In 2003, trapped in a Utah canyon by a fallen boulder, a solitary hiker freed himself with an amputation that became famous around the world. So what's it like to watch a Hollywood director turn your ordeal into entertainment? Weird and beautiful, that's what. ARON RALSTON reports from the set of 127 Hours. PLUS: James Franco on how he portrayed the outer limits of human endurance.

Ralston, photographed for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø in Colorado National Monument, June 2004

Ralston, photographed for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø in Colorado National Monument, June 2004

Franco's entrapment

Franco's entrapment scenes were physically grueling. “I was purple all over”

Ralston atop Colorado's Mount Eolus, March 2005.

Ralston atop Colorado's Mount Eolus, March 2005.

Director Danny Boyle exploring

Director Danny Boyle exploring a fauxsandstone Blue John Canyon on the set in Salt Lake City.

It's a classic dinner-party question:

Who would play you in the movie of your life? But I never thought I'd find myself on a couch next to James Franco in a suite at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles, showing him how to cut off his arm.

It's January 2010, and Danny Boyle—the British director of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire, and, now, 127 Hours, the film about my six-day entrapment in a Utah slot canyon—has brought me to meet James for the first time. The actor unpacks his lunch while Danny's partner on the film, producer Christian Colson, prepares a VHS deck to show a video: my last will and testament, actually, an hourlong diary I recorded from April 26 to May 1, 2003, while an 800-pound boulder kept my right hand crushed and pinned. James wolfs down a walnut-and-spinach salad, chased with a Diet Coke. He's already shedding weight to portray my starvation, I realize, as we settle in to watch.

Immediately, a 27-year-old version of me fills the screen. “It's 3:05 on Sunday,” my ghost says. “This marks my 24-hour mark of being stuck in Blue John Canyon above the Big Drop. My name is Aron Ralston …”

I've seen this tape before, and while it reminds me that I'd accepted my own imminent death, the footage has never distressed me. For others, though—especially my mom—the emotional impact is intense, even disturbing. Occasionally I glance over at James as he intently absorbs my goodbyes, thank-yous, and death-watch updates. When I explain on the tape that I've resorted to drinking my own urine, and then add in disgust, “It's no Slurpee,” the face of Gucci laughs at my pitch-black humor.

Sporadically, Danny pauses the video as James interrupts with questions.

“Where did your bones break?” he asks.

“Just a few inches back from my wrist, here.”

“Is that where you started cutting?”

“Uh-huh, on the inside, the part farthest from the wall.”

It's a surreal game of charades—reenacting my experience for an actor who will later re-reenact it. As I pantomime snapping the bones of my ensnared arm around an invisible boulder that floats above the coffee table, James's spirited eyebrows arch and glide across his forehead like feather boas on a drag queen. They could easily out-tango any duo on Dancing with the Stars. I lose my concentration and laugh out loud. Will someone tame these things, please? I can't work like this!

This whole movie process, in fact, has been quite strange. Producers' solicitous e-mails started arriving within days of my rescue, while I was still in the hospital. Among them was a note from John Smithson, the Brit behind the survival docudrama Touching the Void, who would eventually option my 2004 book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and take it to various financiers and directors.

One of those was Danny Boyle. When we first met at a canal-side café in the Dutch city of Utrecht in 2006, I was struck by his preparation. He had highlighted, underlined, sticky-noted, annotated, and dog-eared his copy of my book to the brink of illegibility. Over espresso, Danny described his fascination with this “exstrawrdinry” story, even as he explained that he's not a wilderness guy himself, nor does he have much interest in adventure tales. What compelled Danny most were the challenges inherent in making an action picture that has so little opportunity for action. One guy, in one place. An hour without dialogue. And absolutely no voice-over. Clearly, this was not going to be a mainstream adventure flick.

Danny necessarily saw the film as more “based on” than “true story,” but, over time, he and John and I found a common vision, and we finally began work on the script in earnest in 2009. Throughout the summer, Danny expanded the script in four iterations, and at each step I provided him with extensive feedback. And I do mean extensive. At first I resisted every departure from the facts. My wife, Jessica, counseled me to detach, but I still struggled. Whenever a new version arrived, I'd spend hours marking up the 90-page printout, muttering things like “Why in the world would a stampede of wild horses be jumping over the canyon?!”

After a few months of back-and-forth, Danny brought in professional screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. In addition to the Oscar he'd won for Slumdog, Simon had been nominated in 1998 for his screenplay for The Full Monty. He was also the only person on Danny's creative team with any climbing experience, which I appreciated. Last November, in anticipation of a major rewrite, Simon came to hike with me in Boulder. Half a foot shorter than me, almost ten years older, and straight from sea level, he still kept pace as we bushwacked uphill, discussing potential script changes. We quickly came to refer to the main character as “Aron,” as opposed to Simon calling him “you” and me calling him “me.”

As Jessica had predicted, this proved key for my well-being. If I kept thinking of Aron as me, I probably wouldn't have been able to stomach the changes needed to translate my book onto film. Cultivating that non-attachment was the toughest part for me. That said, the film character's personality ended up closely mirroring my own: adventurous, self-assured, even cocky; thoroughly analytical but a little wild around the edges.

Simon and I also talked a lot about the role of facts. “Truth is a complex word for a complex concept” in film, he said as we tramped up a slope south of Boulder Creek. “Fiction—or fictionalized adaptations—can convey a true emotion more effectively than the facts.”

That gave me something to chew on. The facts of my experience in Blue John Canyon would still saturate the story line. And with a few choice fictionalized elements, the audience would be transported even deeper into the canyon. Knowing that Danny wanted me intimately involved in the filmmaking also reassured me immensely.

In December, we had a working script, and Danny's team started pre-production. By then, friends and strangers alike wanted to know, “Who's gonna play you?” Bantering about the pros and cons of A-listers, we were all cigar-chomping moguls. Jake Gyllenhaal? Too rigid. Matthew McConaughey? Too hunky. Luke Wilson? Too metro.

Just before Christmas, I got the news that James Franco had been cast. Oddly enough, I didn't even know he was in the running, and odder still, I was having difficulty placing him, despite having seen him in Pineapple Express, Freaks and Geeks, and Spider-Man.

His publicity photos showed that he cleans up very handsomely. But I had to wonder: How will he dirty down?

WHAT WAS HARDER TO CAST was the canyon itself. Back in July 2009, I accompanied Danny, Christian, and John on a visit to Blue John. The canyon is 60 miles southwest of Moab, out by the Maze district of Canyonlands National Park. We flew by helicopter, direct from our hotel to the slot, buzzing the mudstone spires of Fisher Towers on our takeoff. Instead of a circuitous two-and-a-half-hour drive and a five-mile hike, we were there in 15 minutes, fresh as predawn datura.

I've come back to this canyon about once a year for seven years. The first time was just six months after the incident. It's a place of peace for me, of clarifying acceptance. To stand there with the rock that trapped me is literally a touchstone experience, a unique chance to look over my life and check in with myself. Kind of like a yearly physical exam, but I get to keep my pants on.

With two Moab climbing guides spotting and lowering the trio of Brits, we maneuvered over drop-offs and under chockstones to reach the spot where I'd been trapped. Once Danny took a collection of position photos of me at the site, we ventured farther down the canyon to the 65-foot-high Big Drop rappel, which I'd had to navigate to finally escape.

The next time I saw Blue John was in a defunct furniture factory in Salt Lake City. Of the roughly 250 scenes filmed, more than half take place in the entrapment spot. To shoot half the film out in the real canyon—five miles from a road and 50 miles from pavement—would exponentially increase the resources and time required. On top of that, last winter was exceptionally cold, with record-setting snowfall lingering on the red rock. So Blue John would travel indoors for a few months, into the empty Granite Furniture buildings in southeast SLC's Sugar House neighborhood, before filming began at the real canyon in late April.

In Salt Lake, production designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb—a hip young Thai-American who was Danny's costume designer on Slumdog—re-created the canyon grain by grain. She led about half a dozen separate scouting trips to Blue John, mapping, photographing, and taking epoxy casts of the walls. Using a souped-up laser range finder called a LIDAR, Suttirat's team scanned the canyon to millimeter accuracy every three feet along its length. Then they dumped the LIDAR data into a prototyping machine, which spit out a Styrofoam scale model, complete with chockstones, that the team enlarged into two full-size replicas.

On my first visit to the set, on a surprisingly mild day in early March, I walk in the decal-covered front door to find the production assistants occupying a gutted reception area. Behind them, the fluorescent Floor Coverings sign is still lit in what's now the costume department. Actors arriving for casting calls are gathered over to one side, under a doorway marked Kitchens. Everywhere, there's an ironic lack of furniture. Yet this hardly phases the film team, who must be the world's most highly organized squatters.

Back in costuming, the seamstresses have reproduced racks full of my shorts, shirts, socks, and shoes—ten outfits, one for each progressive level of dirt and sweat stain during my entrapment. I'm especially impressed that they've combined two fall 2000 Phish tour shirts into a custom, salmon-toned short-sleeve that's cinematically palatable.

In the props department, the contents of my storage closet have reproduced like viral spam, with cloned stockpiles of my gear everywhere. Over here: ten sets of my exact backpack, harness, hat, and headlamp. Over there: a half-dozen vintage cameras and Walkmans, even four matching mountain bikes, all the precise models I once had.

On a cabinet near some empty cubicles, I notice a lineup of large mason jars half filled with various recipes for fake urine—a bizarre science experiment to reproduce the real stuff I drank to survive in Blue John. It's as if Rod Serling were guest-hosting an episode of This Is Your Life. In a storeroom, I find a dozen fiberglass boulders packing the shelves, exact duplicates of the rock that confined me. This room feels surprisingly personal.

Walking next door to the old factory, I pass three of “my” red Toyota Tacomas parked in a row. Inside the set, coils of “my” rope lie draped over stage boxes. And along the north wall, the trippiest part of it all: a plywood-walled workshop housing a score of fake arms and hands. A half-dozen hang gruesomely on overhead hooks like cuts of meat in Hannibal Lecter's freezer.

And then I come to the technical marvel of Blue John Canyon itself. The set builders have made two canyons, actually: one at exact scale, the other vertically exaggerated by 50 percent to allow for slightly longer falling action in the initial accident sequence. They've cut two 15-by-70-foot holes in the concrete floors to accommodate the 50-foot-high slot canyons and, using the cast molds, created 100 urethane-and-fiberglass wall sections. Painted, coated with grit, and backed with hardening epoxy filler, this simulated sandstone looks and feels incredibly real.

I clamber up the walls excitedly. Only when soft spots flex slightly under my weight can I discern the forgery. Repli-canyoneering is almost as fun as the real thing, I decide, and far more convenient if you want seconds of grilled tilapia from the lunch buffet.

MIDNIGHT IN THE CANYON. Well, really, it's 10 a.m. in Salt Lake City, but here in this windowless factory, the sun only rises when the gaffer says so. Over in costuming, Danny and James and I go through the “clothing” I'd improvised to shelter myself from the nighttime chill: a few wraps of climbing webbing repurposed as my neck warmer and a plastic grocery sack and a camera satchel as long sleeves. I'd stuck my head in my climbing-rope bag and coiled the rope itself into leggings.

Dolled up in my clothes, my hat, my backpack, and my climbing gear, James is a convincing doppelgänger. The prop team brings out one of the replica boulders and sets it on a wheeled cart. With an assistant videotaping my demonstration, I move him, marionette-like, through my attempted escapes: how I chipped at the boulder; how I built a makeshift anchor-and-pulley system with one hand; how I sawed and stabbed at my arm with the blade of my multitool. James is known for his Method acting style. (On funnyordie.com, he sends up his techniques in several mock-instructional videos that had my friends and me wailing with laughter around a laptop.) But despite his character-inhabiting skills, an assistant has to duct-tape James's “trapped” right hand to the fiberglass boulder because he keeps trying to use it to adjust the harness and pulleys.

Remembering that his hand is stuck is one of the more superficial ways that the filming is hard on him. “It's been rough on the body,” James says later, showing me his real bruises and abrasions from the entrapment scenes as he dons his prosthetic third arm for a daytime scene at the boulder.

We're sitting on a couch in his black-draped private area during a break in filming. In person, James is often quiet, almost shy, though perhaps this is because he's perpetually studying for one of four simultaneous master's programs, including one at NYU (for filmmaking) and one at Columbia (for writing). Flying back and forth to New York on red-eyes, he's still missing many of his classes, so he listens to recordings his friends provide. Despite his efforts, he tells me, his professors aren't going to allow him to graduate this spring. “I'm hearing what I'm missing in the class discussions,” he says, rolling his eyes, “and they're punishing me for that?” Whatever happens, it won't prevent him from starting a doctoral program at Yale this fall. “I like to be busy,” James tells me.

No kidding. Even between intense takes, James pulls a thick ream of rolled paper out from a hiding spot under the boulder to read. At first I think he's reviewing the script. But it's actually his homework for a class on Proust. Nothing like a little À la recherche du temps perdu to put one in the mind-set for self-amputation.

When it's time for the live scene, I follow James and his three arms through the dust-clouded factory back to the canyon set. I scoot up a back way into the upper canyon, carefully crawling past two scorching-hot lamps and a hodgepodge of light-diffusing flags. Danny is giving James his directions.

“The pain sears through your arm. Sears,” Danny emphasizes. “Stabbing with pain.” I infer that this is one of the attempted amputation scenes. Oh, boy, the good stuff! With a glance up to me, five feet overhead, Danny raises his eyebrows to say, “OK, let's clear out.” I meet him at the video-monitoring station, where we can see James on two screens. One camera is looking head-on at James from just above his entrapped right arm, the canyon wall framing the left side of the shot. The other view is from just a foot to the right of the first, giving the oblique angle. Cinematographer Enrique “Quique” Chediak and another cameraman are squished side by side into the three-foot-wide space just behind the boulder, each maneuvering a pared-down digital camera rig.

“Pan right and tilt up,” Danny directs Quique. “Pull back. Too much. Press in. More dutch. Boss right …” Finally he says, “Yes. That's it. Ready.”

I've noticed that Danny doesn't generally sit in his director's chair. He stands to watch and move between the video screens, so I help myself to his seat. David Ticotin, the first assistant director, issues the command “Shhhhhhhhhhh” through his microphone, and then “Roll cameras.” Danny cues “Action,” and the efforts of 40 mostly unseen crew members culminate with a collective focus on James.

He takes a few labored breaths. “Even more rasping, James,” Danny calls out, which James provides before reaching for the neoprene covering of his unpeeled CamelBak tubing. He loops it around his right forearm, cinching and knotting it, then uses a carabiner to wind the makeshift tourniquet so tight that it pinches his skin.

Damn, man, be careful. You're gonna hurt yourself, I think, before I remember it's the fake arm. With the knife in hand now, he braces himself, then attacks his arm, sawing away maniacally, grunting, heaving, and sweating. But the blade is too dull. Defeated, he relents, setting the knife down.

I'm alternating between watching James on the screens and watching Danny watch James. James clutches his chest, Danny clutches his; James leans into the boulder, Danny presses into the video cart; they each purse their lips, then bare their teeth, then relax, in concert. I can't tell whether Danny is mimicking the action or directing James through animated telepathy or playing out the part that he's created in his mind over all these years. Whichever, it's intense, slightly funny, and amazing to witness.

With renewed gusto, James picks up the knife. Holding it like a dagger, he slams it into his arm to the hilt. Blood oozes out of the wound.

Then something truly horrific happens. A cell phone rings. A tinny melody shatters the world. The way everyone dives to cover their pockets, it's as if somebody had shouted “Grenade!”

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Danny swears through gnashed teeth as it rings a second time. First AD David cues his microphone: “Cutcutcutcutcut!”

A third ring—and I snicker out loud as Danny realizes that it's his own phone. Pulling it out of his jeans, he smiles at me sheepishly.

Well, good. 'Cause that's about the only way this could have ended without a real amputation and someone's head rolling out of the set doors.

ON APRIL 25, the eve of the seven-year anniversary of my entrapment, I'm stuck again, this time in the farthest reaches of the B Concourse of Denver International Airport as mechanical difficulties delay my travels to Moab and on to Blue John. I'm itching to be there for this septennial moment, and when I finally arrive, 16 hours later, I'm amazed at the transformation: there's now a heli-base four miles from the canyon, with scores of semi-trailers, RVs, delivery vehicles, and SUVs lining a short spur that previously led only to a rancher's water tank. Via chopper, I'm flown to a landing zone just above the slot. Below us, on sand flats nestled amid pale-yellow sandstone domes, is a fully outfitted village, all of it airlifted in for the week of filming.

If there's any truth to the idea that our bodies replace their cells every seven years, this day finally marks the moment when I'm no longer the same person who walked into Blue John in 2003. In a week, I'll no longer be the person who walked out, either. In theory, at least, I'll be totally new. The fact that Danny and the team will finish shooting the movie here in the canyon, during this exact week of my renewal, reminds me how an ending is also a beginning.

Getting out of the canyon alive was a rebirth. My entrapment and amputation cleaved not only my arm but my whole existence into pre–Blue John and post–Blue John eras. In the years following my survival, I finished my solo climbs of all of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in winter; I summited Aconcagua, soloed Denali and skied from the top, and rowed my raft through the Grand Canyon. I worked to preserve wilderness, promote disabled athletics, and help empower at-risk youth. So now, if post–Blue John is ending, what's beginning? Perhaps it's time, I muse, to close those chapters and remember the enduring lesson of my entrapment: that relationships, not accomplishments, are what's important in life.

Life cycles have been a significant theme for me lately. My grandmother Marjorie Ralston died in March at the age of 82, after a severe stroke. The only consolation was that I was able to travel back to Ohio in time to show her photos of Jessica's and my precious baby son, Leo, her only great-grandchild, who was born just two weeks before. At her funeral, the minister said that when a train pulls up at the depot, some people get on, some people get off. Grandma had left, but Leo had arrived. I grieved that they would never meet.

Now, in this red-rock Hollywood, I walk past twin 5,000-gallon water containers serving gravity-fed shower stations and on toward the 45 blue personal tents where the crew is camped. There's a bank of portable toilets, a cluster of droning electrical generators, and, most important, the catering tents, complete with AstroTurf carpeting and a menu board advertising Salisbury steak, chicken pot pie, a salad bar, and fresh-baked brownies.

Hoping for some time alone in the canyon, I head over to the slot. The crew has installed ladders in several places for easier access, but just for fun, I avoid using them. At the downcanyon edge of a platform spanning three Prius-size boulders, I skip the ladder again, scissoring my legs over the railing. Transitioning off my butt, I stretch my right foot above a ten-foot drop to stand on an adjacent chockstone. But suddenly the rock compresses under my shoe. My body pitches forward. A sound like eggshells crunching covers up my astonished yelp—”Wha?!”—as my right shoulder slams into the canyon wall.

Bridged over the void, I look down and realize I've been fooled by a prop. One of the Styrofoam boulders sits below me, now with a size-10 sneaker imprint. I laugh at the terrible irony. Could there be any greater ignominy than taking an anniversary plunge off a phony rock, within yards of my original accident site?

At the drop-off where I stood in 2003, seconds before becoming pinned in the canyon, there's another ladder. Humbled, I use it. This one runs down over the real boulder that pinned me and under a second, larger chockstone, with a sign warning, Watch your head. And your hands, I think to myself.

Settling in, I take off my prosthetic and touch the rock with the skin of my stump, letting the place soak back into me. I feel myself go beyond my memories of all my later visits until I can finally touch that initial time again. I breathe in the dusty air, lean against the cool wall, and look at the spot where floods have long since scoured away my attempted epitaph. Solemnity comes seeping out of the sandstone.

Turning on my camera, I scroll back to the pictures I took of Leo before I left home. His toothless smile beams brilliantly on the screen. Turning the camera around, I show the photos to the boulder. See, rock? The vision I had on my last night in the canyon has come true. In what would have been my final moments, a premonition of a little blond boy gave me the courage to make it until dawn one more time. And now, rock, here he is.

THE FILMING IS HAPPENING farther downcanyon. It's going to be James on his escape, immediately after the amputation. He'll be in the euphoric throes of liberation, trying to manage himself while being driven manically into action by the eight miles of hiking ahead. James joins Danny and the crew in blood-soaked style, looking like he's forgone the pot pie and eaten a vampire for lunch. A makeup artist applies extra red gooey mess to his face and left hand. I remember my concerns about James being too handsome, back in December. Seeing him today at the raw edge of existence, coated in blood, sweat, and dirt, he doesn't even look like himself. Which is to say, he's dirtied down quite nicely.

Danny leads everyone through four takes, each of which includes James careering downcanyon immediately underneath my roost. Each time, he stops in the dark canyon just past me, out of sight but with his raised left hand resting on a curve of the wall that's level with my feet. Each time, a little more blood smears on the Navajo sandstone. At the end of the last take, I shoot a few photos of that hand.

Watching James, time warps in two directions, past and present intertwining like yin and yang. I feel a weird sense of disorientation as my 2010 self is teleported back seven years, sitting in that alcove watching myself escape. Concurrently, I'm still in 2010, observing the ghostly disembodied hand of my 2003 self splayed on the sandstone just beneath me.

Once time returns to normal, I realize that Danny is already leading a closing set of takes just for sound.

“Do you want me moving?” James asks.

“No,” Danny says, donning his headphones. David, the first AD, calls out, “Focus, everyone.” Danny continues, “And … action.”

James breathes heavily, grunts, sucks air through his teeth, and exhales loudly. “Give us an intense-pain one if you can,” Danny says.

There's a long pause until finally, out of the silence, echoes a squeak of Franconian flatulence. There is another pause as we all try not to be the first one to break, and then a flash flood of laughter.

“Cutcutcutcutcutcut,” David belatedly orders, once he composes himself. Still chuckling, Danny calls it a day.

“Thanks, James. Thanks, everyone. It's a wrap.”

AND SO IT IS. In the end, the film hits its narrow target. It is my true story. It authentically conveys my experience in Blue John with power and humor. Make no mistake: this is not a date movie. In nine screenings so far, nine people have fainted. Personally, it grips me with laughter and tears of gratitude every time I see it. My sobs come harder and more joyfully with my family and friends sitting next to me, especially during the closing scene: the people gathered there are my real loved ones. The day we filmed those final moments was my favorite part of the project.

Just as important, Danny and the crew took care of the desert. True to their word, the team went to great lengths to avoid scarring the canyon, and they collaborated at every turn with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance to preserve potential wilderness areas.

Every time I return to the red-rock country of southern Utah, I'm struck again by the massive scale of the desert and the contrasting subtleness of the canyons. Down there, sounds carry with an intimacy like whispers breathed in my ear. My clothes and skin turn buff orange from dirt caked onto the walls, their roughness temporarily scouring away the texture of my fingertips. New secrets come every few feet as I follow turns through the cool humidity of mildewed air. Thirty feet off the ground, I find a bird's nest filled with wind-blown dirt. Under the dust are three broken eggshells.

These slots are the magnum opus of the desert. I think they'll go well with a medium popcorn and some Sprite. Maybe a box of Junior Mints.

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GO HOME, ARON, THE VOICE SAYS. PUT YOUR SKIS ON, ENJOY THE RIDE DOWN. YOU’VE CLIMBED 58 OF THESE FOURTEENERS—YOU DON’T NEED ANOTHER. C’MON, LET IT BE.

Aron Ralston

Photo Illustration by Mark Hooper

Aron Ralston

From left: 2/7/03 > Capitol Peak; 3/17/04 > El Diente Peak; 3-14-03 > North Maroon Peak

Aron Ralston

From left: 1/27/05 > Redcloud Peak; 1/27/01 > Little Bear Peak; 3/6/05 > Sunlight Peak

Aron Ralston

From left: 12/23/01 > Grays Peak; 1/25/03 > Longs Peak; 1/13/01 > Mount Antero

Aron Ralston

NOW WHAT? Ralston beside Colorado’s Animas River on March 8, 2005, the day after completing his seven-winter project.

It’s a cold March morning, and I’m standing at 13,800 feet on the snow-filled saddle between the north and south summits of 14,083-foot Mount Eolus, in the Needles of southwestern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Squinting behind my darkest sunglasses against the high-altitude sun, I scan for a single piece of evidence that might disprove the illusion that I am the only human within 50 miles. But I seem to have the planet to myself—or at least the hundreds of peaks and ridges in Colorado’s largest wilderness, an exquisite nowhere that includes 28 of the 100 highest mountains in the 3,000-mile Rocky Mountain chain.

Of all those ridgelines, I’m staring ahead at one: the Catwalk, an exposed, snow-riddled knife-edge that separates me from the final 300 vertical feet of a seven-winter mountaineering project. In 1997, I set out to climb all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, alone and in winter, and Eolus is my last. Now, after three strenuous days on the approach, I stand just an hour from the summit and consider calling the whole thing off.

But then another voice interrupts: This is the last mountain. Conditions are good, the weather’s good; you’re just intimidated. Do what you do. Climb.

I inch forward. A third of the way out, I pause at a spot where a lonesome rocky knuckle disappears below a double-edged cornice stretching ahead for 50 yards. True to the mountain’s namesake, Aeolus—ancient Greek custodian of the four winds—swirling, winter-long gusts have built the snow into cantilevered curls that droop under their own weight like the furling wings of an albino manta ray. I’ll have to trace the exact crest of the underlying rocks, mindful that with each step one of my cramponed ski boots could sink unexpectedly and throw me catastrophically off balance. A mistake could dislodge the entire snowpack, sending me and several tons of snow crashing down a thousand feet.

Looking back toward the summit of North Eolus, I can see an enormous cross of snow set in the pink granite. Back in the summer of 1999, I watched from a nearby valley as a rescue helicopter hovered above that cross, dangling a haul line down to the body of a fallen mountaineer. Blocking out visions of a helicopter short-haul involving my own lifeless form, I advance nearly doubled over, probing with my ice ax in my left hand as I balance my weight on the ski pole clamped in the prosthetic gripper I wear on my handless right arm. When the ax strikes buried rock, I move, reassured. When it doesn’t, I’m all too aware that my next step could be a fatal one.

THE YEARS AGO, GETTING TO THIS POINT would have been unthinkable. Sure, I’d reached summits before—riding lifts to the peaks of ski areas near my hometown of Denver in high school. But the first mountain I ever walked up was in the summer of 1994, after my freshman year at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, when my best friend, Jon, and I climbed 14,255-foot Longs Peak, in Rocky Mountain National Park. If I had previously questioned my spiritual place in nature, here it was, perfectly clear and understandable when seen from that high mountaintop.

Even before I climbed Longs, I’d heard about people hiking all the fourteeners. Colorado has the highest concentration of 14,000-foot peaks of any state—54 according to the Colorado Mountain Club (CMC), though the exact number is open to debate. Beginning in the 1920s, the CMC has kept the list that most people go by, evaluating peaks since 1968 by the “300-Foot Rule,” which states that, to be ranked as a fourteener in its own right, a summit generally must rise 300 vertical feet above the saddle connecting it with a higher mountain. But some climbers, me among them, prefer an exclusively topographical list of the U.S. Geological Survey’s 59 named or ranked peaks above 14,000 feet.

However you count them, the mystique of the fourteeners is undeniable. At 14,433 feet, Mount Elbert is the highest peak in the Rockies; the east face of Longs, known as the Diamond, holds dozens of the hardest high-altitude climbing routes in North America. For millions of people a year, merely standing in the shadow of the Maroon Bells or Pikes Peak—whose views inspired the lyrics of America the Beautiful in 1893—is worth the pilgrimage. And for generations of hikers, the fourteeners inspire a more exalted sort of passion, the kind exhibited by the elderly gentleman who plopped down next to me on the summit of 14,150-foot Mount Sneffels, near Telluride, and explained between panting breaths that he’d drunk a beer on top of every fourteener. Sneffels was his last peak, and to celebrate, he pulled a five-liter keg of Warsteiner out of his pack. My descent was understandably wobbly.

Since 1923, when young Denver businessmen Carl Blaurock and William Ervin climbed all 46 of the state’s then-measured 14,000-foot peaks, the CMC estimates that nearly 1,200 people have summited all the fourteeners, even fewer than have scaled Mount Everest. Over the years, as better mapping and technology helped the USGS refine peak elevations, the number of recognized fourteeners grew—and the records piled up. In 1937, Breckenridge teacher Carl Melzer and his nine-year-old son, Bob, became the first to climb all 51 of the known fourteeners in a single season. By 1959, the USGS had recognized an additional mountain, and pioneering climber Cleve McCarty knocked off all 52 in 52 days—perhaps the most symmetrical feat of Colorado peak bagging. The current speed record stands at just over 10 days and 20 hours, set in 2000 by Oregon speed hiker Ted “Cave Dog” Keizer.

The summit chase is hardly confined to summer. In 1991, Carbondale, Colorado, writer Louis Dawson II—author of the definitive two-volume Dawson’s Guide to Colorado’s Fourteeners—became the only person to ski down every fourteener. It took him 14 years. This winter, two of my friends from Aspen, 33-year-old ski instructor Ted Mahon and two-time world extreme-skiing champion Chris Davenport, 35, are following in his tracks. Ted has 15 peaks left before he becomes the first to duplicate Dawson’s feat. Chris is attempting to go one better: to ski the fourteeners in a single snow season.

I found myself drawn to the winter wilderness as well. Approximately 500,000 people set out on a trail to a fourteener each summer, according to the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, a partnership of nonprofits dedicated to protecting these mountains. When I hiked 14,270-foot Grays and 14,267-foot Torreys peaks—two of the closest to Denver and Boulder—on a September weekend in 1997, it seemed like I passed half of those people on my way up and the other half on my way down.

At the time, I was just out of college, working in Chandler, Arizona, as a mechanical engineer for Intel, the computer-chip manufacturer. One night that fall, sitting on my bed combing through Dawson’s Guide, I noticed something. “To date,” Dawson wrote, “only one man, Tom Mereness of Boulder, Colorado, has climbed all 54 official fourteeners in winter.” I pulled out my other guidebook, Gerry Roach’s Colorado’s Fourteeners. “Hard-core mountaineers climb all the fourteeners in winter,” it pronounced. “This is a difficult goal for a single individual.” Now I had an epiphany.

I’d harbored aspirations of being hardcore myself, and it appeared that Mereness (like Dawson) had climbed with various partners. Nobody, I realized, had climbed the fourteeners in winter alone. Since high school, I’d wanted to be the first person to do something exploratory. Here was my chance.

At this point I’d hiked seven of the fourteeners, and none of the difficult ones. It took a year of research and training, including a trial expedition up Arizona’s highest mountain, 12,633-foot Humphreys Peak, before I felt ready to tackle my first winter fourteener—14,265-foot Quandary Peak, just south of Breckenridge—in December 1998. In retrospect, that kickoff climb was an utter farce, one that still slightly embarrasses me. I left my two-wheel-drive Honda CRX where it could no longer climb the snowpacked forest road and snowshoed up through the woods. Above tree line, the wind turned my uninsulated water bottles, candy bars, and peanut-butter-and-jelly burritos into useless bricks. Still, I was enraptured—I was soloing a fourteener in winter! Grinning naively, I struggled upward, bundling myself tighter in my ski jacket and pants, worn over manifold layers of cotton: turtleneck, hooded sweatshirt, and sweatpants. My breath fogged my goggles, then froze into shrouds of frost. When I tried wiping them clean, the Kevlar coating on my gloves etched the lenses as though I’d scoured them with sandpaper.

For two hours I trudged into the wind, nearly blind, without food or water, gasping for breath. Despite the hardships, or maybe because of them, I was euphoric when I finally reached the top. If the views from Longs Peak had set the hook, then Quandary’s western vista of the Collegiate Peaks—the greatest concentration of fourteeners in the state—reeled me in. I fantasized that, at that moment, I was higher than any other person in North America. Even the carnivorous chill that snacked on my core through the sweat-laden layers couldn’t strip the smile from my face. I was already discovering that I had a lot more inside me than I’d supposed.

Now I just needed to do something about all that cotton.

TO SAY I WAS UNDERQUALIFIED at the outset would be euphemistic; I was an overambitious kid, with far more enthusiasm than talent or skill. When I conceived the idea, I’d never held an ice ax, put on crampons, gone snow camping, dug a snow cave, or even skied off-piste. And my plan was to go unsupported and unmechanized, meaning no partners, no snowmobiles, no chance of avalanche rescue. Without training, as my concerned Intel friend and mountaineering mentor Mark Van Eeckhout pointed out over the phone one night, the project would likely kill me. This wasn’t news to me: I was well aware of my inexperience. But I also knew how to learn.

For an engineer, little is more satisfying than a well-defined objective with easily tracked milestones, and, beginning in September 1999, when I transferred to Intel’s Rio Rancho plant, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, I committed all my resources to the project. I read mountaineering book after mountaineering book. I enlisted Mark to teach me the basics of backcountry travel. I volunteered on the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council, attended the Silverton Avalanche School, in Colorado’s San Juans, and spent my summer weekends reconning the peaks. I also bought some polypropylene.

It’s easy to find people who are young and stupid. It’s harder to find someone older and still stupid. I didn’t want to be that guy, but sometimes it seemed like my destiny. I made just about every mistake possible, some of them more than once. A few (like forgetting the toilet paper) I seemed to like so well that I repeated them every season.

But I got better—even though I rang in the millennium with a Gorbachevian blotch of frostnip on my forehead. (That was a Christmas gift from 14,172-foot Mount Bross, where I’d cluelessly worn my headlamp all day, allowing the 100-mile-per-hour summit winds to conduct the cold straight through my hat and headband.) Almost every weekend for three winters, I’d drive north from Albuquerque to Colorado, careful to leave word with friends about my plans and to put a detailed note about my route on the dash of my car, legible from the outside. My strategy was to start with the easiest, most accessible peaks: the Mosquito and Front ranges, closest to Denver, then the Sangre de Cristos and the Sawatch Range, flanking the San Luis and Arkansas valleys in the center of the state. I’d leave after work on Friday, climb Saturday and Sunday, and return post-midnight in time for work. I figured I was running about $300 per summit in gas, gear, and expenses—about $18,000 over the course of the project—not to mention the $6,000 I spent fixing my truck after I hit a deer one night south of Leadville.

The personal costs were harder to quantify. I hadn’t turned into a hermit—I still saw my friends on weeknights, road-tripped with my high school buddies, and visited my family in Denver—but I was vaguely aware that I was holding even the people closest to me at a subtle distance. I realized I’d made a conscious decision to defer having a serious girlfriend; I couldn’t be fully available to someone when my passions were so wrapped up in my quest. However, I also saw altruism in my goal. I figured that if I, as unremarkable and average as I am, could do something historic, it might inspire others to dream big, too.

After three winters, I had 23 of the 59 under my belt. My mountain-rescue friends had taught me to telemark, and skinning up the peaks and skiing down was both a huge improvement over snowshoeing and an opportunity for spectacular ass-over-teakettle crashes. I progressively minimized my bivouac kit down to a lightweight down jacket, stove, fuel, pot, and lighter and quickly figured out which foods were most readily swallowed sans saliva. The best were Odwalla super-protein drinks or Gatorade, warmed up and kept insulated inside the jacket in my pack; gels like Clif Shots that I could thaw in my glove, as long as I had some unfrozen water for a chaser; and—my favorite—soggy, dashboard-thawed Patio-brand burritos.

By the end of winter 2002, I was up to 36, and I started planning my endgame. For a year, I’d been ready to move to Colorado and leave my engineering career behind; that March, I got a sign. At the edge of a willow meadow on the west side of 14,421-foot Mount Massive, I stopped short as three gray wolves loped down a hillside not 30 yards to my left—this in a region where wolves had supposedly been extinct for 60 years. The two summits I reached that day were superfluous. For weeks, I replayed what I’d witnessed like a hayseed abducted by aliens; the Forest Service representative in Leadville even responded in a strained X Files whisper: “I knew it—I knew they were out there.” If those wolves could migrate from as far away as, I imagined, Yellowstone, then I could make the move, too.

A few weeks later, I quit my job at Intel. Actually, I called it my retirement. I sold my furniture, rented out my townhouse, bought a camper shell for my truck, and traveled around climbing for six months. That fall, I moved into a low-rent group house in Aspen and got a job at a mountaineering shop.

I had 23 mountains left—the toughest on the list. I was getting to the good part. During the winter of 2003, I climbed Longs, Holy Cross, and the seven summits of the Elks Range, around Aspen—including Capitol and Pyramid peaks and the Maroon Bells, whose steep slopes, technical ridges, complicated route finding, loose rock, and avalanche exposure made them the most dangerous of the lot. The scariest moments of the whole project came on a weekly basis: I fell a sobering six feet off the pinnacled summit ridge of Pyramid, pushed through a brutal night storm on Holy Cross, got frostbite on eight fingers on Capitol, and, on Longs Peak, slipped while descending a steep slab of verglased granite just below the summit and slid toward the nothingness below.

In that eternity before the pick of my ice ax caught on the bare rock, I was more terrified than I’d ever been. But my guardian angels were working overtime that season. Indeed, my closest brush with death came not as part of the solo project but when I was on vacation from it.

IN APRIL 2003, I was hiking alone eight miles from the nearest dirt road in Utah’s Blue John Canyon, near Canyonlands National Park, when I pulled an 800-pound sandstone boulder down onto my right hand and forearm. The stone pinned me in place for five nights and six days. To survive, I drank my own urine, and then, finally, was able to escape by breaking the bones of my forearm and cutting through the remaining tissue with my El Cheapo multitool, amputating my hand just above the wrist. A highway-patrol helicopter on a search initiated by my mother found me nearly five hours later, bleeding to death on a futile march to my truck. I was saved.

I had a lot of time in the canyon to think about my life. More than anything else, I realized, what sustained me were thoughts of my friends and family—my parents, Donna and Larry, and my sister, Sonja. But I also had the self-knowledge, confidence, and determination I’d cultivated on the winter peaks, and it all came together to help me survive, even when the torture of dehydration, hunger, pain, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia made death the more pleasant option. After struggling through five surgeries and three weeks in the hospital, I was released into the nurturing care of my family.

Throughout the agony and improvements of that summer, my parents and I were amazed at how quickly I was able to relearn everything, from brushing my teeth left-handed to typing, tying my shoes, and driving my stick-shift truck. As much as I cherished that time, after four months living in my parents’ TV room, I was ready to get out of Denver and return to the mountains.

It was a bold process to think about mountaineering when I had to rely on 18 pills of narcotics a day just to walk down the grocery-store aisle to pick up even more narcotics. But I sincerely felt that God had given me a new life, complete with the ability to walk in nature, and I missed the high country. Surely, I was content simply to be alive. But I needed the chance to prove to myself that I could regain my self-reliance. So I pushed. First to get off the painkillers, then the IV antibiotics, then to start walking and even running, all in the first month, just because I could.

Curiously, my recovery wasn’t the most difficult thing I’d ever laid out for myself. That distinction goes to my decision to leave my engineering career. In the canyon, I realized how proud I was that I’d found the courage to resign, how right I’d been to give up security for adventure. All along in my fourteener project, I’d hoped to be the kind of person whose example stirred others to reach their potential as well. Once my story hit the media, there was astronomically more interest in that message. But I also had critics.

I don’t mean the friends who teased, “Make sure you tell someone where you’re going,” which I’ve always done when I go solo into the backcountry—except for that one fateful trip. I’m referring, rather, to people who wrote to magazines or anonymously posted messages on online discussion groups or sent me letters saying that because I’d taken what were, in their view, unnecessary risks, I didn’t deserve to be rescued from Blue John.

A few chastised me that I obviously hadn’t learned my lesson or that I was a bad role model. Now, I’m not going to suggest that everyone should take up solo winter mountaineering. But we all bring risk into our lives, through our choices about how we make a living, how we drive, how we party, and how we eat: It’s far riskier to be a McFood-pounding smoker than to climb solo. If it seems that I fill my days with moments that cause my heart to bound, my breath to rush, that’s because those are the times I feel most alive.

Had it not been for the fourteeners project, I would not have recovered as quickly as I did. The ten months between my release from the hospital and my first post-accident attempt at a winter fourteener play in my memory like a Rocky comeback montage: At first, it’s all I can do to walk out into my parents’ backyard. But then the theme song kicks in as I go running up to 8,600 feet on the Incline, a steep abandoned railroad bed on Pikes Peak. Next I’m blazing up Kelso Ridge, on Torreys Peak, my first time soloing above 14,000 feet, and then my friend Jason and I are out traversing five fourteeners in 30 hours. The music climaxes as I cross the finish line of an adventure race in Minnesota, my teammates raising my left hand and my right stump in triumph.

Still, I lived with constant doubts about whether I’d ever be able to venture into the winter wilderness again. My truncated right arm was swollen, weak, and painful; it tingled with the phantom sensation of my hand and was extraordinarily sensitive to pressure. Unlike people born with limb differences, who build up a lifetime of calluses, I knew that if I wanted to climb I would have to do so with a prosthetic. Just after Fourth of July 2003—against the advice of my doctor and prosthetist and certainly to the chagrin of my mom—my friend Rick and I took my brand-new $30,000 myoelectric arm out for a test drive in Castlewood Canyon, southeast of Denver.

State-of-the-art as it was, the device wasn’t meant for active outdoor use, and certainly not for rock climbing. But starting on easy crags that morning, I worked my way up to, well, still fairly easy but much longer walls over the next month. The evidence was clear to me: I could climb. The prosthetic, however, needed work. The smooth off-the-shelf hook slipped around on the holds, I scratched the casing to shreds, and the entire thing threatened to slide clean off my arm with the slightest perspiration.

Malcolm Daly, president of the Louisville, Colorado–based gear company Trango and an amputee climber himself, helped me design a more advanced device—consisting of the head of an ice ax mounted onto the end of a rubber-coated prosthetic casing, with a harness system that allows me to hang from the arm. Therapeutic Recreation Systems and Hanger Prosthetics & Orthotics built the tool and arm in just a few weeks. Despite the fact that, like all prosthetics, the tool can’t provide sensory feedback (I have to see the pick to place it on rock holds) and we hadn’t solved the issue of wrist flexibility (imagine climbing in a wrist cast), it performed much better.

But what about skiing? Ice climbing? Snow camping? Most critically, could I self-arrest? With my right side handicapped by a total lack of touch response, flexibility, gripping strength, accuracy, and reaction speed, I was terrified that if I fell, I would die. Time and again, though, I worked through my doubts. That winter I made my first ice climbs, on a frozen waterfall near Ouray, and my first backcountry ski trip, up 13,316-foot North Hayden Peak, near Aspen. I also practiced setting up my tent, cooking on my stove, and packing my pack, paying special attention to tricky tasks like closing zippers.

By late winter 2004, I felt as ready as I’d ever be.

THERE WERE 14 SUMMITS LEFT—all but one in the San Juan and San Miguel mountains, in the southwestern corner of the state. I decided to start right in with two of the most difficult: 14,159-foot El Diente and its parent peak, 14,246-foot Mount Wilson. I waited until March for the snowpack to settle and for my fitness to build, but I couldn’t shake the visions: I would see myself reaching for a placement with my prosthetic tool, only to have it slip off the rock or pop out of the snow, and then I’d be falling . . .

By the light of my headlamp, I left the base camp I’d established at 12,000 feet and strode quickly up the basin, crampons biting on the compacted snow. Climbing the 30-to-40-degree slopes was fun and easy, and I even wished I’d brought my skis up from camp. Then I started up a many-fingered gully that led into the Organ Pipe gendarmes, dozens of towers that stand like ranks of soldiers on the summit ridge.

I picked my way through large rocks perched upon larger rocks, at one point poking my foot down into a snow bridge and exposing a gap that plunged a hundred feet down the side of the ridge. At the last Pipe, a series of sills hung over the north face; with my body extended and my prosthesis reaching out of sight, I made a committing and unbalanced move. All the visions and fears crowded in on me; the rocks of the north face waited on the other end of a hundred feet of air. But my tool held, my weight shifted, and I was clear. I’d passed the crux.

Ten minutes later, after plowing through the great solid pillows of snow guarding the summit, I stood atop my 46th winter solo fourteener. The sobs that choked my throat reflected all the doubts, worries, anxieties, and uncertainties of the previous ten months. Looking down into the canyonlands where my accident had taken place, it was as though I could see the direct path of my rescue, rehabilitation, and recovery arcing up from the red desert straight to El Diente’s summit.

But there would be no gimmes. The next day, a few hundred feet from a reachy and difficult move at the summit of Mount Wilson, I noticed that the wrist of my prosthetic mountain ax was packed with snow. I whacked at the casing with my handheld ice tool enough to free the release button. But then the mechanism nearly fell to pieces. Of the six screws that attach the ax to the prosthetic casing, two were backed halfway out, three were loosened to their last thread, and one was simply gone.

Crap. Now, in the freezing thin air 14,000 feet above sea level, I had to disassemble the wrist, reseat the parts, and resecure the screws. It was like trying to sew a button on a shirt with one hand while wearing a mitten. The delay maddened me, until I realized what might have happened if I hadn’t checked my prosthetic gear. I would have been up on that full-stretch pull-up at the summit, my feet dangling over the chute into Bilk Basin. With all my body weight hanging on the ax, I could’ve easily pulled it apart.

Whoa. This wasn’t going to be easy. But I could do it, and I would finish.

AFTER THE ACCIDENT, my quest had taken on a different flavor. I found a new balance, and life was good. As I got closer to finishing, though, I reflected more and more about how the project had affected me. It had been my primary source of stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation for so long that I wondered what life would be like without it. I knew it put my family under stress, too. My mom would take down my plans over the phone and then fret for days until I called to check in. But we both knew it was what I needed to do, and she supported me, as she always has.

Still, I wondered, had that stress and fear hardened me irreversibly? I’m sure I distanced myself from potential friends, both before and after the accident. And yet today, after all those years of not even wanting a girlfriend, I’ve met someone special. We travel and go on adventures together, and I’ve been able to open up and share a closeness with her that I haven’t enjoyed for ten years. More than anything, though, I work hard to express my gratitude for the patience of my family and friends. I realize that, in many ways, my fourteener quest wasn’t a solo project at all.

I also know that my life has found a greater purpose, and the ripples keep spreading. I continue to volunteer with at-risk kids, disabled servicemen and -women, and in search and rescue. I donate my time and money to conservation causes, to give back to the wilderness some measure of what it has given to me.

Even the mistakes were worth it. One thing the ongoing miracle of Blue John Canyon has provided is a sense of what a privilege it is simply to feel. The moment I came to from the anesthesia in the hospital, my whole world was pain. That’s how I knew I was alive. And I carried that gratitude with me as I kept climbing fourteeners.

Between hut trips, fundraisers, concerts, a family vacation, and a January 2005 expedition up the highest peak in the Andes, 22,834-foot Aconcagua, I pounced on the next six peaks. In two short trips between avalanche cycles, I whittled my project down to the four peaks of the Chicago Basin of the San Juans: Windom, Sunlight, North Eolus, and Mount Eolus.

Because these mountains are the most remote of the entire list, Chicago Basin would require a five-night expedition. It would take two days just to skin the 15 miles up the Animas River and Needle Creek, an approach rife with avalanche hazard. But early March brought the rare combination of stable snow and stable weather, and sunny skies kept me company on my approach. I set up camp, climbed 14,082-foot Windom Peak, then skied the delectable powder off the west shoulder over to the slopes of 14,059-foot Sunlight Peak. A convoluted route on Sunlight brought me out of a rabbit hole just a few feet shy of the summit; after a dozen tries, I manteled onto the gabled summit rock, where I could look down more than a thousand feet off three sides. The next morning I easily made the top of 14,039-foot North Eolus.

And then there was one.

Now, at noon on the Catwalk on Mount Eolus, I cinch my ax leash on my left hand, check the grip of my prosthetic claw around my ski pole, and venture onto the sickeningly pitched east face. Despite my best efforts not to look down, I can feel that the face becomes vertical somewhere in the thousand feet of air below me—I am astonished that the snow is stuck onto the mountain at all. The powdery crystals squeak as my boots seem to tread in place. It’s like I’m climbing a mountain of packing bubbles.

At exactly 1:30, I reach the top of Mount Eolus. To my amazement, I have become the first person to climb all 59 of these fourteeners, in winter, alone.

Strangely, I find myself not euphoric but relieved. I’m done. Finally. I look around and notice that, appropriately, the mountain doesn’t care, the snow doesn’t care, the sky doesn’t care. The indifference is beautiful. People don’t belong here, I marvel, and yet here I am. Here and alive. Without fanfare, I think back on the peace I found on my first fourteener. That light, clear feeling is still there, after all these years.

Dangling my ski boots over the edge, I smile and take a photo looking down between my knees into the brilliant white. For all the contentment that fills me, I look forward to a juicy steak dinner, a hot tub, and a tall margarita—a time of not doing. Done now, I descend to my skis, then swoosh and rip for thousands of feet.

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“It's 3:05 on Sunday. This marks my 24-hour mark of being stuck in Blue John Canyon. My name is Aron Ralston. My parents are Donna and Larry Ralston, of Englewood, Colorado. Whoever finds this, please make an attempt to get this to them. Be sure of it. I would appreciate it.”

It's April 27, 2003, and for the first time since my arm was pinned against the wall of this Utah canyon, I am using my digital camcorder to videotape myself. I take long blinks and rarely look at the camera's screen. What makes me avert my glance is the haggard expression in my eyes. They are wide-open, huge bowls; loose rolls of flesh sag and tug at my lower eyelids.

Picking up the camera, I point it first at my forearm and wrist, where it disappears in the horrifyingly skinny gap between a large boulder and the canyon wall. Then I pan the camcorder up over the pinch point to my grayish-blue hand.

“What you're looking at there is my arm, going into the rock … and there it is stuck. It's been without circulation for 24 hours. It's pretty well gone.”

Shaking my head in defeat, I yawn, battling fatigue.

I outline my failed attempts at self-rescue, and continue. “The other thing that could happen is someone comes. This being a continuation of a canyon that's not all that popular, and the continuation being less so, I think that's very unlikely before I retire from dehydration and hypothermia. Judging by my degradation in the last 24 hours, I'll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.”

I know with a sense of finality that I'm saying goodbye to my family my parents and my 22-year-old sister, Sonja and that regardless of how much I suffer in this spot, they will feel more agony than me.

“I'm sorry.”

With tears brimming, I stop filming and rub the backs of my knuckles across my eyes. I start up once more.

“You guys make me proud. I go out looking for adventure and risk, so I can feel alive. But I go out by myself, and I don't tell someone where I'm going that's just dumb. If someone knew, if I'd been with someone else, there would probably already be help on the way. Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

Day One: Saturday, April 26, 9 A.M.

This is hoodoo country, Abbey country, the red wasteland.

Under a bluebird sky, I leave my truck at the dirt trailhead for Horseshoe Canyon, the isolated window of Canyonlands National Park that sits 15 air miles northwest of the legendary Maze District. My plan is to make a 30-mile circuit of biking and canyoneering through Blue John and Horseshoe canyons.

This vacation, a five-day road trip, was last-minute. Some friends and I had called off a mountaineering trip, and the cancellation freed me for a hajj to the desert from Aspen, Colorado, where I had a few days off from my sales job at the Ute Mountaineer, an outdoor-gear shop. Usually I would leave a detailed schedule with my roommates, but since I left without knowing what I was going to do, the only word I gave was “Utah.”

Though the Blue John circuit will be only a day trip, I'm carrying a 25-pound pack, most of the weight taken up with climbing gear for navigating the steep canyon system, food, and a gallon of water divided between a three-liter CamelBak hydration bladder and a one-liter Nalgene bottle. I'm wearing a pair of beat-up running shoes and wool socks, with just a T-shirt and shorts over my bike shorts.

Pumping against a 30-mile-per-hour headwind on a scraped dirt road, I finally make it to the entrance of Blue John Canyon and lock up my bike. By 2:30, I'm about seven miles into the canyon, at the midpoint of my descent, the narrow slot above the 65-foot-high rappel marked as Big Drop in my guidebook. Now the canyon deepens dramatically over a series of lips and benches.

I reach the first drop-off in the floor of the canyon, a ten-foot dryfall, and use a few good in-cut handholds on the canyon's left wall to lower myself. It's not a difficult maneuver, but I wouldn't be able to climb back up the drop-off from below. I'm committed to my course; there's no going back.

The pale sky is still visible above this ten-foot-wide gash in the earth's surface as I continue scrambling down, over lips and ledges and under chockstones boulders suspended between the canyon walls. The canyon narrows to just four feet wide here, undulating and twisting and deepening. It's 2:41 p.m.

I come to another drop-off. This one is maybe 11 or 12 feet high. A refrigerator-size chockstone is wedged between the walls ten feet downstream from the ledge, giving the space ahead the claustrophobic feel of a short tunnel.

Right in front of me, just below the ledge, is a second chockstone the size of a large bus tire, stuck fast in the three-foot channel between the walls. If I can step onto it, I can dangle off the chockstone, then take a short fall to the canyon floor. Stemming across the canyon with one foot and one hand on each wall, I traverse out above the chockstone. With a few precautionary jabs, I kick down at the boulder. It's jammed tightly enough that it will hold my weight. I lower myself from the chimneying position and step onto the chockstone. It supports me but teeters slightly. Facing upcanyon, I squat on my haunches and grip the rear of the lodged boulder. Sliding my belly over the front edge, I hang from my fully extended arms.

I feel the stone respond to my adjusting grip with a scraping quake. Instantly, I know this is trouble, and instinctively I let go of the rotating boulder to land on the round rocks on the canyon floor. I look up, and the backlit chockstone consumes the sky. Fear shoots my hands over my head. I can't move backwards or I'll fall over a small ledge.

The next three seconds play out in slow motion. The falling rock smashes my left hand against the south wall; I yank my left arm back as the rock ricochets in the confined space; the boulder then crushes my right hand, thumb up, fingers extended; the rock slides another foot down the wall with my arm in tow, tearing the skin off the lateral side of my forearm. Then, silence.

My passion for the wilderness was ignited when I was 12, when my family moved from Indiana to Colorado, in 1987. Back east for college at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, I pined for the West, and after I graduated I took a job at Intel Corporation as a mechanical engineer, in 1997, working in Phoenix, Tacoma, and then Albuquerque. Even before I quit and moved to Aspen, in 2002, to pursue my adventures full-time, I spent every scrap of vacation exploring the remote West; volunteered for three years with the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council; and, as my competence grew, embarked on more and more solo expeditions.

I'd recently read two best-selling accounts of extremes in the wilderness, both by Jon Krakauer. Into the Wild, the story of Chris McCandless's dropping out of mainstream society, entranced me. Despite his death in Alaska at age 24, I was inspired with dreams of “rubber tramping” across the country, living out of the back of a truck. As I read Krakauer's next book, Into Thin Air, his chronicle of the 1996 Everest disaster, I wondered what I would have done in those climbers' places. I wanted to reveal to myself who I was: the kind of person who dies or the kind of person who overcomes circumstances to help himself and others.

In 1998, I decided on three climbing projects that would come to occupy my entire recreational focus. I would climb all of Colorado's fourteeners, 59 of them by anyone's highest count; I'd then solo them in winter (something that hadn't been done); and I'd reach the highest point in every state. By the end of 2002, I had climbed the fourteeners, and soloed 36 of them in winter. The further I got with my project, the more I learned about my character. Climbing in winter by myself wasn't just something I did it became who I was.

I pushed myself on increasingly difficult routes, but I also developed strategies to mitigate the added risks of winter travel. Still, there were a few near misses that prompted me to reevaluate my practices. In February 2003, on a backcountry hut trip with some of my Albuquerque Mountain Rescue buddies on Colorado's 11,905-foot Resolution Peak, two of my more experienced friends and I skied a 40-degree bowl, despite dangerous conditions. When we gathered midslope at a cluster of trees, the entire half-mile-wide hillside released with a quiet whoomph. The slide swept us hundreds of feet down the mountain, swamping two of us and burying the third for long minutes, until our avalanche transceivers pinpointed his location. We survived, but our friendships did not. I lost two friends because of the choices we made.

Rather than regret those choices, I swore to myself I would learn from their consequences. Most simply, I came to understand that my attitudes were not intrinsically safe.

3 P.M.

Good Christ, my hand. The flaring agony throws me into a panic. I grimace and growl a sharp “Fuck!” I yank my arm three times in a naive attempt to pull it out from under the rock. But I'm stuck.

“Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit!” I shove against the boulder, heaving against it, pushing with my left hand, lifting with my knees pressed under the rock. I brace my thighs under the boulder and thrust upward, grunting, “Come on … move!”

Nothing.

I'm sweating hard. With my left hand, I lift my right shirtsleeve and wipe my forehead. My chest heaves. I need a drink, but, sucking on my CamelBak hose, I find my water reservoir is empty.

I still have my full Nalgene bottle, but it takes me a few seconds to realize I won't be able to sling my pack off my right arm. Once I shrug my left arm free of the pack strap, I expand the right-side strap, tuck my head inside the loop, and pull the whole thing down my left side, to my feet. Extracting the water bottle, I unscrew the top and, before I realize what I'm doing, gulp three large mouthfuls, then halt to pant for breath. Then it hits me: In five seconds, I've just guzzled a third of my water supply.

“OK,” I say out loud, “time to relax. The adrenaline's not going to get you out of here. Let's look this over, see what we got.” I need to start thinking; to do that, I need to be calm. Poking my left hand into the small gap above the catch point, I touch my right thumb, which is already a sickly gray. It's cocked sideways and looks terribly unnatural. There is no feeling in my right hand at all.

An inner voice explodes at the prognosis: Shit! How did this happen? What the fuck? How the fuck did you get your hand trapped by a fucking boulder? Look at this! Your hand is crushed; it's dying, man, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you don't get blood flow back within a couple hours, it's gone.

“No!” I tell myself out loud. “Shut up, that's not helpful.” It's not my hand I need to worry about. There is a bigger issue. 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've got until Monday night.

I take an inventory of my pack. In the outside mesh pouch, I have my CD player, CDs, extra AA batteries, my mini-digital-video camcorder, a digital camera, a three-LED headlamp, and a knockoff of a Leatherman multitool. I've also got a climbing rope and harness and the small wad of rappelling equipment I'd brought to use at the Big Drop rappel. I pull the rope bag out and drop it on the ledge in front of my shins, padding the rock shelf so I can lean into it. My legs are quickly tiring of standing.

My next thought is escape. Eliminating ideas that are just too dumb (like cracking open my AA batteries on the boulder and hoping the acid eats into the chockstone but not my arm), I organize my options in order of preference: excavate the rock around my hand with my multitool knife; rig ropes and an anchor above myself to lift the boulder off my hand; or amputate my arm.

I decide to work on the first option chipping the rock away. Drawing out my multitool, I unfold the longer of the two blades.

My first attempt to saw into the boulder barely scuffs the rock. I try again, pressing harder, but the back of the knife handle indents my forefinger much more readily than the cutting edge scores the rock. Changing my grip on the tool, I hold it like Norman Bates and stab at the rock. Nothing.

It seems like every time I go climbing on a sandstone formation, I break off a handhold, yet I can't put a dent in this boulder. The canyon walls seem to be of a much softer rock. I settle on a quick experiment and, holding my knife like a pen, I etch a g on the canyon's north wall. Slowly, I make a few more letters: e-o-l-o-g-i-c. Within five minutes, I scratch out three more words until I can read the phrase, an elegantly worded warning about falling rocks from Colorado's Thirteeners author Gerry Roach: GEOLOGIC TIME INCLUDES NOW.

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.

Day Two: Sunday, April 27, 9:30 A.M.

I wonder what kidney failure will feel like. Not good, probably. Maybe like when you eat so much you get cramps in your back. Only worse, I bet. It's gonna be a rough way to die. Hypothermia would be better. But the temperature didn't dip that low last night, only about 50 degrees on my watch thermometer. Maybe death by flash flood?

But I'm ready for action, not for dying. It's time to get a better anchor established, one that I can use to build a rigging system to try to move the boulder.

It appears to me that a small triangular horn sticks out from a shelf six feet over my head. But my attempts to toss the webbing over the horn founder. Time after time, the webbing pulls free.

A fissure on the right side of the horn catches my eye. The next time I throw, just as the knot is about to crest the horn, I put the rope leader in my teeth and gently twitch the webbing it slips back into the slot. Aha! I slip a metal rappel ring over the yellow strap of webbing, forming a loop with the ring at the bottom.

I've spent two hours just getting the anchor set up, but the endeavor has been an unqualified success so far.

Good work, Aron. Now all you've got to do is move the boulder. Don't stop now.

Cutting 30 feet of climbing rope, I loop one end of the short piece around my chockstone and tie it to itself. Next I thread the other end up through the rappel ring I can just reach it without tugging against my right wrist. I yank on the rope. Nothing.

Well, at least the anchor is holding.

I need a bigger mechanical advantage. Engrossed, I call upon my search-and-rescue experience, and the two hauling systems we used to evacuate people from vertical faces. I decide on a modified Z-pulley system with a haul line so I can pull down to lift the boulder off my hand. I add Prusik loops, wrapping webbing around the rope in a friction knot that, when loose, slides along the rope but tightens when weighted. Then I clip the loops to carabiners, connecting the rope back to itself. With two such changes in direction, I've theoretically tripled the force applied at the haul point. But the boulder ignores my efforts. Flailing through hours of taxing work, I never once budge the rock.

I finally stop for a break and glance at my watch. It's after one o'clock, and I'm sweating and panting.

Suddenly, I hear distant voices echoing in the canyon. My mind swears in exhilarated surprise, and my breath abruptly catches in my suddenly dry throat. Holding my breath, I listen.

“HELP!”

The caterwauling echoes of my shout fade in the canyon. Forcing myself not to breathe, I listen for a reply. Nothing.

“HELLLP!”

The desperation of my quivering shout disturbs me. Again, I hold my breath. After the dying fall of my shout, there is no returningsound besides the thumping of my heart. A critical moment passes, and I know there is no one in this canyon. My hopes evaporate.

My morale slumps in a pang, like the first time a girl broke my heart. Then I hear the noises again. But I know better, and I wait. Slowly they resolve themselves into the scratchy sounds of a kangaroo rat in his nest.

2 P.M.

For the first time, I seriously contemplate amputating my arm. Laying everything out on the surfaces around me, I think through each item's possible use in a surgery. My two biggest concerns are a cutting tool that can do the job and a tourniquet that will keep me from bleeding out. Of the multitool's blades, the inch-and-a-half one is sharper than the three-inch one. It will be important to use only the longer blade for hacking at the chockstone and preserve the shorter one for potential surgery.

Even with the sharper blade, I instinctually understand that I won't be able to hack through my bones I don't have anything that could approximate even a rudimentary saw. The likeliest method available for cutting off my arm, cutting through the softer cartilage of my elbow joint, simply never occurs to me.

I turn my attention to the tourniquet. Experimenting with the hose from my empty CamelBak, I cut the tubing free from the reservoir and manage to tie it in a simple knot around my upper forearm just below my elbow. But I can't cinch it down; the plastic is too stiff.

So much for that idea.

I have a piece of purple webbing knotted in a loop that I untie and wrap around my forearm. A five-minute effort yields a double knot, but the loops are too loose to stop my circulation. I need a stick, or a carabiner, to twist the loops tighter. Clipping the gate of my last unused carabiner through the loops, I rotate it twice. The webbing presses deeply into my forearm and the skin nearer my wrist grows pale. Seeing my makeshift medical setup working brings me a subtle sense of satisfaction.

Nice work, Aron.

Despite my optimism, I realize there's a darker undercurrent to my brainstorming. Until I figure out how to cut through the bones, amputation isn't a practical choice. But I wonder about my courage levels if cutting off my arm becomes a real plan of action. As a test, I hold the shorter blade of the multitool to my skin. The tip pokes between the tendons and veins a few inches up from my trapped wrist, indenting my flesh. The sight repulses me.

What are you doing, Aron? Get that knife away from your wrist! What are you trying to do kill yourself? That's suicide! You'll bleed out. You slice your wrist and it's as good as stabbing yourself in the gut.

I can't do it.

I picture my blood spilled on the canyon walls, the torn flesh and ripped muscles of my arm dangling in gory strands from two white bones pockmarked with divots, the result of my last efforts to chisel through my arm's structural frame. And then I see my head drooped to my sagging torso, my lifeless body hanging from the knife-nicked bones. I set down my knife and retch.

I hate this boulder. I hate it! I hate this canyon. I hate the morgue-cold slab pressing against my right forearm. I hate the faint musty smell of the greenish slime thinly glazing the bottom of the canyon wall behind my legs.

“I … hate … this!” I punctuate each word with slaps of my left palm against the chockstone, as tears well in my eyes.

No expectation has prepared me for this tormenting anxiety of a slow death, thinking about whether it will come tonight in the cold, tomorrow in the cramps of dehydration, or the next day in heart failure. This hour, the next, the hour after that.

But then another voice speaks coolly. That boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. That's their nature. You did this, Aron. You chose to come here today; you chose to do this slot canyon by yourself. You chose not to tell anyone where you were going.

9 P.M.

Night fills the sky. Time swells, my agony expanding with it. I've fallen into a wormhole where I endure excruciating maltreatment for immeasurable eons, only to return to consciousness. In the hazy freedom of my imagination, I fly out of the canyon, dipping and weaving in the whispering clouds over the sea, whitecaps changing to swells as I head still farther west, glancing back to watch the land turn into a green frame around the cobalt ocean.

Day Three: Monday, April 28, 7 A.M.

I still haven't given amputation a full chance.

I realize that I'm not confident in my tourniquet. I need something more flexible than the tubing and more elastic than the … That's it! Elastic! The neoprene tubing insulation from my CamelBak is supple but strong. It's perfect.

I'm elated at the idea and retrieve the discarded tubing insulation from my pack. Why didn't I think of this before? Using my left hand to wrap the thin black neoprene twice around my right forearm two inches below my elbow, I tie a simple overhand knot and tighten with one end in my teeth, then double and triple the knot. I take a carabiner and clip the neoprene, twisting it six times. Clamping down on my forearm, the material pinches my skin. For some reason, the pain pleases me.

I take my multitool and, without thinking, open the long blade. Instead of pointing the tip into the tendon gap at my wrist, I hold it with the blade against the upper part of my forearm. Surprising myself, I press on the blade and slowly draw the knife across my forearm. Nothing happens. Huh. I press harder. Still nothing. No cut, no blood, nothing. Back and forth, I vigorously saw at my arm, growing more frustrated with each attempt. Exasperated, I give up. This is shit! The damn blade won't even break the skin. How the hell am I going to carve through two bones with a knife that won't even cut my skin? God damn it to hell.

That's pathetic, Aron, just pathetic.

Back to waiting.

3:35 P.M.

I have to urinate.

Save it, Aron. Pee into your CamelBak. You're going to need it.

I transfer the contents of my bladder into my empty water reservoir, saving the orangish-brown discharge for the unappetizing but inevitable time when it will be the only liquid I have.

6:30 P.M.

A subtle stirring tells me it's time to pray. I haven't tried that yet. I close my left hand in a loose fist, shut my eyes, and lower my forehead onto my hand.

“God, I am praying to you for guidance. I'm trapped here in Blue John Canyon you probably know that and I don't know what I am supposed to do. Please show me a sign.”

I slowly tilt my forehead back until I'm looking up through the pale twilight. Nothing. What was I expecting? A swirl in the clouds? A petroglyph showing a man with a knife? I start again.

“OK, God, since you're apparently busy … Devil, if you're listening, I need some help here. I'll trade you my arm, my soul, whatever you want. Just get me out of here.”

Day Four: Tuesday, April 29, 5 A.M.

More cycles.

Dark.

Cold.

Stars.

Space.

Shivering.

I've got a little less than three ounces of water left. I place the bottle in my crotch and unscrew the lid. But as I raise the bottle to my mouth, the lid snags on my harness and the bottle slips. My sluggish brain responds too slowly for my hand to catch it before it tilts almost horizontal and a splash of the sacrament darkens my tan shorts, turning the red dust to a patina of shining mud.

Fuck a nut, Aron. Pay attention! Look what you did!

Water is time. By that spill, how many hours did I just lose? Maybe six, maybe ten, maybe half a day? The mistake hits my morale like a train.

6:45 A.M.

I wonder if the police are involved in any theoretical search yet. Perhaps they've obtained my credit-card and debit-purchase histories, which would lead them to Glenwood Springs, Moab, and then Green River. No, wait: I paid cash for those Gatorades in Green River. Damn.

Credit, debit, cash, it doesn't matter; a couple energy drinks aren't going to guide rescuers all the way out here. Shifting away from the dim hopes of my rescue, I conjure up a series of bright memories that bring me a tidal change of emotion. I am surprisingly happy. Rejuvenated, I start videotaping.

“It's 6:45 in the morning on Tuesday morning,” I repeat myself. “Mom, Dad, I really love you guys. Thank you both for being understanding and supportive. I really have lived this last year. I wish I had learned some lessons more astutely, more rapidly, than what it took to learn. I'll always be with you.”

My thoughts turn to my sister and her wedding to her fiancé, Zack Elder, in August. “I wanted to say to Sonja and Zack that I really wish you the best in your upcoming life together. Do great things with your life that will honor me the best. Thanks.”

Thinking about my sister makes me happy. She's planning to be a volunteer teacher; it reassures me to know she's got such great aspirations. A smile cracks my dry lips.

7:58 A.M.

Slowly, I become aware of the cold stare of my knife. There's a reason for everything, including why I brought that knife, and suddenly I know what I am about to do. Mustering my courage, I dismantle a purple Prusik loop from the rigging and tie it around my right biceps, preparing the rest of my tourniquet as I refined it yesterday.

Unfolding the shorter blade, I close the handle and grasp it in my fist. Raising the tool above my right arm, I pick a spot on the top of my forearm. I hesitate, jerking my left hand to a halt a foot above my target. Then I recock my tool and, before I can stop myself, my fist violently thrusts the blade down, burying it to the hilt in the meat of my forearm.

“Holy crap, Aron,” I say out loud. “What did you just do?”

My vision warps with astonishment. I bend my head to my arm, and my surroundings leave sepia-toned hallucinogenic trails behind them. Yesterday, it didn't seem possible that my knife could ever get through my skin, but I did it. When I grasp the tool more firmly and wiggle it slightly, the blade connects with something hard, my upper forearm bone. I tap the knife down and feel it knocking on my radius.

Whoa. That's so bizarre.

I am suddenly curious. There is barely any discernable sensation of the blade below skin level. My nerves seem to be concentrated in the outer layers of my arm, then. I confirm this by drawing the knife out, slicing up at my skin from underneath. Oh, yeah, there they are. The flesh stretches with the blade, broadcasting signals through my arm as I open an inch-wide hole. Letting the pain dissipate, I note that there is remarkably little blood; the capillaries must have closed down for the time being. Fascinated, I poke at the gash with the tool. Ouch.

As I root around, burgundy-colored blood seeps into my wound. I tap at the bone again, feeling the vibration of each strike through my left thumb and forefinger. Even damped by surrounding tissues, the hollow thumping of the blade against my upper forearm bone resonates up into my elbow. The soft thock-thock-thock tells me I have reached the end of this experiment. I cannot cut into or through my forearm bones.

Sweating from the adrenaline, I pick up my water bottle. As the first drops splash against my lip, I open my eyes and stare into its blue bottom with detached observation as I continue to tilt the bottle up and up. I'm going to do it, and the fact I shouldn't makes me enjoy it even more.

Just do it get it over with. It doesn't matter.

Each tablespoon of water satisfies me like a whole mouthful, and instantly I'm gulping at the dribbling flow. I close my eyes … Oh, God. I swallow the last drops and it's gone.

Day Five: Wednesday, April 30, 3 A.M.

In the piercing brutality of night, I repeatedly escape into trances. If heaven turns out to be as comfortable as the trances, then what I return to in the canyon is nothing short of hell. There is only one emotion in hell: unmitigated despair wrapped in abject loneliness, and I am enveloped in it.

9 A.M.

I update my hour tallies in my head: 96 hours of sleep deprivation, 90 hours that I've been trapped, 29 hours that I've been sipping my urine, and 25 hours with no fresh water. The exercise evokes no emotion, only matter-of-fact acknowledgment.

Suddenly, I have a new idea what about using a rock as a wrecking ball to smash into the chockstone? Or maybe this is an old idea. Have I thought of this already? I can't remember.

2 P.M.

“It's Wednesday afternoon,” I say into the camera. “Some logistics still to talk about.” I've covered what to do with my possessions, so now I begin talking about where I'd like my remains to be scattered Big Sur, Havasupai Creek in Arizona, New Mexico's Sandia Peak, a little spot on the Rio Grande …

Looking straight into the lens, I bid one last adieu: “I'm holding on, but it's really slowing down, the time is going really slow. So again, love to everyone. Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. It would bestow the greatest meaning for me. Thank you. I love you.”

Somewhere inside my mind, I know I won't survive tonight in Blue John Canyon. The day has been cool; this night will be the worst yet. It's not something I debate or internally discuss, but when I consider that I am going to die in a matter of hours, it rings true. If my time is up, then it is up, and yet I have a disconnected feeling of lightheartedness that vaguely approximates bliss. I wonder if this is what rapture feels like. Give it whatever name I want all I know for sure is that I don't have to sweat it out anymore, because I'm not in charge.

11 P.M.

The canyon is an icebox. These are the killing winds.

I only get through two of the frigid nine hours of darkness before I decide it is time to make a final annotation. My watch confirms that it is April 30, for another hour at least. Above the four letters of my name, ARON, I scratch into the red rock, OCT 75. Below my name, I make the complementary scratching: APR 03.

I lean back in my harness and slip into another trance. Color bursts in my mind, and then I walk through the canyon wall, stepping into a living room. A blond-haired three-year-old boy in a red polo shirt comes running across a sunlit hardwood floor in what I somehow know is my future home. By the same intuition, I know the boy is my own. I bend to scoop him into my left arm, using my handless right arm to balance him, and we laugh together as I swing him up to my shoulder.

The boy happily perches on my left shoulder while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I'm back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.

That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.

Day Six: Thursday, May 1, 9:30 A.M.

With five days of gritty buildup pasted to my contact lenses, my eyes hurt at every blink, and wavering fringes of cloud frame my dingy vision. Sip after sip of acidic urine has eroded my gums and left my palate raw. I can't hold my head upright; it lolls off to lean against the canyon wall. I am a zombie. I am the undead.

Miserable, I watch another empty hour pass by. The boost I felt from my vision of the boy has dissipated entirely. I have nothing whatsoever to do. I have no life. There is nothing that gives even a slight hint that this awful stillness will break. But I can make it break. I can resume smashing the chockstone with the rock.

Bonk! Again, I strike the boulder, the pain in my hand flaring. Thwock! And again. Screeaatch! My rage blooms purple amid a small mushroom cloud of pulverized grit. I bring the rock down again. Carrunch! Now my voice stokes hatred for the chockstone as I growl with animalistic fury “Unnngaaarrrrgh!” in response to the throbs pulsing in my left hand.

Whoa, Aron. You might have taken that too far.

With my knife, I begin clearing particles from my trapped hand, using the dulled blade like a brush. Sweeping the grit off my thumb, I accidentally gouge myself and rip away a thin piece of decayed flesh. It peels back like the skin of boiled milk before I catch what is going on. I already knew my hand had to be decomposing without circulation, but I wasn't sure how fast the putrefaction had advanced. Now I suddenly understand the indigenous insect population's increased interest in my hand.

Out of curiosity, I poke my thumb with my knife blade twice. On the second prodding, the blade punctures the epidermis, like it is dipping into a stick of room-temperature butter, and releases a telltale hissing. Escaping decomposition gases are not good; the rot has advanced more quickly than I guessed. Though the smell is faint to my desensitized nose, it is abjectly unpleasant, the stench of a far-off carcass.

I lash out in fury, trying to yank my arm straight out from under the sandstone handcuff, never wanting more than I do right now to simply rid myself of any connection to this rotting appendage.

I don't want it.

It's not a part of me.

It's garbage.

Throw it away, Aron. Be rid of it.

I thrash myself forward and back, side to side, up and down, down and up. I scream out in pure hate, shrieking as I batter my body against the canyon walls, losing every bit of composure that I've struggled so intensely to maintain. And then I feel my arm bend unnaturally in the unbudging grip of the chockstone. An epiphany strikes me with the magnificent glory of a holy intervention and instantly brings my seizure to a halt:

If I torque my arm far enough, I can break my forearm bones.

Like bending a two-by-four held in a table vise, I can just bow my entire goddamn arm until it snaps in two!

Holy Christ, Aron, that's it, that's it. THAT'S FUCKING IT!

There is no hesitation. I barely realize what I'm about to do. I unclip from the anchor webbing, crouching until my buttocks are almost touching the stones on the canyon floor. I put my left hand under the boulder and push hard, harder, HARDER! to put a maximum downward force on my radius bone. As I slowly bend my arm down to the left, a POW! reverberates like a muted cap-gun shot.

I scramble to clear the chockstone, trying to keep my head on straight. Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the rock. Smearing my shoes against the canyon walls, I push with my legs and grab the back of the chockstone with my left hand, pulling with every bit of ferocity I can muster, until a second cap-gun shot ends my ulna's anticipation. Sweating and euphoric, I touch my right arm again. Both bones have splintered in the same place, just above my wrist.

I am overcome with excitement. Hustling to deploy the shorter and sharper multitool blade, I completely skip the tourniquet procedure I have rehearsed and place the cutting tip to my wrist, between two blue veins. I push the knife into my wrist, watching my skin stretch inward, until the point finally pierces and sinks to its hilt.

In a blaze of pain, I know the job is just starting.

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