Aron Ralston with Blair Braverman

What would you do if you were pinned down by an 800-pound boulder, and no one knew where you were? In 2003, Aron Ralston had to answer that question. Today, our survival correspondent Blair Braverman is here to tell us the tale of the man, the myth, and the multitool. Blair Braverman tells us how the legendary story of one good dog is actually a story of two good dogs. Read Blair’s book, Small Game:https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780063066175Read Blair’s Patreon (and learn more about sled dogs!):https://www.patreon.com/bravermountainSupport You're Wrong About:Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are GoodLinks:https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780063066175https://www.patreon.com/bravermountainhttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-good Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Sarah Marshall?

  It says a lot that you ask me what I would do and I'm like, I give up. Pass.

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are bringing you an episode all about surviving despite the odds and also in this specific case, despite there being a boulder on your arm. We are joined, of course, by our adventure and survival correspondent Blair Braverman, who is a dog sledder. She's an adventurer. She's a keynote speaker. And of course, she's an author, most recently of the novel Small Game. Today Blair is bringing us the story of Erin Ralston, a name that perhaps you know, perhaps you don't. This was a big story about 20 years ago in 2003. Let's not worry about that being 20 years ago. 22, actually. Don't worry about it.

• 0:56Sarah Marshall?

  This was a story that at the time really captured at least Americans imaginations because it was about a young man who had gone off on a little day trip and ended up being pinned to a canyon wall by an 800 pound boulder and then had to figure out what to do about it and did figure it out. And that's just the kind of story I love and the kind of story I especially love doing with Blair. This is a gory episode, to put it bluntly, no pun intended. And especially in the back half, we're going to talk about how a person goes about escaping from under an 800 pound boulder, might involve cutting something off, and then how you survive after that. So that might be right for you today. It might not.

• 1:41Sarah Marshall?

  And if it's not, then we will see you in the next one and we can't wait. We, as always, have got bonus episodes out for you on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions. We did some really fun ones in the past year and we have a new one coming out shortly that I'm thrilled about where Sarah Archer and I will talk about my favorite cookbook, The I Hate to Cookbook by Peg Bracken, and also kind of the whole melange of what the 60s were in terms of women and the kitchen and also the question of how to keep feeding your family despite the fact that you don't want to sometimes. And I love doing it. I can't wait to share it with you. Thank you for being here with us. Thank you for walking into 2025 with us.

• 2:26Sarah Marshall?

  Here is an episode for you.

• 2:32Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, our first episode of the new year. It is 2025. We are not on track to have a normal one. And in times of anxiety, I really like to have something unbelievably compelling to distract myself with. And when I think of unbelievably compelling, I think of Blair Braverman.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Oh, Sarah, I think of you.

• 2:57Sarah Marshall?

  It's, you know, it's a team effort. I mean, something I wanted to, and I know I told you this before, but it really bears repeating, like of individual episodes of the show that people really care about and love and love both for informational and like great story reasons and also for being kind of a light in difficult times is the episode that we did on survival in the Andes, the survival of the rugby team.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And those, those boys.

• 3:25Sarah Marshall?

  So many people have come up to me, I don't want to sound like Trump, big guys, strong guys, tears pouring down their faces about the Andes rugby player episode.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I think about the Andes rugby players all the time.

• 3:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I really do.

• 3:43Sarah Marshall?

  I think a lot of us do because of you.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  And talking about them with you. We all went on a journey.

• 3:48Sarah Marshall?

  We really did. And we're going on another journey today because I wanted to bring you back to tell a story of survival and also one that a lot of us feel like we kind of know, because when I think we were in ninth grade, ninth or 10th grade, there was suddenly this big story about this guy named Aaron Ralston, who the story went, had gotten his arm pinned under a rock that was too heavy to move and ultimately had had to cut off his arm with a multi-tool. And the story really captivated America. And I guess, to me, it feels very intuitive to tell this story today at a moment when America is also trying to cut its own arm off with a multi-tool, maybe, I guess.

• 4:35Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know what that's a metaphor for, but I think I'm right.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Perfect timing. It's perfect timing. Thank you for having me on to talk about Aaron Ralston, the guy who cut his arm off with a multi-tool. And I too remember this story very much as it was playing out in the media. And I also, I mean, I've come on for a couple of survival story theme episodes with you. I feel like when someone's in a survival situation, the general public is often like, what did you expect when you decided to go outside? And so like the pattern is that I come on this podcast and I'm like, actually, you know, I end up really defending the person and saying like, I think these people did

• 5:19Speaker 01

  a really good job in a really tough situation. And I have to say, this story really challenged me. I'll get into the reasons why, but I had a really different emotional response to this story than I have to other survival stories. And I didn't expect that when I first started researching it.

• 5:39Sarah Marshall?

  That's exciting.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Have you seen the film that's based on Aaron Ralston's story?

• 5:43Sarah Marshall?

  I have.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Do you, do you recall?

• 5:45Sarah Marshall?

  I do. Cause as you know, kind of relatively early in the pandemic, I was on a big survival movie kick. And I also very strongly recommended Blake Lively's The Shallows.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:57Sarah Marshall?

  At the time, which you had notes on, understandably.

• 6:02Sarah Marshall?

  But I remember watching 127 Hours at the time. And I mean, one of my takeaways is that I'm a fan of horror movies generally. And I feel like that was, you know, kind of a horror movie premise, but was lit in such a way that it felt like an IMAX movie, which is really interesting combination of story and aesthetic, if that makes sense.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  So this incident happened in 2003 and the film came out in 2010. And I actually saw it in a movie theater on a date.

• 6:28Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, wow.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  It's a very dramatic movie. It uses noise and color to illustrate pain.

• 6:34Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And so I remember we both like left the theater like shell shocked, like it had such Visceral effect on us. And what I also remember about this particular date and this movie theater, which I just have been holding on to this memory for 15 years, is it was a small sort of artsy movie theater in Waterville, Maine, which is a small town in Maine. And I went to the bathroom and in the women's bathroom stall, someone had written graffiti that was in Norwegian. And it said, "Ingen forskjordet du, nemai savne ym," which means, "nobody understands this except for me. I miss home."

• 7:19Speaker 01

  And I was so moved by it because I spoke Norwegian, but I had no one to speak it with, right? Because I spent part of my childhood in Norway. And I was like, wow, someone was in here in this bathroom stall, like, missing Norway and thinking in Norwegian. And then someone else had taken a pen and written, "I understand you" underneath it. And in a different pen, someone else had written, "I under..." There were three responses, all in Norwegian, of different women who had been in this bathroom stall and understood the person who had been lonely there. And whatever we're going through, we're not usually as alone as we think we are.

• 7:58Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Unless you're trapped under a rock in the wilderness. And then you really are.

• 8:03Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And then you are.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  I'll start at the beginning so we know who this guy is by the time he's stuck under a boulder.

• 8:10Sarah Marshall?

  They say that in all the screenwriting books.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Do they? They do.

• 8:14Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, something like that.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  It's just intuitive. So Aaron Ralston, he's born in 1975. So solidly Gen X. Gen X, we see you. You're not invisible. So Aaron grew up in Ohio. He was growing up, his family moved to Colorado. He got into backpacking. He climbed his first 14er in 1994, when he was 19. And a 14er is a mountain.

• 8:38Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you so much for explaining.

• 8:42Sarah Marshall?

  I'm like, don't make me ask.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  A 14er is a mountain over 14,000 feet.

• 8:46Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. And what is 14,000 feet? What is a mile in feet?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  There are 96 14ers in the United States. Colorado has more than any other state. It has 53. And 14,000 feet, like, that's very significant mountaineering. I'm not a mountaineer. I actively avoid mountaineering at all costs. So I really can't, like, speak with any sort of personal experience about it. But like, it's definitely, you're dealing with low oxygen, you're dealing with, you need a lot of technical skills, et cetera, et cetera, if you're climbing a 14er. And 14ers, climbing mountains, being in deep cold, these are all places where little mistakes can cause very serious repercussions.

• 9:30Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And, and so he has experience. This is the other thing. Aaron moves to Colorado. He gets into climbing 14ers. He gets into outdoors. It's clear to him that this is going to be one of his callings in life. So he goes to Carnegie Mellon for college. But in summer, he's working as a rafting guide in Big Whitewater. At one point, he rafts eight miles of rapids with inflatable pool toys. Like, that's a questionable decision. He and his friends make it.

• 9:59Sarah Marshall?

  Some of those suckers are hard to keep afloat, even, you know, in, on a pond. So because a lot of young men, you know, the, the fear of death hasn't really fully grown in yet. And it does seem like a lot of guys in their early twenties love climbing really tall mountains before they realize that they could actually die or something.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I gotta say, mountaineering is one of those sports where it seems like everyone knows someone who's, everyone who does it, like, knows, has peers who have died doing it.

• 10:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Mushing is an extreme sport, but most people don't know someone who's died dog sledding. I feel like I'm still in a very different category from these guys.

• 10:39Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, and I, and also that sort of proximity to death isn't the point, which I know, you know, that isn't fair to say about mountaineering, but I, it does seem like that is a dynamic for some people, some of the time, at the very least.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Right. Like, the risk is part of the thrill.

• 10:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  So Aaron is, he loves being outdoors and he also loves risks and thrills. And like you said, proximity to death. He's into the scarier sides of adventure and the more technical sides. There's a point where he goes on a three day solo backpacking trip in Wyoming, and he gets stalked by a black bear who's just come out of hibernation and spends like the three days like throwing rocks at the bear. Like, he's being chased across like, snow fields, like, he gets in this really dire situation with a bear who's just like...

• 11:32Sarah Marshall?

  He's experienced a TikTok scenario in real life.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yes, like the, exactly. Like, he is experiencing man v. bear in real life. The park rangers are like, oh, my gosh, we can't believe you survived that. He starts going to restaurants, asking if they have bear steak, because he like wants his little petty revenge, but they don't. But he decides after this bear incident that he's gonna climb all of Colorado's 14ers, solo, in winter, which is something that's never been done before.

• 12:02Sarah Marshall?

  With good reason, arguably.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  With good reason. And at the time, he's working as an engineer for Intel in Arizona. So he starts doing this project. He starts climbing 14ers. He acquires mentors who can teach him how to do it. So he's, he's going about it. It seems like he's going about it responsibly. And he eventually decides, you know what, I don't want to be doing this engineering thing at all. I'm gonna move to Colorado and become like a full-time outdoors guy. And so he quits Intel and he moves to Aspen, Colorado, which is such a fascinating place. I worked for a summer in Aspen, Colorado, and it is like the Disneyland of, like, it's so...

• 12:42Sarah Marshall?

  I still think about your weird Aspen stories.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I, you know, I, it's beauti-, it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. And like every single person you encounter is like walking out of their house to climb a mountain. It's so fascinating and it's so rich. Anyway, so I, I worked as a nature guide in, in Aspen, Colorado for a summer, but I never did any mountaineering stuff. And so he's immediately going to this mountaineering. Uh, he works at a gear store. He and his buddies are like skiing all the time and they know how to like, you know, they're on budgets. So they know how to like walk up mountains with their skis to get around having to have ski passes and then they get to like ski down on the slopes, which is, you know, so much more work, but it's such a ski bum type of thing

• 13:29Speaker 01

  to do in a really lovely way.

• 13:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I love that whole culture and like the way people reminisce about being young and broke and doing outdoor stuff. That's like a genre that just feels so cozy to me.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And it, you know, some people never, never grow out of it, which also is lovely. Like the people I know who are like outdoor elders, the stories are just absolutely incredible. So he, Aaron wrote a book after all this happened. Can you guess what it's called?

• 14:00Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, I remember this. It's called A Rock in a Hard Place.

• 14:04Sarah Marshall?

  Between a rock and, that's so good. I mean, you gotta, you just gotta.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Here's a sentence from it. Just to give you a sense of the tone. I went on a month-long streak of climbing 14ers in January with close calls on all of them. And these close calls, he's getting stuck in a blizzard. At one point, he's like plummeting down a slope and he manages to stop by driving his axe into solid granite. He gets severe frostbite on eight out of 10 fingers. There's a lot of danger. This is starting to raise flags of discomfort for me, I have to say, as I'm reading it. This is when I start to be like, look. Adventures happen, right? Adventure is just bad planning and things are gonna go wrong. But like, if you're doing these things, if you're on a streak of having

• 14:52Speaker 01

  close calls on everything you do, to me, that's not, to me, that's a wake up call and not a bragging point.

• 14:58Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Right. Because I feel like as an adult woman, you're like, hey, this might mean that you're not prepared enough to be doing this if you keep almost dying. And I can imagine as a young man, having some, not even necessarily an articulated thought necessarily, but a feeling of like, wow, if I keep not dying, then I must really be good.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, or something. I mean, I think like, the most dangerous situations often become the best stories. And I'm not immune to that. Like, there's things.

• 15:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Some of my quote unquote best stories are from things that went wrong. But you want that to be the exception.

• 15:35Sarah Marshall?

  Right. You want most of your days to have no great stories in them.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Maybe the great story is, I saw a bear.

• 15:42Sarah Marshall?

  There you go.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  And we kept our distance from each other. So he climbs, he climbs this peak resolution peak with his friends Mark and Chadwick. And his friend Mark actually pulls him aside and is like, I want you to know, like, I am disturbed by what you're doing. Like, I want you to be happy living outdoors, but like, this is raising concern for me.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. It seems like it goes in one ear and out the other. He has new skis. That's actually what's going on. He has new skis. And his friends concerned about him, and he's thinking about his new skis. And there's this, this bowl, this sort of like, picture literally sort of the shape of a bowl on the mountain, that the others don't think is safe to ski down. Because it seems like really, really prime avalanche terrain. And Aaron is like, yeah, but we'll get amazing photos if we ski into this bowl. And his friends are really, really, they don't want to do it. And Aaron goes over the edge, basically. Forces them to follow him.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  And there is a massive avalanche that all three of them get trapped in.

• 16:51Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Aaron gets trapped neck deep in the snow.

• 16:55Sarah Marshall?

  Jesus.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And he's able to dig himself out.

• 16:58Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. So again, like a very close call where he like sort of theatrically makes it, but shouldn't have.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Well, he's neck deep. His friend Chadwick is up the slope, survives. He's not buried. Mark's gone.

• 17:14Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, God.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Mark is missing. They've been swept the length of two city blocks. It's a D5 avalanche. It's as destructive as an a- this is a massive avalanche. And Mark is missing. He's been buried. And Chadwick and Aaron start looking for him. But again, this is such like, where, what do you do? How do you do it? And where do you start looking? And they start, they use avalanche beacons, which they have, to search for him under the snow, and they finally see his ski tip poking out.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And they are able to dig him up. He has an ice plug in his mouth. He's been buried for 12 minutes without enough oxygen, and he's not breathing.

• 17:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  They give him rescue breaths, and he starts breathing again. But it is impossible to overestimate how close Mark came to dying in this avalanche. That he did not want to ski there at all. He got pressured into skiing there by Aaron.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  The three of them do manage to get to safety. Mark and Chadwick never speak to Aaron again.

• 18:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, yeah. God.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I want to be clear. I'm telling you the story. I mean, it was in the news at the time, so I've read the news stories. But largely, this play by play is from Aaron's book. Like, this is how he depicts it. And he says, quote, "We had survived, but Mark and Chadwick blamed me for pressuring them to ski the bowl. I lost two friends that Sunday because of the choices we made."

• 18:51Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm, babe.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I had to put down the book. I was so upset.

• 18:57Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  I was so upset by that sentence. The choices we made.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Mark and Chadwick left the next morning and they haven't spoken to me since. Rather than regret those choices, I swore to myself that I would learn from their consequences. It feels very different to say rather, like if, if you're the one who's in danger, you could decide to regret it or not. But if you almost kill your friend, like you should regret that. This is my personal ethic. This is where like, this is where I'm like getting so angry, even like reading the quotes. It's really, I really, really, really struggled with this part. Quote, "After the resolution bowl avalanche, I found it easier to let go of the ego and attitude that otherwise pushed me to risk more than I was comfortable with." I'm curious when he says he lost friends because of the avalanche and the choices quote unquote, "we made."

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Did he lose them because of what happened or did he lose them because of his attitude afterward? Like when I read this, I mean, there's so much projection happening here and guesswork that's not written in the story. But like, I wonder if there's an attitude he could have had afterward that would have made it so he could reconcile his friendship with them. I wonder if what really made them angry wasn't the fact that they had skied this bull, that he had pressured them into the skiing the bull, but that he's sort of shirking responsibility afterward.

• 20:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Like, did, did he apologize? Who knows?

• 20:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I wonder if, if he even knows.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  We don't see it. We hear every other detail, but we don't hear if he apologized. It really reminds me of like that trope about politicians being like, well, a lot of people might die, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.

• 20:35Sarah Marshall?

  It's like, well, yeah, you are. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well, and it also feels like the kind of thing that happens when you are really big in the news and you have to do a memoir about it and then talk about the rest of your life. And then, cause it, it feels like it's, you know, the writing of somebody who has not, or the thoughts of somebody who believes they have reflected on this fully, but has not yet done that.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I think that's a really, really good point. This book came out in 2004. It came out 20 years ago. I'm sure like he was offered a big book deal. You know, you have to sort of jump on those moments when they come, like Aaron Rossin now is 20 years older. I'm guessing he wouldn't write the same book now.

• 21:20Sarah Marshall?

  Like this is the part in the horror movie where you are given kind of a premonition of how things could go. If you don't learn your lesson from this and you're like, I'm going to learn something else.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  The Aspen Times writes about this incident, and I think this is an interesting story to go back to because it's a major feature. It's written by Tim Moutree, March 13th, 2003, and it's about Aaron before the whole arm thing happened. So it's a glimpse of him. He's in the news, but it's before he's famous.

• 21:50Sarah Marshall?

  It's like when you see Rachael Ray on an old New Jersey morning show.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  It's just like that.

• 21:54Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  It says,

• 21:57Speaker 01

  "Ralston, a mechanical engineer by training, knows he crossed the line when he led two friends into that east-facing bowl in dicey avalanche conditions." Quote, "That's still part of what I'm working through. Do I really have good judgment? Have I really just been getting lucky on all these trips? What's going to happen when I try to go farther?" Ralston said. Then he says, quote, "Let someone know where you are and what you're doing. So if you should get into trouble, at least there's a remote chance they'll know where to find your body," he added with a chuckle.

• 22:28Sarah Marshall?

  I think this might be foreshadowing.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  The world is full of foreshadowings.

• 22:33Sarah Marshall?

  That's true.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Here's another quote. "Mountain rescue is concerned that I'm going to be bait for the next rescue, which is the attitude we usually take when we see people who we don't know their experience or background, going in to do something more ambitious than our perception of their ability." Oh, they're rescue bait. This is how he's describing himself.

• 22:55Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  "Ralston always leaves behind detailed itineraries with friends or family, with explicit instructions should he become overdue."

• 23:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and that quote from him is very interesting because it's as if he's saying, "Everyone may perceive me as too inexperienced, but I am actually more..." They just lack the ability to correctly perceive my abilities. And it's like, oh, it's weird that everybody thinks that.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Mark, the guy who got buried alive, who almost died, has now taken the rest of his life and used it to teach avalanche safety. And he's never spoken about Aaron. I looked him up because I was curious sort of what he's doing now because he drops out of the story. And one of the things he teaches people when he's teaching them about avalanche safety is heuristic traps, which I think is a really, a really useful framework for looking at this story. So it's easy to say, oh, Aaron was arrogant, he made bad decisions. But the truth is complicated. He made bad decisions, but he was also highly skilled and experienced. So if we look at these heuristic traps, which I'll explain more in a second,

• 24:03Speaker 01

  it's a helpful way for us to see the situation and analyze what happened without saying, oh, he was dumb, or oh, he was a hero, without sort of judgment about him.

• 24:13Sarah Marshall?

  I think that maybe one of the themes of the shows that we do together, and really of the show generally, although normally I'm talking not about nature, but about tabloids, but you know, come see, come saw, is the idea that most of what happens to you doesn't really have that much to do with you.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. So are you, are you familiar with heuristic traps?

• 24:32Sarah Marshall?

  No, I have no idea. I don't, I, I feel like heuristic is a word I pretended to know what it means in academia, but I doubt.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  It's okay, it's okay. So it's like specifically a thing that people talk about with avalanche safety. And it has a lot of other applications. But basically heuristics are mental shortcuts that we take.

• 24:51Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  And they're often very helpful.

• 24:54Sarah Marshall?

  Huh.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  But when you're in a wilderness situation, these mental shortcuts are often what lead us into really dangerous situations. And there's a way in which the more experienced you are, the more mental shortcuts you're taking, and the more prone you can be to falling into these traps. And I'm gonna explain what a couple of those are, because I think it's really helpful for us to look at the situation and see the ways that any of us could fall into traps, rather than looking at the situation and being like, oh, this is all about Aaron Ralston's ego.

• 25:27Sarah Marshall?

  And not just in nature, because like our stuff, we, we live with heavy objects.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  It's true. And this is, this is for me too, as a wilderness person, because I feel judgy about Aaron, and I have to remind myself, I can't think myself immune to the kind of situations that he ended up in, just because I make somewhat different risk-taking decisions. So I'm going to read to you a couple of examples from a paper called Evidence of heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents, written by Ian McCammon in 2002. Thank you, Ian.

• 25:58Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you, Ian.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  And these are these mental shortcuts we take. So there's one that's called familiarity. The familiarity heuristic is the tendency to believe that our behavior is correct to the extent that we have done it before. I've skied this part of the mountain before. It's okay to do it again. The commitment heuristic is the tendency to believe that a behavior is correct to the extent that it is consistent with a prior commitment we made. Oh, I set out this morning to climb this mountain. Therefore, like, when I encounter obstacles along the way, I already made the decision and I should trust the decision I made earlier.

• 26:34Sarah Marshall?

  It would also, if you find this unrelatable, you can compare this to going on a trip to Ikea.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Say more.

• 26:45Sarah Marshall?

  The bookcases were here before. They must be in this area. And then you end up lost, disoriented, and increasingly confused.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Or I went to Ikea. I must buy furniture because I went to Ikea to buy furniture, even if the ideal furniture isn't there.

• 26:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Here's another one, social proof. The social proof heuristic is the tendency to believe that a behavior is correct to the extent that other people are engaged in it.

• 27:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, this all relates to the satanic panic as well. Oh, yeah. The, I, okay. So the Ikea, a great example, is when you see a long line and you're like, I assume that this line is for something because why else would there be a line? And then it turns out that it's like a line for the wrong thing, or just not even a line, because people believe in the line.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I love Sarah's Ikea version of heuristic traps. Okay, here's another one, scarcity. And I'm going to read you the whole quote about this one. A substantial body of research suggests that people react strongly, at times even aggressively, to any perceived restrictions, to prerogatives they feel they are entitled to, regardless of whether or not they intend to exercise those prerogatives. In our everyday decision making, this manifests itself as the scarcity heuristic. We tend to distort the value of opportunities we perceive as limited and to compete with others to obtain them.

• 28:04Sarah Marshall?

  They're discontinuing the blue Ikea bags. Suddenly, everyone is running out with armfuls of them.

• 28:14Sarah Marshall?

  Does that fit?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think so. There's a lot of ways we use these.

• 28:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  So I'm going to tell you what Aaron does on the day this article about him comes out. And as you're listening, I want you to think what heuristic traps are being demonstrated in all his decisions throughout the day.

• 28:32Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh, okay.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  The story comes out on the day it's released. He's in an area that's had really high avalanche activity all week. He decides he's going to climb his 45th winter 14er solo that day. He leaves at like three in the morning and he decides to take a shortcut up a gully. And we talked in the Andes episode about climbing gullies and how they can be like funnels for things that are falling on you.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  A huge ice block falls past his head and he, he writes in his book, Tara chilled my blood, but I climbed on hoping that the 20 pound ice cube didn't have any friends.

• 29:12Sarah Marshall?

  They always do though.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  They always do. They, they always do, but he makes it up. He makes it up the gully. Guess what? He hits a curtain of ice that he wasn't expecting. He wasn't planning on ice climbing today. He doesn't have the right equipment. He decides to free solo it, climb it without ropes.

• 29:31Sarah Marshall?

  Wow. That is definitely that first heuristic. I just, or one of the heuristic that says, I decided to climb this thing today.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  It really is. I decided to go to Ikea. Now I must get the meatballs.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Now, he could go back. He could safely descend at this point, but he doesn't because he wants to meet his climbing goal. Now, remember like days ago when his friend, he got his friends caught in an avalanche and he said, after the resolution bowl avalanche, I found it easier to let go of the ego and attitude that pushed me to take more risks than I was comfortable with.

• 30:05Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And it's like, I guess your ghostwriter just said you should say that.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. At this point in the book, I'm reading this and I'm like,

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Why are you telling me the reader this?

• 30:16Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  You made this decision on the mountain. There's a way in which I can understand why you made that decision. I don't think I would make the same decision, but I can see why you would. But the decision I really don't understand is why you're telling me this now.

• 30:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right? I mean, it feels like either a person is writing a memoir while still lying to themselves about sort of what was motivating various parts of their life, or it was ghostwritten or sort of, you know, written with the help of a ghostwriter in such a way that the publisher insisted on there being like more of a fake trajectory of like being, you know, in the process of learning something when you're clearly not.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  This is a case for everyone who has like a time sensitive memoir coming out to have like a required waiting period. For his sake, for his sake, because I feel bad. Like, there's things in this memoir that are really compelling. Like, the way he describes his brain as like what's going through his head as he's trapped later on is so well-written.

• 31:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, and the question of kind of how much, what motivates the degree of recklessness that you've exhibited, you know, in your life is like a really hard question right after you've barely survived something that you're then writing a memoir about. So it does, you know, you gotta get a memoir out of somebody who's been in the news, even if it's news that directly relates to their own trauma, before people forget who they are.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:39Sarah Marshall?

  Which is, you know, it makes sense, you know, on a lot of logical levels, but also kind of, there's a degree of scarcity mentality there that I think does mean that we get worse material than we could if we took more time with stuff. But I realize that I'm, you know, not speaking a language that publishing understands when I say that.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  So, but anyway, he makes the climb. I don't even care. He like, he's happy about it. He climbs the mountain. Like, I resent learning about it. I was reading about him climbing this mountain. I don't like saying negative things about people, so I'm really like in a pickle about this, but I have such a strong emotion. But I want to take a small detour right now into something that has absolutely changed my worldview. And I learned it in an unexpected place, which was hunter safety classes in 2012 in Iowa.

• 32:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that is unexpected. Love it. Okay, tell me, please. I'm excited.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I was vegan at the time, too. But I took a hunter safety, a gun safety course.

• 32:36Sarah Marshall?

  Because, you know, you're a Renaissance woman.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  And one thing from that course changed my life and it was just this like random page in the workbook and it was called the five stages of hunter development.

• 32:48Sarah Marshall?

  Ooh.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And the stages are the shooting stage where you're a new hunter and you just want to be shooting your gun.

• 32:55Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  You just want to be shooting. You don't care what you're shooting at. You just want to shoot your gun.

• 32:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  The limiting out stage, which is when you want to shoot as much as you can, as many animals as you can.

• 33:06Sarah Marshall?

  The kid playing, kids playing Oregon Trail might go through some version of this possibly.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I went through all of this with Oregon Trail. The trophy stage, which is where you want like a trophy animal, like a big, beautiful specimen.

• 33:20Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  The method stage, the, the method where you care a lot about the way you're doing it. And the final stage, the most advanced stage of hunter development is called the sportsman stage. And in the sportsman stage, you don't necessarily care if you hunt at all at the, on a day when you go into the woods. What you care about is being in the woods, being with the people you're with, seeing animals. You care about the whole experience and you're not trying to reach a specific goal for your own ego. And this applies to so many things in life. There are so many things that parallel the five stages of hunter development.

• 34:03Sarah Marshall?

  I, well, what jumps to mind for you, though?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Well, for me, I see Aaron Ralston in the trophy stage right now. But I think another thing that's really compelling about looking at these things as stages as opposed to discrete categories is that it gives people credit for the fact that they're probably going to evolve out of that stage. So if someone's in the trophy stage, that is a step on the way to the method stage and the sportsman stage.

• 34:33Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, and you know what, it definitely occurs to me to compare that to the development of a writer as well.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:40Sarah Marshall?

  Because you begin with, it's like, it's just something you love to do, you want to do it all the time, and then you progress to having certain goals, you know, and to me, that's sort of being a young, you know, young person or a young adult and wanting to publish and get in this or that publication, or, you know, to have a book out. And, and I do think that like, if you were able to keep progressing, then you do, you know, ideally, come out the other side feeling in the end like, the goal is to like, have it a nice day writing. I think the trophy stage maybe is about accomplishing enough things that like, it means something that you accomplished them, like you, it is significant to you, you know, once you've bagged whatever trophies apply in your field, then I think

• 35:24Sarah Marshall?

  there does come a time when you're like, well, that was great, but it's not entirely satisfying in and of itself. And I feel like ultimately, the most satisfying thing is doing the thing that you love. And I agree with you. It seems like he is, yeah, like the, the challenge is a big part of the excitement, it would seem.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And actually, now I'm looking at this list, and I feel like Aaron is probably in the method stage too, because he's doing solo winter mountaineering. Like, being solo is about trophy, but it's also about like, relying on himself and getting into and out of these situations based on his own skills. So this brings us to Saturday morning, April 26, 2003.

• 36:10Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Aaron decides to go canyoneering. He's going to explore some canyons. He goes to a trailhead and he meets these two women, Megan and Christie, and they start chatting. He explains Edward Abbey to them, and then tells us that he explained Edward Abbey to them.

• 36:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. You know, that is, that's a sporting event for guys of that age.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  It's a sporting event. It's, it's one of the stages. And then they part ways. He continues on. He's feeling good. He's listening to fish.

• 36:42Sarah Marshall?

  Aww.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  And as he's descending from a ledge, he climbs onto a rock the size of a large bus tire that's sort of wedged above a canyon.

• 36:51Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  He tests it. It wiggles a little bit, and he decides to use it to climb down into the canyon. So he starts to lower himself off of it. It begins to rotate. He lets go and drops down and the rock falls on top of him and it traps his arm.

• 37:09Sarah Marshall?

  And is the goal in what he's doing to kind of that if this horrible accident hadn't happened, that he would kind of let go and fall into this canyon and then get to sort of hike around at the bottom and have a nice time?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, like he's exploring. He's having fun. He's poking around, you know, like he's just having a good time. It's not a particularly big trip.

• 37:26Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  He tries to lift the rock instantly because he knows he's full of adrenaline and he has the presence of mind to think like, if there's going to be a moment I can lift this, it's going to be right now.

• 37:38Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  He shifts it like a tiny, tiny bit and it settles even more onto his arm.

• 37:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Is he feeling any pain at this point or is it just shock?

• 37:50Speaker 01

  It sounds like it's mostly shock and adrenaline and like his mind is reeling. He takes a swig from his water bladder and it's empty.

• 37:58Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  The stone is about four feet off the canyon floor, so he's able to stand and his right wrist is quote, "compressed to one-sixth of its normal thickness." He has no feeling. His wrist is holding the stone, so even if he could pull it out a little bit, the stone would settle onto it even more.

• 38:17Sarah Marshall?

  Ah.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  He starts thinking about if anyone's going to find him, if anyone's going to look for him. It's Saturday. His roommates will probably miss him on Monday. His work might notice he's gone on Tuesday. Maybe a search crew would go out on Wednesday. But he didn't use his credit card and he didn't tell people where he was going. So people won't be able to track him by his credit card. They won't know what trailhead he left from. The earliest someone could possibly find him is probably Friday, maybe Sunday, a week from now. He's calculating all this. He thinks he's going to live till Tuesday and probably the search crew will find him like five days later, his body.

• 38:57Sarah Marshall?

  Which is, I do commend having the presence of mind to sort of strategically think through all of this and be honest with yourself about what your chances are in this moment and just the realities of the situation.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. He's thinking, okay, here's what he has with him. Two bean burritos, a CD player. Batteries, a camcorder, a multi-tool, a headlamp, a water bottle, his empty hydration pack, a climbing rope, a harness, and a little bit of repelling equipment. So if you were him and these were your supplies, what would you try to do?

• 39:35Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. I have no idea. Dissociate, you know? I mean, because like the rock is not going to move, right? Like a bus tire is really big. I assume it weighs like tons.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  They found out later, they estimated later it weighs 800 pounds.

• 39:52Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. So like, I don't, I'm sure that there are some human beings who could move that with some kind of like a lever or like just using strength plus like some sort of tools. But like, oh, my God, you know, I, I, I mean, I guess you do very quickly, perhaps come to the conclusion, like, it's hard to think creatively to the extent of imagining doing something besides having to just cut your hand off.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but he comes up with four plans and amputating his arm is only one of them. So it is the last resort. So the ideas he comes up with in the sort of immediate aftermath are, one, he has batteries. Can he use the battery acid to erode the stone?

• 40:38Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  To get his arm out.

• 40:40Sarah Marshall?

  Nice one.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Can he chip away at the rock? With the multi-tool.

• 40:45Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Could it be softish?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Can he use the ropes to make a pulley system to lift the rock enough that he can get his arm off?

• 40:52Sarah Marshall?

  It says a lot that you ask me what I would do and I'm like, I give up. Pass.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  That's why when we go into the wilderness, I'll go with you, Sarah.

• 41:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, exactly. That's why I will not go to the canyon by myself.

• 41:07Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so the pulley.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And then his last option, he's like, I could cut off my arm. So he decides to start with a more pleasant option, which is chipping away at the rock. And he tested, I think this is actually incredibly beautiful. He tested by carving the phrase geologic time includes now into the rock, which is a quote from a book about mountaineering. And it means like, the earth is still moving, including when it falls on top of you. I think that's gorgeous. That's so poetic.

• 41:37Sarah Marshall?

  I love it.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  And as he's doing this, he realizes the stone is really hard. And actually, that's why it hadn't eroded like the rest of the canyon. You know, the canyon was eroded by water and this rock was left behind because it's hard. So chipping away at it is really not going to work. Also, his arm is blocking the place he needs to chip away at.

• 41:59Sarah Marshall?

  Right, and he's working with his, and is he, is he left-handed or right-handed?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  He's right-handed.

• 42:05Sarah Marshall?

  And his right hand is under the boulder.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. At 6:00 PM, three hours after getting trapped, he comes to clarity that he's going to have to cut his arm off. But he doesn't want to.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  So he's going to try to exhaust all these other options first. And he can't decide how often to take a drink. Remember, he has just a little bit of water. He decides to take a sip every 90 minutes. And he's sort of experimenting at this point. He tries to, he keeps trying to chip at the rock in the hope that he won't have to cut his arm off. And he's switching off between sitting and standing, and the chipping's keeping him warm. And he does a calculation and he figures he would have to chip at rock for 150 hours to have any possibility of pulling his arm off. And he would die before he could do that. Pulling his arm out, excuse me, not off.

• 42:55Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like this is a moment when it really comes in handy to be an engineer.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 43:01Sarah Marshall?

  To sort of think that way innately to some extent, and also to just sort of approach problems in terms of the realities of time, among other things.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Day two.

• 43:11Sarah Marshall?

  Does he sleep? Can he sleep?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 43:14Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  He hears voices.

• 43:17Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  And he starts yelling, absolutely yelling, hoping that these people will hear him. And it turns out to be a rat scratching around.

• 43:26Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, gosh.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  The sound of his own voice yelling panicked him so much that it takes him a long time to calm down. And he realizes he has to be really careful about yelling because that is like revving up his adrenaline so much. It's energy he can't spare spending.

• 43:44Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  That afternoon, he starts thinking more about amputation because the pulley system didn't work. Chipping away didn't work. So he makes a tourniquet from the tubing from his water bladder. Do you know what a water bladder is?

• 43:56Sarah Marshall?

  I think so. It's like a camel bag.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 43:58Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, that's one of the brands. So it's like a pouch of water that you take when you're backpacking. I feel like you're trail running. I feel like I see people do that because it's sort of packs up nicer, I guess, flatter.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And it can stay in your backpack and there's like a tube, sort of a bendy straw you're drinking out of. So he, he tries making a tourniquet from the tubing and he like pokes himself with the blade of his multi-tool, which is an inch and a half long. He can't do it. He just can't like bring himself to try to amputate his arm. And also he has bones in there. He doesn't know how he would get through his bones. So he, he like gives up.

• 44:37Sarah Marshall?

  Forgive me for the ridiculousness of this metaphor, but also I know that we're getting into a freaky part. And, um, you know, let's be honest, I'm pretty much here for comic relief. It's like when you bring a watermelon home and you're like, if I open this watermelon without a plan, like I might be opening myself up to a world of trouble because like you have to figure out if you have enough room in the fridge for a broken down watermelon. Can you tell this is a big problem in my life right now?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  You have to commit to eating the whole watermelon.

• 45:05Sarah Marshall?

  You do. Once you open it, you can't go back, is my point. And just that, you know, in this example, and in the case of anybody, you know, who has to do kind of field medicine on themselves in some capacity or working on a patient in many cases, I presume. Like, once you start, you can't stop. I guess, really, there aren't any medical procedures you should start and then go make a sandwich in the middle of, you know, because the like, that I imagine the potential for like bleeding out really, really quickly would be at at hand.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  I also imagine that. I mean, and he's an engineer, not a doctor, so he doesn't.

• 45:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  He does not have surgical experience.

• 45:45Sarah Marshall?

  No.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Cutting off his arm is an option that appears to him from like moment one. But he's ruling it out. He tries it. He rules it out. And so instead, he decides to make a video because he has a camcorder. And I feel like this is one of those things that like now you'd have a phone, everyone would be making videos, but this was like right at the moment where it was like, the fact that he had a camcorder and he made all these recordings of himself.

• 46:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Are part of what made this story go so viral. You can go on YouTube and you can find the videos of him. I mean, they're everywhere. He released them. Talking to the camera as he's basically waiting to die. So he introduces himself. He gives his parents names. He asked the person who finds the camera, presumably attached to his skeleton, to try to find his parents and return, return the camera to them so they can see the video. And he starts basically recording his will. He's talking about his assets, doing the, I mean, what would you do if you were gonna die in the wilderness? You could take a video for your loved ones. What would you be doing with it?

• 46:52Sarah Marshall?

  Right. There's sort of the pragmatic things of sort of who gets what, if you have anything of value, but like primarily you would be using, or I would be using the time that I had to speak to everybody I loved for the last time. Yeah, I would be thinking about not wanting there to be unanswered questions for the people I left behind and sort of being like, hey. I love you all. I've been having a really great life. Everything has been going amazing, except for the hand thing. Or something like that. Not, not those exact words. I would have more time to think about it. But really, just, you know, that you are, you're given this sort of gift of a conduit between the present and the future and are given away to, um, because I do think that like,

• 47:36Sarah Marshall?

  when people go missing, family members often worry that there was something that they could have done. And so, you know, no matter what the outcome turns out to be, or doesn't, if you don't find out. So I think that just having the ability to tell everybody that it wasn't their fault would be really nice.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Would you leave a message for listeners of this podcast?

• 47:57Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, sure.

• 48:02Sarah Marshall?

  I would be like, dear listeners, well, you know me, you know that this kind of makes sense. But boy, we had some great times together. And, you know, just think of me whenever you watch Newsies, or whenever you yell at the news, or whenever you defend Tonya Harding, and then my spirit will live on.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  It's her last podcast. That's because you're in the sportsman's stage of podcasting.

• 48:25Sarah Marshall?

  I hope so. Okay. So yes, he has, he has the video camera, which, and I knew that the, there was a video camera element to this, mainly because it, you know, it's a part of the movie. But I had forgotten that that was such a big part of the story at the time. But of course, if I'm like a 60 Minutes producer, I'm like, this is fantastic TV. We must play this in primetime.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And he's remarkably poised in these videos. I mean, he's talking calmly. You can sort of feel the fear, but it's, they're very compelling. And I think part of why this story is so gripping and became so popular is because it's a situation that invites us to put ourselves in his shoes. Like, could we cut off his arm? What would we be saying to the video? Part of what I want to know about the story is I want like the statistics on how many people I trapped by a limb. And do or don't attempt to cut it off. Like, would most of us do this if we ended up in that situation? Is he actually that unusual?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Like, do a lot of people try? Not a lot of people do. A high percentage of people in this situation try to cut off a limb, but then, you know, die on their way to safety. Like, I want to be able to compare him to a population of his trapped peers. Because I, I mean, I hate to say it, but it must be a situation that is not, certainly not unheard of.

• 49:50Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and do you think that maybe that is also part of, in a way, the sort of subconscious appeal of, of his story specifically breaking at that, at that time? Because if we treat him as really unique for having had to do this, then we get to ignore the reality that, like, actually, you know, there are a lot of people in the world and like, some number of them have had to think about cutting a limb off. And some of them have actually had to do that.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  And most of it is probably because they're being bombed and not because they went on like a cool hike?

• 50:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, right. Yeah, that it's, it's outside of the scope of who should expect to suffer. And that we have these sort of categories when we learn about the world of who we, who we expect to suffer and who we don't. Which I don't think is, you know, anything against us as people. I think that there's so much horror and cruelty in the world that like, we have to figure out a way to navigate daily life without being immobilized by the, the pain that we're witnessing all the time. But, and that maybe also, you know, this story became as big as it did, or stories like this do, because there is the sort of, as part of our culture, this expectation of safety as a white, middle-class American.

• 51:04Sarah Marshall?

  So we, we as a group and as the people who make media and make the news typically like to gather around and tell our, our scary sort of campfire stories about. The person who who shouldn't have expected great suffering and yet it happened anyway.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Right. Like, how would this story be different if someone else caused his arm to be stuck? Would he, this guy still be idolized in the same way as a hero of the situation?

• 51:29Sarah Marshall?

  Or what if this had happened to him in his own house, you know, because I know that that can, that can happen, right?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Or an earthquake?

• 51:36Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something, I mean, there's like an alchemy to this very particular story that made it blow up at the moment it did.

• 51:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, but I don't know that us talking about that is not an attempt to take anything away from this story because it's a remarkable story that there's a reason why we're talking about it today. But also just to say that sort of, yeah, for every story that becomes this kind of huge and folkloric, they're big not because they're unique, but because they represent some bigger part of human experience that maybe we're not prepared to talk about, except through like one story about it that has to stand for everything else. But that, you know, yeah, humans go through a lot more survival than we give ourselves credit for, as, as you've talked about on the show in the past, too.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  There might be something also about it being aspirational, like people might want to be like this guy, but they wouldn't want to be like someone in a war zone. And there are protective mechanisms in place to keep them from relating to people in war zones.

• 52:37Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And that it's just one boulder as opposed to, you know, something much bigger or something systemic.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Aaron knows that his limiting factor is going to be liquid. He's in the desert, it's incredibly hot. So when he pees, he stores it in his camelback. And he's not drinking it, but by the early hours of Tuesday, it's been two and a half days. The pee has like stratified into layers of gunk and he tries tasting it.

• 53:07Sarah Marshall?

  Is that good or bad?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 53:10Sarah Marshall?

  I would start off by drinking my own urine straight away because I think if there's one thing worse than urine, it's urine that's been sitting out.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  It's like that. He takes a sip. It's not good. He wants water instead. He drinks some water. He spills a little bit. And he feels as he watches this water pour out, like he's watching like hours of his life drip onto the ground. Like, oh, I just spilled six hours of the rest of my life, which is apt.

• 53:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And at night, it's getting cold. The air drops like forty degrees. It goes from a hundred to sixty. He can feel that his heart rate is irregular. Things, he's really falling apart. By now, we're on day three.

• 53:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Oh, my god.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  At eight AM, he picks up his blade and he sort of stares at it. And without really thinking about what he's doing, he stabs it into his arm. And he feels the blade knock into his bone. And in his book, he describes the layers of his skin, like his skin is leathery and it's thick. And then you get beneath that and there's sort of flesh that you can push through. And then he can like feel the blade like knocking on his bone and he can't get through it. There's no way. So he pulls out the knife and he's like, wow, great. Now I have another wound. Fantastic. I can't get through my arm and I introduced another one.

• 54:34Sarah Marshall?

  At least it's not raining.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  At least it's not raining because then there would be a flash flood.

• 54:39Sarah Marshall?

  Although then, you know, you could at least hydrate a little. This is like, I would spend a certain amount of time just like trying to tell myself I wasn't that this was really happening, you know? And I do think that that is like-

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Gaslight yourself?

• 54:51Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, or I guess that like, I think that is one of the hardest parts when things get really dire is to have the presence of mind to believe fully in what is going on and be strategic about it, you know? Because I think, I don't know, just looking around at how we're doing in America, it's like the human impulse denial is very strong and has never been more prominently on display as far as I can tell, you know? So it's just very impressive whenever anyone registers reality at all at this point in my book.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  It's really interesting that you mention that because the way he describes what his mind is doing at this point is that he's on these like psychedelic dream trips where he's living in his mind. And then every once in a while, this voice will tell him to go check on his body.

• 55:32Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  And the book does an incredible job of describing his mental state as all this is going on. So if that's something that's interesting to you, pick up the book for that reason alone. He's having these visions of- Doorways, a friend's leading him places and the visions feel real. Like it can, he can feel them with his senses. He can touch walls, he can smell things. But he can't like move his body in these visions. And he's just sort of logic-ing his way through these situations, through these doorways, through seeing people who aren't really there. He's telling himself, this can't be real. I feel it, but it can't be real. I have to check on my body. And then he'll return to his body and he'll discover that his body is shivering violently and he's starving and he's in pain.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And he describes his consciousness as gradually filling his body from the legs up. Going into and out of his body as his, his mind is just taking him places to help him survive or because he's just losing his grip on life. He describes this experience as shifting between heaven and hell. And when he's in his body and he's in the canyon, he's imagining what his parents are going through, what the search crew might be doing, which is nothing yet. And the conclusion he comes to again and again is that the search crew cannot possibly get there before he dies. He's gonna die first. He doesn't know that his roommates actually called the cops on Tuesday evening and thought the cops would start looking and the cops did not.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  They like registered that he was gone, but they didn't start a search crew because they don't have any information to go off. And he's in there, sometimes he's re-watching the videos on his camera, which is like he's playing with the battery life for sure, but it's like having, having like a private TV. Which is, is funny. I did that on Naked and Afraid when I had a little diary cam, like at three in the morning, I'd be like, if only I had a screen to distract me from the lions.

• 57:32Sarah Marshall?

  If only I could scroll a little, kiss a little.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  And that's what he did too. He's watching himself on the camera. Just when he feels like he's giving in and he doesn't care anymore. He has a vision of a baby, basically, that he perceives as his future son. And it gives him this boost of wanting to live again and, and, and keep going, keep trying to hold on in this body that is decomposing with him in it.

• 57:59Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I, I remember that part of the story from the movie, which I remember dramatizes it in my memory really well. And it describes my sort of level of spirituality that like, you could sort of talk about how like, well, you know, it's like the body digs deep to sort of find what it needs to motivate you to do whatever when you have to do it and so on. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. But also like, let's just let that be his baby, you know, like, why not?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I have a friend in northern Norway who's in his, in his 60s. No, he's in his 70s now, but he was in his 60s at the time. And he would always say, there's a lot we don't understand between the earth and the sky. It was just sort of his humble way of saying like, who knows if these things are true. I love that quote.

• 58:47Sarah Marshall?

  I love that too.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  On Wednesday, his manager at the gear store calls his mom, who gets into his email and starts trying to figure out where he is. Now, of course, he doesn't know this, but his mom is motivated. Like as soon as she finds out he's missing, like she is in action trying to get as much into like, the ma, the mom is on it.

• 59:07Sarah Marshall?

  Luckily, his password is 123456.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  It took a while. It took a while for her to get the password, but she's mobile. Like as soon as mom is involved, like things are happening fast.

• 59:17Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What's her name?

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Donna. Donna is on it. And meanwhile, he wakes up, or he doesn't wake up. He sort of like comes back to his body, right? He can't believe he's still alive. It's Thursday. He like feels like, oh my gosh, I'm still here. His mouth is raw from drinking urine. But he's starting to feel weirdly hopeful because if he what, because the longer he lasts, the more likelihood there is that there could possibly be a search crew that encounters him while he's still alive. So he starts to actually feel his mood get better and something has changed with his arm too, which is that it's basically rotted while still attached to him.

• 59:59Sarah Marshall?

  Is that good or bad for what we, I guess, good?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  It's dangerous. But he gets so repulsed by this dead limb. And remember, he's so sleep deprived. He's so hungry. He's so dehydrated. He's not in his right mind. He starts stabbing his arm again, and this time the knife goes in like into butter. Like because his arm has decomposed, it just gives way before the dull blade.

• 1:00:28Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's great because yeah, the, the tiny little multi-tool blade is one of, I think, the aspects of the story that works on the mind the most.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  He has a revelation, which is that now that he can cut through his flesh and not just that he can cut through his flesh, but he actively like doesn't want his arm attached to him anymore. He is repulsed by his dead arm. He's no longer like, oh, he's no longer sad about cutting off part of his body. He wants it off. And he realizes if he can break his bone clear in half, then he'll be able to cut his arm off. The bone was always what stopped him. And he, he'll have to bend his arm until it breaks.

• 1:01:08Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my God.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  And so he drops his weight. He just stopped supporting himself. He hears a crack that sounds like a gunshot echoing in the canyon. And when he touches his arm again, he can feel the gap in his bone. He has broken it completely.

• 1:01:25Sarah Marshall?

  And on the first try, which is really ideal. And like, what is the pain like at this point?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  At this point, he's in extraordinary pain.

• 1:01:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And he's cutting off the flesh and the nerve pain is the worst. He's hitting, he has to, he has to cut through a nerve. He describes it as he had to recalibrate his personal scale of what it feels like to be hurt. It's as if I thrust my entire arm into a cauldron of magma. Horrific, horrific pain. And then he's free.

• 1:01:56Sarah Marshall?

  And does he do a tourniquet or does he just like go in there?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  He does do a tourniquet. He did, he did with the, with the tubing.

• 1:02:02Sarah Marshall?

  Great.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Now, he also doesn't know that as this is happening, they have found his truck at the trailhead. Search and rescue teams are getting closer and closer and they're starting to deploy helicopters to look for him.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  He's only thinking about the fact that he's eight miles from the trailhead. He's so depleted, he's gonna have to climb out of the canyon. He's gonna have to rappel down a 65 foot sheer wall. And he's gonna have to hike out in this incredibly depleted state. He manages to do it. He manages to rappel. At the bottom of the wall, he gets to a puddle and it is the best water he's ever tasted. He chugs three Nalgones full of this water. He starts to get diarrhea because his body can't handle it. His arm is incredibly painful and he just keeps going. He just keeps moving toward that trailhead. After six miles, he sees people, two adults and a kid. And he yells, "Help."

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  And they hear him and they start running toward him. Now, these three people are named Monique and Eric. They have a son named Andy. And they knew that there was a guy lost here because a search and rescue crew had seen them at the trailhead and been like, hey, keep an eye out for this guy. So when they see someone yelling, "Help," they're like, oh my gosh, like we've found the person who's lost here. And so they run to him.

• 1:03:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  They have Oreos. They give him Oreos. They're trying to decide what to do. And they decide that Eric will stay with Aaron and Monique will run to the trailhead with their son. After she leaves, Aaron's like, why did they bring the little kid? Like, is he really that fast? Like, maybe the kid should have stayed. But the decision's made. And as they're running to the trailhead, the helicopter finds them. It's close because it was already out looking. And he realizes later, if the helicopter had come just a tiny bit later, he would have died by the time it arrived. He was so close to death at the time the helicopter finds him. Or if he had cut off his arm earlier, he would have died before getting to the trailhead or before he could get help. The timing is exactly right.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Everything lined up so precisely for him to survive. Any one of these factors could have been changed. If he had been more effective at cutting off his arm earlier, he would not have lived. And he's able to get care at a hospital. You know, we have our happy ending. The epilogue of his book is called A Farewell to Arm, which I love. I love it. I love it. There's a real poetic sensibility here between this and geologic time includes now that I really, really appreciate.

• 1:04:35Sarah Marshall?

  Totally.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Medically, it's a pretty complicated recovery. He does have an infection. He hates being hooked up to IVs because to him it represents weakness,

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  which I strongly dispute. I think it represents science.

• 1:04:53Sarah Marshall?

  There you go. Yeah, I like that one.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  And miracles. And he finds recovery just frustrating in general. He finds it a really difficult process for him. By July, he's rock climbing again with a prosthetic arm, and he climbs five 14ers in 30 hours.

• 1:05:10Sarah Marshall?

  My God. It's that math on that is tough to figure out. That's amazing.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  They're close to each other.

• 1:05:16Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. But wow.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  By the end of the season, he says, "I was performing at or near, or even in some cases, above my ability levels prior to the accident."

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Right. That's my response, too. I'm happy he's happy.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  His severed arm and his forearm get retrieved by a search crew. It took a lot of equipment to move the boulder. Like, there's no way he could have moved the boulder on his own.

• 1:05:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What do they do with with his arm?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  It's cremated. And he scattered the ashes of his arm at the site of the accident, which I think is interesting because he could have just left his arm there. But I understand the intentionality.

• 1:06:00Sarah Marshall?

  Although I don't know if parks let you do that.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  I feel like for cleanliness.

• 1:06:04Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you know, just to, yeah, the whole biohazard issue. But, or, you know, so you don't freak out any other hikers. I love that this is a story about him immediately getting back to climbing as soon as he possibly can, because it feels like, like this story is really a Western, right? Like, I was just talking to my mom last night about how her favorite thing in the world when she was a kid were Westerns. And that was what was on TV. And that was what kids in the 50s grew up with. And I think that is such a great genre because, you know, it's part of America sort of envisioning itself, both for good or for ill, but also because it has so much capacity for different kinds of narratives. And there's a very strong tendency in in Westerns

• 1:06:47Sarah Marshall?

  and in sort of American narrative towards revenge and towards this idea of like, you know, the Captain Ahab of it all. And the idea of what if he felt he had to get revenge against this rock or this canyon or something? What if he had to swear to destroy all canyons? You know, like, I can see a sort of like revenge movie version of this where that is the lesson. And instead, it's like, there's nothing wrong with with having adventures and going outside. It's just that, you know, maybe when you're young, you take too many risks with it.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I think it's interesting how different he feels to me at the end of the story.

• 1:07:21Sarah Marshall?

  Do you feel like you're you're watching him describe his own growth?

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, it's hard to imagine how someone could go through this and not be transformed by it psychologically, emotionally, in terms of maturity level, in terms of relationship to wilderness, relationship to yourself. He went on, he completed his goal of being the first person to solo climb every 14er in the US in winter. After this incident, he completed that goal, which I think is kind of remarkable that this is a guy who is only known in pop culture for cutting off his own arm. But he's also an extraordinarily accomplished mountaineer on top of that. And aside from that and after that, and that's a story that you rarely hear.

• 1:08:07Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, that, you know, so often people get known for kind of, you know, the most famous thing about their life is something that happened to them as opposed to something that they did.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Although I, I mean, talk about agency and cutting off, cutting off your arm.

• 1:08:22Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah, that's true. It's a, it's a real, it's, it's really about both in this case. Yeah. The rock falls on you, but then you decide what to do about it. Yeah. And I, I do think that like it still has that drive. Yeah. Anybody who hears that story has to wonder whether they would have the capacity to do that. And I think the answer maybe is that we don't know, like, we don't know until we end up in those situations. But I do think that we very often surprise ourselves with how much we can handle once we know that we have to.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  It also makes me think, how many people were in situations like this? Made it as far as cutting off their arm or metaphorically cutting off their arm or doing the extreme thing that they needed to do to survive?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  And then still didn't make it.

• 1:09:06Sarah Marshall?

  And that, yeah, that this was a case where a lot of it came down to chance and the chance all lined up. And then I'm sure we also, as people, we need to tell these stories where a story was very, very unlucky until suddenly it was lucky.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  How would this story be different on the news if it's like, here's a guy who cut off his own arm and then died in the parking lot?

• 1:09:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. And I think there is, like in the stories we tell, there is that kind of survivor bias of, we like to think that sort of, yeah, the people who survive are the people who are able to keep a clear head and, and do something extraordinary in order to make it. But really, the reality is that there are a lot of people who do keep a cool head and who do do amazing things or show great bravery. And they don't make it. And that that, you know, makes sense as something that we less want to put on the news on Sunday night. But that that is, yeah, part of.

• 1:09:59Sarah Marshall?

  An important part of these stories that we tell and what we learn from them.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  I think there's also an interesting comparison to be made between Aaron Ralston and Chris McCandless.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Because Chris McCandless is controversial, right? A lot of people will say, I just can't stand that people idolize him. I can't, I can't, you know, he just represents-

• 1:10:19Sarah Marshall?

  People in Arizona don't talk about how much they hate Aaron Ralston all the time, presumably.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  I, please weigh in if you're from Arizona, because I, I don't know that. But I've, it's not conversation I've ever heard in the way I've heard people complaining about Chris McCandless. And I think it's very arguable that Aaron Ralston took greater risks than Chris McCandless did, that they both had a lot of skill, and that the major difference is that Aaron Ralston had exceptionally good luck, and Chris McCandless had pretty darn bad luck. And so we revile people who died. Like, sometimes it's that simple. We look down on the people who died because we think we wouldn't be them, and we look up to the people who live because we want to be them.

• 1:11:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Aaron Ralston is aspirational. Chris McCandless is so often dismissed. And the differences between them are largely things that were out of their control.

• 1:11:17Sarah Marshall?

  And yeah, we, we love winners who manage to not die.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  We love them. We can't get enough of them. And we look down on, like, there's so much disdain for the people who die along the way.

• 1:11:30Sarah Marshall?

  I know. We're kind of, I mean, we as a country are in an early phase of, of whatever the five phases of being a country are. We still look at places who have existed for longer and, and are taken over by another country or experience some kind of massive devastation and are like, couldn't be me. You know, the, the sort of, the sense of being, of needing to, to believe that you can stay lucky forever is very strong with us, I think.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  It really, I really, I mean, I'm inclined to say we're at the shooting stage for obvious reasons.

• 1:12:02Sarah Marshall?

  Well, yeah. You know, anytime that you consume a story about somebody, I think there is- An implicit ask for you to identify with with the people in it, you know, to sort of imagine, even if you don't realize you're imagining it. I think a lot of this happens kind of back of mind, but sort of what would you do? Would you ever do this? Would you ever do that? Why or why not? Would you find yourself in such a time and place? And that I think that, yeah, that often the minute people are asked to put themselves in the shoes of somebody who has, you know, ended up going past the point of no return, even if it's through no fault of their own. I think there's a real, a feeling of anxiety of maybe the fear of realizing that luck is the only thing standing between us and oblivion a lot of the time, you know?

• 1:12:46Sarah Marshall?

  And that's a scary thing to accept, but it does make us appreciate what we have more, I think.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  We do everything we can to tell ourselves that our lives aren't based on luck.

• 1:12:56Sarah Marshall?

  But Billy Zane in Titanic says, "A real man makes his own luck." So, you know.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  What happens to him again?

• 1:13:04Sarah Marshall?

  Well, you know, I mean, he survives the Titanic, but then we learned that the stock market crash left him penniless and destroyed his life. So, you know, hmm, thought provoking.

• 1:13:19Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like this story, it still puts us in meaningfully uncomfortable places. And maybe it allows us to get that far into our own discomfort by reassuring us that we are identifying with somebody who made it. And maybe that allows us to to identify with somebody who ends up in a position that we like to believe that we, like, maybe we can only believe that we could possibly end up in such a horrible position if we can also believe that we might be able to get ourselves out of it.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  That's so good. Sarah, you're so good at this.

• 1:14:05Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you to Blair Braverman for being our guest. And if you liked this episode, please be sure to check out our other episodes with her. We've talked about survival in the Andes. We've talked about the Dyatlov Pass incident. And you can also check out some of her amazing work, including her novel Small Game. Thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this episode. Carolyn has a new album out called Each Machine, and we hope you listen and enjoy. And if you want to hear a little sneak peek of it, listen to our last episode. And that's it for us. See you in two weeks.