127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (31 page)

At that point, although he had done some excellent sleuthing, Brion was getting ready to leave for Australia for a few weeks’ holiday and was a little behind in wrapping up business at the shop. He needed to pass the baton to someone who would be around, so he circuitously asked Elliott for backup: “What are you doing today?”

Sensing the loaded question, Elliott said, “Uhh, I was cleaning out Leona’s room, getting ready to start moving my stuff in, unpacking, like that. You need me to do something else? I’m glad to help.”

“Well, yeah. I’m starting to get e-mails back, and I’m getting swamped. I’m supposed to be leaving tomorrow for two weeks. Would you be able to come in to the shop and make some calls and watch for e-mails?”

“Sure thing. I was going to come in anyway and bug you some more about giving me a job. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

A few minutes before eleven-thirty
A.M.,
Brion was on the phone calling my mom. His call interrupted my mom and Michelle’s efforts to crack my password protection. My mom was happy to hear back about the progress Brion had made with the police and the e-mail to my Denali teammates. She spoke with him about the additional data the police needed while she continued to hack away. Brion asked if my mom had my license-plate information. She went downstairs to the drawer where she had tucked half a sheet of white paper on which she’d written the make, model, year, and license number of my pickup truck. She had asked me for the vehicle description when I was home at Christmas in 2000, prior to a winter solo fourteener climb, in case she needed it in an emergency. I had hastily told her the vehicle information from memory, so she unknowingly passed along to Brion an error I’d made.

As my mom finished confirming the truck description and license, she hit enter on the most recent attempt to guess the answer to my “secret question” and gave a gasp when the computer screen changed for the first time in a half hour. Michelle and my mom shouted in unison, “We got it! We got it!” and hugged each other.

“What’s going on? What happened?” Brion asked when my mom came back on the line.

“We’ve been trying to get into Aron’s e-mail for the past hour. We just figured out how to change his password. We’re going to read his mail and see if there’s anything about where he went.”

Brion could hear the pick-me-up effect that the success had on my mom. “Are you into his account now?” he inquired.

Scanning through the most recent e-mails from my friends, my mom explained, “Yes, we’re looking at his in box. If we don’t find anything in his messages, would you be able to send a big e-mail to all his friends and find out what they know?”

“Sure, that’s a great idea,” Brion replied. My mom gave Brion the new password, and they agreed he would carry out the mass e-mailing while she and Michelle read through the two dozen e-mails I’d received since I had last checked my messages on Wednesday the week before. After hanging up, Brion immediately phoned Adam Crider over at the Aspen Police Department to relay the truck description and license number.

After my mom had transferred the password to Brion, Michelle had to leave to go home and pack for a trip with her husband. Alone again just before noon, my mom called my sister in Lubbock, who was working on her senior thesis for the Honors College at Texas Tech. Her voice raw from the crying and upheaval of the past two hours, my mom spoke softly: “Sonja, I just found out this morning that your brother is two days overdue for work. Do you have any idea where he was headed or what he was doing?”

Sonja was calm, but she didn’t have much information on my recent travels, since we hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. “I have no idea where he’s at. I’m sorry, Mom. Are you OK? Do you want me to come home?”

“No, stay there and finish your paper. I’ll let you know what happens. Try not to let it distract you.”

Despite my mom’s wishes, life would not go on without distraction for either her or my sister. Even though Elliott was at the helm of the e-mail search, passing leads along to the Aspen police, who were fully engaged once Brion phoned in my vehicle information, my mom could not go back to working without becoming fraught over what might have happened to me.

Minutes after twelve o’clock, Elliott arrived at the Ute, leaning his silver road bike against the bike rack in front of the store. Elliott rarely drove around town, as he could usually bike to the Aspen core in less time than he could drive and find a parking spot. After Elliott jogged the stairs up to the office, Brion handed him the ’03 Denali folder and summarized his most recent activities. “Here’s the file of people he’s going to Denali with. I’ve been getting replies from a few of them, and I’ve talked with one of them, Jason Halladay. His number’s on a piece of paper in the folder. Aron’s mom’s number is there, too. Also, this is his e-mail address and password. His mom wants us to send an e-mail to everyone in his address book.” Brion was going full speed, and yet he was barely keeping his head together in the midst of the most hectic firestorm he’d ever experienced.

“Who’s the contact at the police?” Elliott asked.

“Oh yeah. I’ve talked to them a couple times. Here’s the number of the guy over there, uh, Adam.”

“What have you told them?” Elliott was thorough and wanted to know everything that everyone involved knew.

Brion gave him a pass-down of the information he’d told Adam up to that time. Elliott sat down at Brion’s cluttered desk and pondered what he was going to do next while Brion walked through the shop to check on the shorthanded staff.

Amid the stack of e-mail printouts Brion had made that morning and handed to Elliott was the response from Jason Halladay. Jason had replied fifteen minutes after Brion’s initial e-mail, clarifying about our May 1–4 Denali training trip. At 11:03
A.M.,
he had written, “We have not heard from him since last week. The last e-mail I have from Aron here at work is from April 22 but he did not mention his upcoming plans.” Jason was going back to his town house for lunch and had typed out, “I may have a more recent correspondence from him at home and I will check on that as soon as I get home.” Just over a half hour later, Jason had sent in another message, with excerpts from the seminal e-mail I’d written to him in January, inviting him to join me for any of a slew of slot canyons, as well as the climbing expedition to Denali. Sitting at Brion’s desk, Elliott read this e-mail:

Brion came back in the office and discussed with Elliott whom to call next. Brion offered, “From what I know, Brad Yule was the last person who saw Aron. But I don’t know how to get ahold of him.”

Elliott exclaimed, “You gotta be kidding me. I’ve got his cell-phone number right here.” Whipping his cell phone out of his pocket, Elliott looked up Brad’s number and then called him on one of the office lines, catching him at the Denver airport, ready to board the connecting leg of his flight to Atlanta.

“Hey, Brad. I’ve got a question for you. Aron didn’t show up for work yesterday or this morning, and we’re really starting to worry about him. We’re trying to get information to give the police so they can start a search. It seems like you were the last person to see him. Do you know where he went? What’s the best information you have from him when you talked?”

Brad recalled the ski trip on Mount Sopris for Elliott, including the information that we’d gotten my truck stuck on the drive out, and that I’d departed for the desert but I hadn’t been specific about my destination.

“We thought we were going to hear from him before the party Saturday, but he didn’t call, and then we didn’t really make it to the party, either.”

“OK. Do you remember what he had in his truck?”

“He had his mountain bike and his skis on his roof rack, and he had his climbing stuff with him and his skiing stuff and camping gear.”

“Was he going out for more skiing?”

“No, I’m pretty sure he was going to do some canyoneering.”

“Oh, OK. The police want to know what his stuff looks like. Like his backpack and jacket.”

“I don’t remember, exactly, but hey, Elliott, I’m on the plane, and I have to go. I’ll think about it and call you when I get to Charlotte.”

On the plane, Brad got out his digital camera and reviewed the pictures from Mount Sopris, double-checking which backpack I’d had with me that day and which jacket I had been wearing, making some mental notes to share with Elliott when he landed in North Carolina.

Just before talking with my sister, at 11:43
A.M.,
my mom sent a message to the Denali team members from her account. Using the addresses from an e-mail she and Michelle had found in my in box, she requested any info they had, as Brion had already done. Jason Halladay called her from the Los Alamos National Lab, where he had returned to his job as a computer technician, to give her the same information he had sent to Brion. My mom went down to the basement and retrieved a road atlas, marking down the locations of Zion National Park and the San Rafael Swell on the map. Jason tried to help her as best he could, but he didn’t know the exact locations of a few of the canyons. He needed his canyoneering guidebook, but that was back at home.

Elliott relayed my last known point and subsequent direction to Adam at the APD, who asked if there was a more specific location other than simply the Utah desert. Elliott pulled out the list of possible Utah destinations provided by Jason and read that to Adam. Crider recognized Zion National Park from the list and located the San Rafael Swell on a map of Utah. Although the lead was from an uncorroborated three-month-old e-mail, it was the only specific information collected up to that point in the investigation, and Adam followed through as best he could. Just before one
P.M.,
he issued a teletype message to the Washington, Grand, and Emery county sheriffs’ offices and followed up with phone calls to Grand County and Zion, to ensure that the national parks received the information.

Grand County is home to Canyonlands and Arches, two of the most popular national parks in the western United States. Because of the concentration of agencies managing public lands in Grand County, it’s possible to cross three, four, or even a half-dozen boundaries on a single bike ride, four-wheel-drive outing, or day hike. To better coordinate incident response and provide a greater quality of service to the public, the Park Service, Forest Service, Utah State Parks, and Bureau of Land Management share a unified command and visitor information center in Moab. With Adam’s action, nearly every public resource agency in the southeastern quadrant of Utah had my vehicle information. While none of them was actively searching yet—it would be too costly to track down every vehicle that might or might not be in the state—they were on the lookout and would call the Aspen police if they happened upon my truck.

Elliott began an intense process of notifying my friends across the U.S. that I was missing. From Brion’s desk, Elliott monitored my Hotmail account, Brion’s Ute account, Brion’s EarthLink account, and his own Yahoo! account, scrolling through message after message from my disconcerted friends. By trading e-mails through the afternoon, Elliott collected a few leads but mostly just waded through replies that said, “I have no idea where Aron is, but I’m worried for him.” Standing out from the other e-mails was one from my friend Dan Hadlich, which pointed Elliott to Mount Sopris and Mount of the Holy Cross in Colorado, but not to Utah.