127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston Read Free Book Online

pack, the remaining contents of my pack are my green and yellow climbing rope in its black zippered rope bag; my rock-climbing harness; and the small wad of rappelling equipment I’d brought to use at the Big Drop rappel.
    My next thought is to brainstorm every means possible that could get me out of here. The easy ideas come first, although some of them are more wishful than realistic. Maybe other canyoneers will traverse this section of slot and find me—they might be able to help free me, or even give me clothes, food, and water and go for help. Maybe Megan and Kristi will think something’s wrong when I don’t meet them like I said I would, and they’ll go look for my truck or notify the Park Service. Maybe my Aspen friends Brad and Leah Yule will do the same when I don’t show up for the big Scooby-Doo desert party tonight. But they don’t know for sure that I’m coming, because I didn’t call them when I was in Moab yesterday. Tomorrow, Sunday, is still the weekend—maybe someone will come this way on his or her day off. If I’m not out by Monday night, my roommates will miss me for sure; they might even notify the police. Or my manager at the shop where I work will call my mom when I don’t turn up on Tuesday. It might take people a few days to figure out where I went, but there could be a search out by Wednesday, and if they find my truck, it wouldn’t be long after that.
    The major preclusion to rescue is that I don’t have enough water to wait that long—twenty-two ounces total after my chug a few minutes ago. The average survival time in the desert without water is between two and three days, sometimes as little as a day if you’re exerting yourself in 100-degree heat. I figure I’ll make it to Monday night. If a rescue comes along before then, it will be an unlikely chance encounter with a fellow canyoneer, not an organized effort of trained personnel. In other words, rescue seems about as probable as winning the lottery.
    By nature I’m an impatient person; when a situation requires me to wait, I need to be doing something to make the time pass. Call me a child of the instant-gratification generation, or maybe my imagination was stunted from too much television, but I don’t sit still well. In my present situation, that’s probably a good thing. I have a problem to solve—I have to get out of here—so I put my mind to what I can do to escape my entrapment. Eliminating a couple ideas that are too dumb (like cracking open my extra AA batteries on the boulder and hoping the acid erodes the chockstone but doesn’t eat into my arm), I organize my other options in order of preference: Excavate the rock around my hand with my multi-tool; rig ropes and an anchor above me to lift the boulder off my hand; or amputate my arm. Quickly, each option seems impossible: I don’t have the tools to remove enough rock to free my hand; I don’t have the hauling power needed, even with a pulley system, to move the boulder; and even though it seems my best option, I don’t have the tools, know-how, or emotional gumption to sever my own arm.
    Perhaps more as a tactic to delay thinking about self-amputation and less as a truly productive effort, I decide to work on an easier option—chipping away the rock to free my arm. Drawing my multi-tool from its perch above the boulder, I extract the longer of the two blades. I’m suddenly very glad I decided to add it to my supplies.
    Picking an easily accessed spot on the boulder in front of my chest and a few inches from my right wrist, I scratch the tip across the boulder in a four-inch line. If I can remove the stone below this line and back toward my fingers about six inches, I will be able to free my hand. But with the demarcated part of the stone being three inches thick in places, I’ll have to remove about seventy cubic inches of the boulder. It’s a lot of rock, and I know the sandstone is going to make the chipping tedious work.
    My first attempt to saw down