It wasn't until five years ago that I started mountaineering. I got more and more into winter solo activities, like climbing fourteeners. There are fifty-nine peaks over 14,000 feet in Colorado, and I wanted to climb all of them by myself in the wintertime. People said that I would never finish them without killing myself, but I've been doing it for five winters, and I have only fourteen left.
There's a very acute sense of solitude when you're climbing solo. There's nobody to hand you your glove if you drop it. I'll get to a trail registry and see that the last time someone signed in was in October, and it might be March. I actually saw three wolves, which are supposedly extinct in Colorado. But once it's been three days, five days, I'm ready to come back and get a greasy hamburger and listen to some live music and have a beer with my friends. You go out and get away from everything so you can appreciate what it means to have society. And when you come back to a warm shower, you just appreciate it more.
Last spring I left Colorado and went to Utah to get away from the mountains. I went biking in Moab, and then I drove three hours to the Horseshoe Canyon trailhead and stayed there overnight, sleeping in the back of my truck. In the morning, Saturday, I biked about fifteen miles in, locked my bike to a juniper tree and hiked a mile and a half across the desert to get to the beginning of these slot canyons. The beauty of the place is really the attraction. It's a Martian landscape. The sandstone is polished smooth from the water action. The colors range from deep purples to salmon hues and even bright orange. The light is really amazing. And there are petroglyphs, ancient Indian rock etchings, down at the bottom, in Horseshoe Canyon.
So I had my headphones on, and I'm hiking down the canyon. And the topography changes. It becomes a deep hallway that bends and warps. I was standing in a section that's only about three feet wide. Chalkstones get rolled down into the canyon during flash floods, and they'll get stuck between the walls. I stepped off this ledge onto one of these huge chalkstones; I had to climb over it to continue down the canyon. I was hanging from the boulder, my feet about two feet off the ground, when it started to roll, rotating toward me. It was falling, and I was falling with it. So I dropped to the ground, my arms flew up in front of my face, and the boulder smashed my left hand into the left-side wall and then ricocheted back and trapped my right hand against the canyon wall. I tried yanking it out, but it didn't move. My hand was pinned against the wall, trapped right in front of me.
It was very painful for about forty-five minutes. You can imagine what it would feel like if you've slammed your finger in a car door. For a brief moment, you don't feel anything until your brain processes the signal. And then the pain starts flooding in. Before an hour had gone by, the hand was entirely numb. I could poke at it with my finger and it felt like I was poking a wooden hand.
I laid out all my options: Rescue could come. I could chip away at the rock. I could try to lift the rock off my hand. Or I could cut off my hand. The first night I spent chipping away at the boulder. Fifteen hours later, I realized I'd never be able to free my hand that way. On Sunday morning, I started rigging a pulley system to try to lift the rock, but I couldn't get that boulder to even budge. On Sunday afternoon, I started videotaping. I recorded my last will and testament—dispensing my belongings and assets and talking to my family, telling them how much I loved them, how proud I am of my sister.
On Sunday afternoon, I told myself I'd be surprised if I made it to Tuesday morning. But by Wednesday, I thought I had a couple of days left in me. By now people knew I was missing, and so the longer I could last, the greater the probability was that rescuers would show up. The nights were very difficult. It was really cold, and I had on only a T-shirt and shorts. I took my rope and wrapped it around my legs to provide insulation, and I had a rope bag that I put over my head and my left arm. I kept my backpack on to keep me insulated and my headphones on to keep my ears warm. In the past, I'd fasted for six days at a stretch, and that gave me confidence that I'd be okay, but water was the issue. Most experts say that in the desert, one to three days is enough time for dehydration to kill you.
Even on the first day, I was having this debate with myself: "You're going to have to cut your arm off, man!" "I don't want to cut my arm off!" "You're going to have to do it!" On Sunday afternoon, the second day, I started laying out my surgical table. I put the knife to my skin, and I was just totally revulsed by the sight. I didn't think I had it in me. Monday I actually tried cutting into myself. And I couldn't do it. The knife was dull, and I couldn't break the skin very easily. Tuesday morning I got pretty serious about it, and I stabbed myself, thrust it into my arm and worked it around, and it hurt like a bitch. And I very quickly realized that I had no chance of sawing through the bones. So at that point, I put the whole amputation thing on hold. And Wednesday I didn't even consider it. I was just like, "Okay, all I'm doing now is waiting for rescue." I videotaped some more and thought about myself. I went through a grieving process. I was angry at the prospect of my death. And then I accepted it, had kind of a peacefulness about it. And I would go into daydreams for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. In my dreams, friends would visit me. They would come, and I would see them in the canyon in front of me. At one point, I heard my mom call out to me.
By Thursday I knew I would not make it through another night. Wednesday night was terrible. I was in a constant shudder. That morning I accidentally poked myself in the thumb. And my knife just slid right in and this gas escaped, this hissing sound. That was when I really got motivated. I started wrenching my arm and trying to rip my hand out from the rock in a panic. And that's when I had the idea that maybe I could bend my arm enough to break my bones. I made a tourniquet, using the neoprene tubing from my CamelBak and a carabiner. (I did a pretty good job. Four hours later, I'd only lost a little over a liter of blood.) Then I bent my body downward and dropped my weight down and erted enough force to break my arm just above the wrist. It hurt. But it was nothing compared to the amputation, which was ten times that. Especially cutting the nerve. The sensation was essentially like fire. It felt like I'd thrust the entire arm up to my shoulder in a vat of liquid magma, like it instantly vaporized my flesh. It took an hour.
I got to the last piece of flesh that was against the wall. I stretched and rotated so that I could get the knife at it and used the wall as a cutting board. And I sliced through that, and I was free. I staggered backward and I hit the wall, and my body sort of flattened against it. And all of a sudden, I felt a euphoria, having gone through the process of grieving over my own death and then being given a rebirth. When we're born, we don't have the senses, the cognition, to understand what it means to be born. And for me this second birth came with all the advantages of being a fully grown adult and knowing what it means.
That boulder had probably seen hundreds of people climb over it since it had been wedged there however many eons ago. For whatever reason, when I tried to climb off it, it moved. I think the boulder was put there to teach me something.
In some ways, this whole thing has been the greatest thing that's happened to me. Not just the opportunities it provided—I am writing a book, and I have two standing offers to be a mountain guide in Aspen, where I live—but also the appreciation of the values I carry. I learned that if you let your ambition drive you without check from your intuition, you are going to get into trouble. That day, I came into that canyon at the same time as these two other girls. We struck up a conversation and were instant friends. They invited me to come out the way they were going and have lunch. And I said, "I appreciate the invitation, but I want to go see these petroglyphs down at the end of the canyon." When I was stuck under that boulder, I looked at those two women as having been angels sent to save me from what was coming. And I ignored them.
Since my recovery, I've attempted to hike as many fourteeners as I could in a forty-eight-hour hiking marathon—I climbed five 14,000-foot peaks in the thirty hours I lasted. I set my personal distance-running record (in August) in the Leadville Trail 100—a hundred-mile footrace. I was a pacer; I ran with another athlete who was competing and paced him for thirty-five miles of the race.
I don't remember anything in particular about my right hand. What I have in its place is this phantom sensation. My hand feels like it's balled up in a fist about six inches shorter than where it used to be. When I flex and make it into a tight fist, I can feel the sensation of my pinkie pushing into my palm. It has diminished over the past three months. For a lot of people who suffered trauma like I did, though, the phantom sensation stays with them for a long time. Sometimes forever.