Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Oh, man, how can that be? I check my map, and it looks much closer than that, maybe a mile to where the trail leaves the canyon bottom and another mile of steep hiking. “Are you sure?”

He shows me the GPS screen. He’s benchmarked the route, and the display indicates that we are now 2.91 kilometers from and 220 meters below the trailhead. The elevation will be the devastating part. I can feel the strain that comes with hiking up over the ten-foot-high sandbars where the trail cuts the corners off the meandering wash channel. I start to have doubts that I will make it to the trailhead after all. Maybe it is the knowledge that there are rescuers there, and that they might be able to come get me, but I begin to understand my body is failing. I’ve lost too much blood. Even minor obstacles cost me a great deal of energy and cause my heart rate to skyrocket.

Thinking through the sequence of events that will most quickly lead to definitive medical care, I ask the hikers for their names so I can plan what I’m going to ask them to do.

“I am Eric, and this is Monique and Andy,” the dad replies. “We are the Meijers, from Holland.” (That explains the accent as well as the excellent English.) I haven’t yet heard Monique or Andy speak, but I can safely assume their English is just as good as Eric’s.

“OK, Eric, you guys look pretty fit. I need one of you to run ahead and get to the police at the trailhead.” I am fairly certain that the people there aren’t actually police, but that’s what he called them. “I need them to send down a litter and a team of people to help carry me out. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it out of the canyon. Will you do that?”

“Monique can run-she is fast.”

Still hiking along, I look to his wife, and she nods. “Do you understand what I need?” I ask.

“Yes, a litter and a-”

I interrupt her. “Wait. Did the police have radios and phones?” The two adults nod. “OK, I need you to ask them for a helicopter.” Why I didn’t think of this first, I don’t know-maybe because of my fatigue-but a helicopter will be much better than a litter team. All I’ll have to do is get up to a place where a helicopter can land, and then wait. I think I can manage that. I look at Monique. “Please, now, go fast.”

[The following passage is from a letter from Eric Meijer, giving his account of our unplanned rendezvous.]

On Thursday May 1st, our family [my wife, Monique, our son, Andy, and myself, Eric Meijer] planned a trip to the Horseshoe Canyon, a remote section of Canyonlands N.P. in Utah. At the start of the trailhead we talked to a ranger who told us about a car that was parked in the area already for several days and that the owner might be missing in the canyon. We joked that we would keep our eyes open and that we would try to find him.

After a hike of 3.7 miles to the Great Gallery (Indian rock art) where we took some pictures, we returned and suddenly heard a noise behind us, and after that a voice that cried “Help, I need help!”

Monique and I immediately realized that this had to be the missing person. We didn’t find him, he found us! A bit unstable but pretty quickly he walked nearer and we saw that the right-hand side of him was full of blood.

His arm, or better what was left, hung in a self-made sling. We ran towards him and he spoke clearly: “Hello, my name is Aron. A boulder fell on me on Saturday. I have been stuck for five days without food or water. I cut off my hand four hours ago and I need medical attention. I need a helicopter.”

We decided that my wife and our son would try to get out of the canyon ASAP to get help, whilst I remained with Aron to move with him in the same direction, giving him food and water and supporting him mentally at the same time. Aron asked me to carry his backpack and by continuous talking I tried to find out as much as possible about his further well-being. It was important to direct him ASAP out of the narrower part of Horseshoe Canyon towards the wider area near the climb out where a heli could possibly land.

As Monique takes off at a jog, Andy follows her. I almost ask the boy to stay with us so Monique can go faster, but more immediately, I think of asking Eric if he has any food. He thinks and calls out to Monique, and she stops. “We have a couple Oreos left, but Monique has them,” Eric explains to me, and shouts to her to get out the cookies as we catch up to her. She hands over the clear plastic sleeve that held fifteen cookies with an apology that she and Andy ate most of them already. She and the boy turn and run off again.

There are only two Oreos left, but they are heaven-sent, and I dispose of them in a single chomp each, pausing after the first one to unscrew the lid on my water bottle and take a swig of tadpole water to wash it down. After I munch the second cookie, Eric hands me an unopened half-liter bottle of distilled spring water. It doesn’t taste as good as the Big Drop puddle water, but it’s a vast improvement over the sandy sludge currently in my Nalgene. I thank Eric for the water, and I ask him if he will carry my pack. He says certainly, and I shrug it off, lightening my burden by a few pounds.

Eric talks with me and asks a few questions about what happened. I’m trying to walk with the water in my mouth still, but each time I reply to one of his questions, I swallow the water. When I finish talking, almost always keeping my answers short, I take another few ounces into my mouth and hold them there. After a half-dozen rounds of inquiries, I let Eric know that I need to stop talking and focus on hiking.

About five minutes after Monique and Andy leave us the second time, Eric and I come across another hiker, in his early forties, headed in the opposite direction with an older woman who looks to be his mother. He asks if we need any assistance, and I reply with a question: “Do you have a cell phone or a satellite phone?” He does not have a phone of any kind, but he offers that he is medically trained. Relieved to have come across someone with more medical knowledge than my meager education by osmosis from search-and-rescue missions, I ask him to join us as we hike. He leaves the woman who continues hiking and introduces himself as Wayne, and I engage him in a back- and-forth to double-check that I’m doing everything I can at the moment to help myself. We walk together through endless stretches of tamarisks that whip at my arm and face, as I ask questions like “Is it OK that I eat?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, sure”) and “Should I worry about drinking too much water?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, you’ll be OK.”)

I assume that Monique and Andy Meijer are running farther ahead to climb out and ask for a helicopter, but I haven’t seen them for about ten minutes. As we come up on yet another long sandbar covered in brush and a few scattered trees, I have to stop to empty the sand in my shoe again. The grating friction on my bare left foot is so intense that it pushes the agony of my arm into the background. I find it ironic that my foot is distracting me from the fact that I’ve cut off my arm. I think it’s doubly ironic that now, when I tell Eric I’m going to stop, he is the one who protests, “No, you must keep going.”

“No, listen, I am going to sit down and empty the sand out of my shoe, and then you are going to help me retie my shoe when I’m done.” I can be a bossy SOB when I’m tired and in pain, but Eric takes it in stride, and after I find a seat on a downed tree trunk and dump half a sandbox out of my sneaker, he ties my shoe for me.

I tried to imagine what Aron must have gone through over the past few days. I was really impressed by his physical, as well as mental, power. He exactly knew what he was doing, what he wanted and where his limits were even after going through all this.

Despite all the loss of blood, his walking pace was remarkably strong, until sand in his shoe started to irritate him and he just stopped in a shady part to get that out of the way before he wanted to continue. He asked me to fasten the lace of his shoe.

It is mile seven, and a few minutes after three P.M. The sun is beating down hard on the shadeless sand at the bottom of the eight-hundred-foot-deep Horseshoe Canyon. Eric and Wayne and I have just come around a wide bend in the open canyon, and I see what must be the beginning of the exit trail that leads to the parking area, zigzagging up the steep hillside ahead on the left. Somewhere on the rim, some seven hundred feet above me, the rescuers are waiting. Oh, how I wish I were a raven and could simply open my wingspan and, with a husky-voiced ca-caw, catch a rising thermal current in the air; I’d be at that trailhead in two minutes.

It will kill me if I try to hike out of this canyon. I’ve lost too much blood; I’m on the verge of deadly shock. I contemplate sending Eric up to get help as well, but before I can spit out the idea, the rapid stutter of a booming echo interrupts my thoughts.

Thwock-thwock-thwock-thwocka-thwocka-thwocka.

Two hundred yards in front of us, the metallic body of a wingless black bird rises over the canyon wall.

The sight shocks me into an abrupt halt and then inundates me with emotion. In disbelief, I try to sort out how Monique and Andy got to the trailhead and the rescuers brought in a helicopter so quickly, but I then understand that this bird was already here. My astonishment yields to immense relief, and it’s all I can do for the moment to remain standing in the sand. Also stunned to a standstill, Wayne and Eric begin waving their arms over their heads,