone calls. Aron's dad, Larry was a tour guide in New York, and was unavailable that moment.
Donna was able to break into Aron's email, looking for any kind of information for where he was headed. She used his online address book to send emails for help. By that afternoon, she and Brian learned that the last time Aron had been seen was the day that he left Aspen, just outside of town where he had climbed Mt. Sopris with a friend. Unfortunately, that had been six days ago.
Donna had called authorities throughout Colorado and Utah, but there was little that they could do because they had no idea where Aron had gone or how long he had actually been missing. By that late afternoon, Donna was able to speak to her husband Larry, and they both knew that he was too experienced to be lost. Something very seriously had gone wrong.
Finally, a friend emailed Brian, telling him that Aron had mentioned wanting to visit some canyons in Utah, and Donna stepped up her calls to authorities in that area. They sent out patrols, they checked hospitals, broken down vehicles, but by 8:00 and 9:00 that evening, they still hadn't heard anything. Around that time in Blue John Canyon, Aron was slowly loosing ground in his fight to hold on. "I thought about my sisters wedding that was coming up at the end of August that I was going to miss, not only miss, but put a whole somber overtone to it, that there would probably be a funeral before my sister got married. And I felt bad for what I was doing emotionally to my parents. It was hard, I felt guilty about it."
His only comfort was that he was able to tell them all of this. "Mom and Dad, I really love you guys. I wanted to take this chance to say that the times that we've spent together have been awesome...I love you. I'll always be with you."
It was his fifth night in Blue John Canyon, and Aron knew that it would be his last. "Emotionally, it was the darkest night for me. It was when I etched on the wall here. I'd taken the knife, and I etched into the wall the four letters of my name: A-R-O-N, just to identify who this body was. And then I etched, 'October '75' above my name, and then I added 'April '03 ' below my name. And I wrote 'R.I.P.' right there." He recorded his last message to his family, asking to be cremated, and instructing where to place his ashes. He prayed to God and found peace, ready to accept death.
"Again, love to everyone," he recorded at last. "Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. Thank you. Love you."
"I had very little confidence that I was going to get myself out, basically because it came down to whether or not I could cut through my arm, and I couldn't do it. I didn't have a knife sharp enough to cut through bones." When night fell, Aron had been without water for almost two days. He had lost almost 45 pounds and was near hypothermia. He had many sleep-deprived hallucinations, many of them dark, but some offered hope.
"I had the vision of this little three year old boy with blonde hair and a red shirt, running across the floor of the living room and into my arms, picking him up and realizing that it was my son. And this was a vision of something in my future..."
When Thursday morning came, Aron was surprised to see the sun rise. However, he was still convinced that he wouldn't make it to day 7. He needed a miracle. "I prayed about seeking guidance of what I was supposed to do, and to finding an option that was actually going to work to get me out of there." Aron waited for the raven to pass overhead on its daily morning flight, because it was the one thing that he could count on. That morning, the raven never appeared, and Aron's prayers were about to be answered.
Also during that morning, authorities had a lead for the first time. Aron's credit card had been traced to a grocery store in Mohab, Utah. Authorities homed in on the park-lands in southeastern Utah. Overcome with exhaustion, Donna sat down on the stairs and began to pray. Somewhere over in a canyon in Utah at that hour, Aron was preparing to save his life. He claims that he felt the impact of all the prayers at that time.
In the canyon once again, Aron was idly chipping away at the rock, when his knife brushed the tip of his thumb. "It ripped part of the skin off of my thumb, kind of the way an old blister will rip away. And so that made me curious and I started prodding around and I stuck the knife down in my thumb at that spot and it slid in like I was just sliding it into a pad of warm butter. And it went in - I couldn't feel it of course - but it went in about half an inch and then ffffff this hissing sound of gas, the decomposition gas, was releasing from inside of my arm and hand where they had been building up as my arm and hand was decomposing over those five days. And that threw me into a panic. It scared me, it apalled me, that gruesome concept that my hand was decaying while still attached to my body. And I started yanking my hand and arm around, giving it everything that I had. I was twisting myself around, trying to slide my arm up and down..."
And then in an instant, Aron realized what he had to do to save his life. "It came to me, this epiphany that I could break the bones because my arm was caught so tightly that I could torque myself." Before, when he tried to amputate his arm, he had realized that he couldn't because his pocket knife couldn't cut through the bones. But if he could break them, maybe he'd have a chance of survival. He would have to snap both of the bones in his arm in order to make it work.
(<-- James Franco in 127 hours. I've never seen the movie before, but this looks kind of like what he was doing then.)
"And so I slammed my body against the opposite wall, I grabbed the backside of the boulder, and I even got my feet up to where I could stand half way up the wall. And, grabbing the backside of the rock, helping my body over it, until finally that bottom bone snapped. And this POW! sound kind of went echoing through the canyon, and I don't even know if I started feeling excited at that point, but I just knew that the next thing that I had to do was that I had to break the other bone. And so I grabbed the bottom side of the rock and pushed, and tried to sink myself down until I was pushing up to create the downward leverage on the top bone, until it too made the same noise - POW! - and snapped, in the same spot, thankfully, right where my wrist was caught. They both broke right behind the bones in my wrist."
"I said to myself, 'Here we go Aron, you're in it now.' Then I took my knife," - which was now bent and dull after days of chipping away at the rock - "and at first I still had the larger blade out, and I held it up against my arm and started pushing into it. I couldn't get the knife to sink in, so I switched over and I pulled out the smaller blade. And with the smaller blade then, I actually started the amputation. The smaller one was a little more sharp."
The smaller blade was only 2 inches long. "I just dove into this exercise, this surgical procedure, and started cutting away." He cut through the top layer of skin muscle until he saw an artery. Only then did he realize that he'd forgotten to apply the tourniquet that he had used days earlier, when he first attempted to cut off his arm. "I put the tourniquet on and I was bleeding down the wall, and I severed the artery.." He cut through more muscle and two more arteries, then tendon, the most difficult layer. His dull knife was unable cut it through..."so I ended up taking the pliers side of the knife, and used that to grab and twist and rip, until the tendon gave away." It was slow, painful, excruciating work. He hacked away at his arm for nearly an hour, layer by layer, until he saw what he knew would cause the most intense pain yet.
"And then I was looking at the nerve, this little strand of spaghetti running through my arm. And I had to take the knife and pry it up. Even just when I touched it, it felt like the fire, like sticking my arm into a pot of liquid metal...it burned all the way up, up my arm. And I took it again and lifted it up, I knew it was going to hurt, and I plucked it up....and that that fire sensation redoubled and went all the way up my shoulder. But I knew that that was the hard part." It was only a few more moments of work, "and then boom! I wasn't even attached any more. And I fell down...I was free."
"It was the happiest moment of my life. It's funny to think about, there will never be a more powerful experience for me. It was absolutely the greatest feeling, to be given the chance to get out of here...at least I wasn't going to die right here. And the power of that was astonishing."
His sister Sonya's wedding, in which he thought that he would never see, was a joyous event. "To be at my sister's wedding, to be back with my family, to see my relatives, to see my friends, to be out, doing all the things that I had wanted to, eventually, with time, all of that came to pass." For any amputee, learning to adjust to life is difficult: getting dressed, trying to tie a shoe with one hand, but Aron, it was slightly more complicated than that. His everyday tasks range from scaling a two hundred foot ice gorge, to competing in a multi-sport adventure race.
"I spent most of the first night doing it (chipping at the rock), and I realized that it would take me 150 hours to remove enough rock to where it would even be possible to move my hand. And I didn't have that kind of time available nor did my hand. My left hand didn't hold up very well to the task of just bashing into the rock. I was scraping my knuckles up, my hand was swollen from when the boulder had smashed part of it. From that point on, I didn't have the energy and I knew this was going to be a much longer haul."
He was already exhausted, but sleep was not an option. He was trapped in a standing position with no way to take the pressure off of his legs. He took an advantage with his training as an engineer to rig a system with his rope and climbing harness that allowed him to sit, taking the weight off of his legs.
As dawn came around with Aron still chipping away at the rock, realization came to him that chipping himself out was not an option. He had now been trapped for 16 hours and it was starting to sink in that his best chance of survival was his most dreaded option: cutting off his own arm. It was his last resort, a decision he was still a long way from making.
"Having made it through the night felt good. I knew that I could make it through another night if I needed too. It also gave birth to a hope that, well, it's Sunday. It's a day on the weekend, maybe some other hikers might be coming down."
(Person Interviewing Him): "Did you ever scream for help?"
Aron: "Once. I limited myself to one shout a day, but I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. I knew from experience that you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon."
By now, Aron realized that his crushed arm was beyond repair. The pain had somewhat subsided, signaling that the tissue and nerve endings in his lower arm were probably dead. But he was still tremendously uncomfortable, still trapped in a standing position. The same ropes and gear that he used to help him sit were also used to develop a pulley system to try and shift the boulder, but still it would not budge. His arm remained solidly pinned beneath it.
By Sunday afternoon, 24 hours had passed. In that time, Aron had worn down both blades and the file on his pocket knife. Now he re-evaluated is next two options: he continued to hold out hope that he might be found, but as the remaining hours of weekend daylight faded, so too did that possibility. It was unlikely that there would be other hikers in the area until the next weekend and Aron knew that he wouldn't survive that long. Rescue also seemed unlikely: he wasn't even expected at work until Tuesday and no one would realize that he had been missing for days, and even then, he had told no one where he was headed.
It was this point Sunday afternoon where Aron, realizing his slim chances of survival, picked up his video camera and began recording messages that he hoped would be found after his death.
(Pictures of the actual recording that he made. You can watch some of the footage right here. <--If it doesn't work, look at the very bottom of this post.)
He would continue to record these video messages for the next four days. It is said that his videos were too upsetting for his friends and family to see. However, you can hear some of the auditory portions of it right here.
More and more, Aron wondered if that dreaded last resort of cutting off his own arm was his only hope of getting out alive.
"It wasn't something that I was very psychologically prepared to think very hard about at that point, but I laid things out, trying to brainstorm what I was going to use, how I could use it to operate on myself, what I could use for a tourniquet, what I could use for padding, what I could use for a splint...things like that."
Going through with it...well that was something else. For now, it seemed like cutting off his arm was just another trail that would lead to certain death. "It's pretty much suicide," he had said in one of the tapes he had recorded at the time. "It's, uh, four hours from here to my vehicle...climbing it would probably be impossible with one hand. The blood loss and my dehydration, I think, are ruling that out. I think I would die if I cut my arm off."
Once again, he pushed the thought of cutting off his arm away, and instead focused on rationing his remaining food and water even further in order to survive. With only ten ounces of water left, he now limited himself to one very small sip every hour and a half. He also took pains to conserve his two burritos, eating one small bite at a time. But as Sunday afternoon slipped into Sunday night, even though small bites and sips were a luxury, he couldn't afford them.
"I would allow myself to open up my water bottle and I would hold it up to my lips and I'd tilt it just enough so the inside of my lip got wet and then I would make myself put it down."
Aron was well informed with the survival statistics. Without water, he would likely die within three days and he was already feeling symptoms of extreme dehydration. "My body wasn't operating properly. Even during the day, I would have hot flashes and cold flashes without wind. My body's temperature regulation was just out of the window."At night, it was even worse. "Even with a slight breeze, I would just shudder uncontrollably from the early stages of hypothermia. I wrapped my legs up in the rope that I had and put webbing around my neck to keep my neck warm, I had my hat pulled down, and I put my CD walk-man headphones on my ears to keep my ears warm. 9 hours of just total darkness with cloudless skies and the stars sucking the warmth out of me. The hours, especially from 3 to 6 in the morning would go very, very slowly. I would think that I had been passing as much as ten to fifteen minutes of time, and then I would look at my watch again and it had been 3 minutes since I had looked at it last. That would almost be all the activity that I would do (looking at his watch) during those last hours of the morning when it was the coldest and it was just, it felt darker."
Monday morning, Aron had made it through his second night but he still hadn't slept and now sleep deprivation was taking its own toll. "I would kind of drift off into these trances that would lead me through a surreal escape from the canyon. I would suddenly be in someone's living room or in a hallway that would lead into a cocktail party, and one time I ended up in a hospital janitor's closet. I had very little understanding of what those were all meant to convey, but in some concrete way, they helped me by giving me something to look forward too, to bolster my strength, to feel like I was not as alone, and connected."
Hunger and thirst were also taking their toll on Aron. (As recorded on Monday morning): "I can't stop thinking about how good grapefruit juice or a margarita or an o.j. or a popsicle sound -- all of these great things that I would love to have. An orange - oh, a tangelo. I can't think about that stuff."
By Monday night, he was only down to a few bites of food and a few sips of water. His desperate situation called for desperate measures. "Monday night, I started saving my urine, because I knew that it was going to be an option, if nothing else." The situation continued to grow worse, and Aron knew it as well. "I'm going to shrivel up right here over course of the next few days," he said that night.
"There was a raven that flew overhead that came each day." It was the only sign of life that he had seen for days. "With the accuracy of the timeliness...every morning at exactly 8:15, it was overhead, flying over the canyon. It kind of became my morning ritual to watch for it and to see it go." As the raven soared overhead Tuesday morning, Aron took his last sip of water. In Mythology, the raven tended to be a dark symbol, thought to foreshadow death, or to carry the soul to the next world. Was it a sign for Aron Ralston?
By then, he knew that his only chance of living would require him to do something unimaginable. "It's going to be a really long time before anybody gets to me," he said that morning. Now, he was forced to confront the decision that had loomed for days. It was time to act, to cut himself free. "What I was working through in my head was: can I actually do this? And I took the knife and I stabbed myself into the upper part of my forearm, and was able to sink the knife blade in. But I wouldn't be able to cut through the bone with this knife."
"I couldn't barely break the skin with this, this stupid knife," he recorded. "I tried a couple of different blades and all I did was mark myself up like...I can barely even get any blood to draw." It was a crushing realization. Now his only hope was that someone would realize that he was missing, and by some miracle, figure out where he was and find him.
It was now 9:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and back in Aspen Colorado, Aron was officially late for work. "Down deep in my stomach, I knew that something was seriously wrong," his manager Brian said. Because he knew what a skilled outdoors-man Aron was, he decided to give him a day before sounding the alarm.
Back in Blue John Canyon, Aron had run out of water and at 4 p.m, he took his last bite of food. "All I had was two bottles of urine. It certainly wasn't a pleasant part of the experience, but it helped me survive." As he waited, he wondered what would kill him first: dehydration, hypothermia, or his arm...would be able to stay off death until he was rescued? Aron calculated that even if he was reported missing, it would be days before rescuers started to look for him and days more before they found him. "My confidence in me lasting that long was very low. On Sunday, I'd say that I would be surprised if I made it to Tuesday morning, on Tuesday morning I'd say that I'd be surprised if I made it to Wednesday at noon." And the critical error that he made by not telling anyone where he was going continued to haunt him. "It was the most significant mistake that I've made." Later, he received criticism of not having a cell phone on him, but Ralston argues that given his remote location - literally underground - getting a cell phone signal would have been impossible.
As the days passed, he questioned if anything would save him. His thoughts often turned dark, his mind playing out other horrific scenarios. One of the most dangerous things for canyonier's: a flash flood. Even a moderate rainfall could trigger a torrent of water that would send rocks, trees, and debris rushing through the canyon. "I was almost wishing for it to come in one sense," he said that Tuesday. "That maybe I could get a little bit of water." He also had an even darker thought: why wait for nature? Why not just finish the job himself? "If I had a way to end it...I probably would. It's miserable. It's cold. I can't keep the wind off of me...it just blows. It's not even a stiff breeze, but it's just cold. I'm doing what I can, but this sucks. It's one of the worst ways to go, knowing its going to happen."
He readied himself for his fourth night in the canyon, hoping that he'd still be alive when the sun rose. "The nights got longer from the way that they felt, they got colder and my body just had a diminished ability to respond to the cold and to the resources as my calorie reserves were being used up." His body was slowly breaking down. Unbelievably, he had gone some 90 hours without sleep and only a few bites of food and now, a full day without water. He couldn't survive that much longer: he was slowly dying, and he knew it.
That day, he said his goodbyes to his loved ones: "So I didn't want to sign off without saying 'I love you' to Grandma and Grandpa and all my relatives back in Ohio, God bless you all."
At the same time when raven made its daily morning pass, the store in Aspen where Aron worked at, opened up for business. For the second day in a row, Aron didn't show up for work. "I pretty much made up my mind that if I didn't hear from Aron by 9:00 Wednesday morning, that something was seriously wrong," Brain said. As 9:00 a.m. came and went, Brian's fears were confirmed. He talked to Aron's roommates, who were now also concerned, but they had no information either. He sent out emails to everyone he could think of, asking for any information or when Aron was last seen. He also called Aron's parents in Denver, and at the time, Donna Ralston was working at her home office. Donna immediately took charge, setting out for a plan of action. Brian placed a missing person report with the Aspen police. Donna made several phone calls. Aron's dad, Larry was a tour guide in New York, and was unavailable that moment.
Donna was able to break into Aron's email, looking for any kind of information for where he was headed. She used his online address book to send emails for help. By that afternoon, she and Brian learned that the last time Aron had been seen was the day that he left Aspen, just outside of town where he had climbed Mt. Sopris with a friend. Unfortunately, that had been six days ago.
Donna had called authorities throughout Colorado and Utah, but there was little that they could do because they had no idea where Aron had gone or how long he had actually been missing. By that late afternoon, Donna was able to speak to her husband Larry, and they both knew that he was too experienced to be lost. Something very seriously had gone wrong.
Finally, a friend emailed Brian, telling him that Aron had mentioned wanting to visit some canyons in Utah, and Donna stepped up her calls to authorities in that area. They sent out patrols, they checked hospitals, broken down vehicles, but by 8:00 and 9:00 that evening, they still hadn't heard anything. Around that time in Blue John Canyon, Aron was slowly loosing ground in his fight to hold on. "I thought about my sisters wedding that was coming up at the end of August that I was going to miss, not only miss, but put a whole somber overtone to it, that there would probably be a funeral before my sister got married. And I felt bad for what I was doing emotionally to my parents. It was hard, I felt guilty about it."
His only comfort was that he was able to tell them all of this. "Mom and Dad, I really love you guys. I wanted to take this chance to say that the times that we've spent together have been awesome...I love you. I'll always be with you."
It was his fifth night in Blue John Canyon, and Aron knew that it would be his last. "Emotionally, it was the darkest night for me. It was when I etched on the wall here. I'd taken the knife, and I etched into the wall the four letters of my name: A-R-O-N, just to identify who this body was. And then I etched, 'October '75' above my name, and then I added 'April '03 ' below my name. And I wrote 'R.I.P.' right there." He recorded his last message to his family, asking to be cremated, and instructing where to place his ashes. He prayed to God and found peace, ready to accept death.
"Again, love to everyone," he recorded at last. "Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. Thank you. Love you."
"I had very little confidence that I was going to get myself out, basically because it came down to whether or not I could cut through my arm, and I couldn't do it. I didn't have a knife sharp enough to cut through bones." When night fell, Aron had been without water for almost two days. He had lost almost 45 pounds and was near hypothermia. He had many sleep-deprived hallucinations, many of them dark, but some offered hope.
"I had the vision of this little three year old boy with blonde hair and a red shirt, running across the floor of the living room and into my arms, picking him up and realizing that it was my son. And this was a vision of something in my future..."
When Thursday morning came, Aron was surprised to see the sun rise. However, he was still convinced that he wouldn't make it to day 7. He needed a miracle. "I prayed about seeking guidance of what I was supposed to do, and to finding an option that was actually going to work to get me out of there." Aron waited for the raven to pass overhead on its daily morning flight, because it was the one thing that he could count on. That morning, the raven never appeared, and Aron's prayers were about to be answered.
Also during that morning, authorities had a lead for the first time. Aron's credit card had been traced to a grocery store in Mohab, Utah. Authorities homed in on the park-lands in southeastern Utah. Overcome with exhaustion, Donna sat down on the stairs and began to pray. Somewhere over in a canyon in Utah at that hour, Aron was preparing to save his life. He claims that he felt the impact of all the prayers at that time.
In the canyon once again, Aron was idly chipping away at the rock, when his knife brushed the tip of his thumb. "It ripped part of the skin off of my thumb, kind of the way an old blister will rip away. And so that made me curious and I started prodding around and I stuck the knife down in my thumb at that spot and it slid in like I was just sliding it into a pad of warm butter. And it went in - I couldn't feel it of course - but it went in about half an inch and then ffffff this hissing sound of gas, the decomposition gas, was releasing from inside of my arm and hand where they had been building up as my arm and hand was decomposing over those five days. And that threw me into a panic. It scared me, it apalled me, that gruesome concept that my hand was decaying while still attached to my body. And I started yanking my hand and arm around, giving it everything that I had. I was twisting myself around, trying to slide my arm up and down..."
And then in an instant, Aron realized what he had to do to save his life. "It came to me, this epiphany that I could break the bones because my arm was caught so tightly that I could torque myself." Before, when he tried to amputate his arm, he had realized that he couldn't because his pocket knife couldn't cut through the bones. But if he could break them, maybe he'd have a chance of survival. He would have to snap both of the bones in his arm in order to make it work.
(<-- James Franco in 127 hours. I've never seen the movie before, but this looks kind of like what he was doing then.)"And so I slammed my body against the opposite wall, I grabbed the backside of the boulder, and I even got my feet up to where I could stand half way up the wall. And, grabbing the backside of the rock, helping my body over it, until finally that bottom bone snapped. And this POW! sound kind of went echoing through the canyon, and I don't even know if I started feeling excited at that point, but I just knew that the next thing that I had to do was that I had to break the other bone. And so I grabbed the bottom side of the rock and pushed, and tried to sink myself down until I was pushing up to create the downward leverage on the top bone, until it too made the same noise - POW! - and snapped, in the same spot, thankfully, right where my wrist was caught. They both broke right behind the bones in my wrist."
(Diagram of the way Aron cut his arm off. Sorry it's in another language, but this was the only one that I could find.)
"I said to myself, 'Here we go Aron, you're in it now.' Then I took my knife," - which was now bent and dull after days of chipping away at the rock - "and at first I still had the larger blade out, and I held it up against my arm and started pushing into it. I couldn't get the knife to sink in, so I switched over and I pulled out the smaller blade. And with the smaller blade then, I actually started the amputation. The smaller one was a little more sharp."
"And then I was looking at the nerve, this little strand of spaghetti running through my arm. And I had to take the knife and pry it up. Even just when I touched it, it felt like the fire, like sticking my arm into a pot of liquid metal...it burned all the way up, up my arm. And I took it again and lifted it up, I knew it was going to hurt, and I plucked it up....and that that fire sensation redoubled and went all the way up my shoulder. But I knew that that was the hard part." It was only a few more moments of work, "and then boom! I wasn't even attached any more. And I fell down...I was free."
(Yes, he had the nerve to take a picture right after he cut off his arm.)
The crude amputation of his arm had taken an hour. "I never whimpered, I never made a noise, I never yelled, I didn't whine about what I was doing, I didn't black out, I just did what I needed to do, right here. And I stopped myself to take a few deep breaths, and then I stood back up on the rock and I took my pack, I took the gear that I needed, and I just started off."
Now he still faced the daunting challenge of escaping the canyon itself. He wasn't far from the entrance, but with his amputated arm still bleeding in a makeshift sling, he'd never be able to scale the fifteen foot wall he had descended. He'd have to continue ahead, taking a longer and possibly more treacherous route out. It was uncharted terrain. He knew only that he faced a cliff and a 65 foot repel at the end. Could he handle all of that in his condition?
Earlier that morning, the park rangers at the park found Aron's vehicle. They told the authorities that it had been there the past five days. It had not raised suspicions, because campers often camped several days at a time. The park ranger in charge contacted the authorities for a search and rescue, and also got a helicopter to help search for Aron.
Meanwhile, Aron was struggling ahead through the depths of Blue John Canyon. "I was negotiating all of this with my arm strapped to my chest," he says. Going through the cave slots is an extraordinary challenge: the passages are often exceptionally narrow, there are sudden drop-offs, pools of water turn up in unexpected places with no way to tell how deep, and the canyon tunnels so far down there is barely enough light to see.
Finally, literally, light at the end of the tunnel. But now, after all that he'd endured, he was standing on the edge of a six story high cliff with down as the only way out. Somehow, he would have to repel out with only one arm, another seemingly impossible challenge. "I swooned, I felt faint. I almost fell over head first over the cliff. I lost my balance and stepped back." But he didn't give up. He clipped his climbing harness to a rock so he wouldn't fall, and set to work, rigging an anchor and a repel for the treacherous decent. Even with the benefits of his supplies, it is still a formidable challenge. If he slips or looses control, he could plunge to the canyon floor. It's the final obstacle that he encounters. It is an unnerving repel, even for an experienced climber. The tip of the cliff juts out, you have to ease off the overhang, trusting that you'll find a foothold to push off the jagged rock.
When he escaped the canyon, at the bottom of that repel that afternoon was the water that he so desperately needed, but it was rancid and stagnant. Floating in it, was a dead raven. Was it yet another sign that Aron had cheated death? "I drank about three liters just sitting here over the course of about 15 minutes. First just a little sip at a time and then taking big gulps and big gulps and then I filled my water bottles up again and I emptied some things out of my backpack and I stood up and got ready to go."
And yet again, another seemingly impossible task. With one arm bleeding profusely, starved and dehydrated, now close to shock, Aron would have to hike seven miles out of the canyon in the direct midday sun. Then an 800 foot vertical climb to the trail head where his truck was. The nearest hospital was a several hour drive. As he set out, his desperate struggle to survive was still far from over. As he summoned his strength for the seven hour mile ahead, rescuers were converging at his truck at the horseshoe canyon trail-head.
Miles away on the other side of the canyon, Aron labored to make his way across the loose sand, the afternoon sun sapping his strength. "I was loosing blood, I hadn't slept, I was fatigued, my body was just exhausted from the effort of staying alive over the course of those five/six days. It was getting harder and harder just to walk, even at a slow pace." He would later learn that he had lost 25 percent of his blood supply, and he was on the verge of decompensated shock - when the body can no longer provide oxygen to the organs.
Luckily, he was about to get help from an unlikely source. Eric and Monique Meijer along with their eleven year old son, Andy, had traveled some five thousands miles from their home in the Netherlands to experience the beauty of the American canyonlands. "I came around a corner and saw them hiking. I shouted to them 'help! help! I need help!' And they came running back and I told them, 'I just had to cut off my arm a few hours ago. I need help. I need medical attention. I need a helicopter.'"
The Meijer's gave him everything they had - two oreos and some water. Then, the mother and son ran ahead for help, while Eric stayed behind to help Aron walk. But Aron was fading quickly now. "I wasn't able to hike without keeping water in my mouth. I was so dehydrated that breathing at a rapid rate, it just parched me." After two more hours of hiking, finally, Aron saw the trail in the distance where his truck was parked. But his heart sank. "I was looking up an 800 foot, very steep hillside in direct sun, no shade, sandy terrain, in 85-90 degree heat. It was going to be my death, trying to hike out of there. It was just at that time where we heard the whip whip whip whip, and the helicopter appeared, coming up the canyon and it was deliverance...and I knew, when I saw it that I'd made it."
He was rushed to the hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he underwent surgery on his arm. Aron was reunited with his mother. "The first thing I thought was: I'm alive! When my mom came into the room, we both cried together. I've never been happier to see anybody before in my life."
"It was a wonderful sight," says Donna. "I just kind of stood there in disbelief and looked at him and leaned down and kissed him and said, 'Aron, I'm here.' First thing he said was, 'can I have food?' And I don't think he stopped eating the whole time he was in the intensive care unit."
Against all odds, he had rescued himself. He was reunited with his family, reborn, but for Aron, a second chance did not mean his old life was over. His story stunned the world. It was front page news all around the globe.
"It (the whole experience) was very spiritual," Aron says. "The fact that I had cut off my arm was a part of that for sure. There's a positive side to it. When people come up to me to say 'you're an inspiration, you're story is amazing, I heard about what you did,' what they're telling me is that I've affected them. I've done something that helped them in someway."
His recovery was far from easy. There was serious damage to the bones and tissues in his arm. There were five surgeries, a life threatening bone infection, and he required intravenous antibiotics for months. He'd lost more than 40 pounds and suffered from chronic pain. But more intense, the pain from his shocked nerve endings that were sending false signals from a part of the arm that was no longer there.
His sister Sonya's wedding, in which he thought that he would never see, was a joyous event. "To be at my sister's wedding, to be back with my family, to see my relatives, to see my friends, to be out, doing all the things that I had wanted to, eventually, with time, all of that came to pass." For any amputee, learning to adjust to life is difficult: getting dressed, trying to tie a shoe with one hand, but Aron, it was slightly more complicated than that. His everyday tasks range from scaling a two hundred foot ice gorge, to competing in a multi-sport adventure race. Within months of the accident, he was testing himself again. He climbed Mt. Moran and Mt. and Grand Teton. More than a year later, he was back on top of things like he was previously. He has special devices so he can clamp onto his bike handle, clip into his ski pole, have a pick for rock climbing, an ice climber - it may even be an advantage. So far, no more close calls for Aron.
Days after Aron rescued himself, park rangers returned to Blue John Canyon to retrieve his arm. It took 13 men, a winch, and an hydraulic jack to pry what was left of his arm from under that rock. It was cremated, he carried the ashes with him in a box, and scattered them back "where they belong." He rubbed out the message that he had ingrained in the canyon wall and he is finally at peace with what happened. In the end, Aron says that the epic of Blue John Canyon is a battle he would have rather fought and won than to have never waged at all.
"My perspective has certainly changed among those things - the appreciation that I have for my life, now for my friends and my family, the experiences that I get to enjoy, getting back out and climbing, these things that I appreciate, and they feel so much richer to me now and I think that for that I wouldn't trade the experience I had in that canyon for anything. It was six days that has shaped and will shape the rest of my life."
Aron has written a book about his experience called Between a Rock and a Hard Place. As shown before, there is a movie that was recently made based on his story called 127 Hours.
Credit to a documentary I found. If you want to watch it with greater detail, here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyPBTblkzBI or you can look for the Documentary called: Desperate Days in Blue John Canyon.
Here is the link to some of the real video footage that was taken while he was in the canyon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NerTo86BE9w
Here is some of the audio portion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HQpvg-gvtY
Enjoy :)
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