127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (32 page)

Although it counterindicated what I’d said to Brad, Dan had provided the only itinerary I’d left in writing, and Elliott knew he needed to follow through on the Holy Cross lead with the Aspen police. When they talked just after one
P.M.,
Adam said he would call the police department in Minturn, the town nearest the access for Mount of the Holy Cross, to have them check the Tigiwon Road for my vehicle.

“However,” Adam informed Elliott, “the license information you gave me is invalid. We searched the computer records, and that New Mexico plate number 888-MMY doesn’t exist. I put Eagle County on the lookout for a maroon 1998 Toyota Tacoma, but we need to get the correct plate.”

Elliott said he’d call my mom and double-check the number.

Unable to eat lunch, my mom returned to her upstairs office, where she sat at her desk, organizing some papers while terrifying thoughts of my undoubtedly dire situation maddened her to the edge of a break-down. Then she fought back. Nipping off another upwelling of helplessness, my mom threw down her papers and said aloud, “I have to do something to help Aron.” For my mom, it was as though my life now depended on her actions. She was not going to sit tight and wait to hear back about how things were progressing. That just wasn’t her style.

My mom twice tried calling my dad in New York to let him know what was happening and ask for his ideas on what to do, but he didn’t have his cell phone turned on, and he was out of his hotel room, so my mom left messages for him to call her as soon as he got back that evening. On her own, with the info she’d received from Jason, my mom brainstormed a short list of groups to contact: the Aspen police, Brad Yule, the Utah Highway Patrol, and Zion National Park.

Before my mom could contact the first name on her list, her cell phone rang. It was Elliott, calling to notify her that my license information was incorrect. She pulled out the note she’d referenced previously and read the number to Elliott one digit at a time.

After the third digit, he interrupted her. “Wait, eight-eight-
six,
you said? OK, Brion had written down eight-eight-eight. The rest is ‘M-M-Y’? I’ll get this to the police.”

Just over a half hour later, Elliott called my mom back. The Aspen police had told him that wasn’t my license number, either—it belonged to a Chevy Blazer registered to an Albuquerque woman. Taking the initiative, Elliott had called the New Mexico Department of Motor Vehicles and tried to get them to search for my proper license number using the truck description and my name, but they weren’t able to help him. Unfortunately, my mom didn’t have any better information, so they hung up without any further plans for how to get my correct license information.

Minutes later, at three-forty-five
P.M.,
the home line rang again. It was my dad calling from New York. My mom was now in the same position of delivering the terrible news as Brion had been that morning.

“I got a call from Aron’s manager this morning. He missed work yesterday and today, and no one’s seen him since last Friday. No one knows where he went.”

Shocked for a moment, my dad instantly began pondering what might have happened to me. He was disturbed that I hadn’t left word with anyone. Alarmed as he was, though, he knew they needed to address the immediate problem. There would be ample time later for emotions to play themselves out.

My mom told my dad what was going on. For each thing she told him she’d done, he asked a few questions to clarify whether there were any unchecked leads, but each time, they determined that she had done everything they could think of. Still, my dad wanted to come home immediately. “Do you think I should make arrangements?”

My mom replied, “No, it’s a short tour, you’ll be home in three days. By the time they get someone in there to take your place, it’ll be Saturday night, and you’re coming home Sunday. There’s nothing else you could do here, anyway.”

Comforting my mom as best he could from across the country, my dad knew she needed someone to be there with her, especially as things slowed down. “If I’m not coming home, then you have to promise me that you’ll call the church and ask for someone to come and stay with you.”

My mom resisted the idea of asking for help, saying, “I really don’t think that’s necessary.” But my dad finally convinced her to call Hope United Methodist Church, our family’s congregation in Greenwood Village, a southeast suburb of Denver. My mom agreed, then said she’d contact the sheriffs’ offices and the National Park Service.

Lastly, my dad advised, “If you haven’t done it already, you need to write everything down so you can refer back to it when you make the follow-up calls.”

“Yes, I’ve started making a phone log,” my mom told him. From their combined experience working with bureaucracies, they knew the importance of keeping track of who said what, when, so the next time, when my mom called and someone different answered, she could still be effective.

By the end of the conversation, all the other possible explanations for my disappearance—that I might be out camping along a stream with some friends, or that I’d been irresponsible and not called to let anyone know I’d decided to extend my vacation—were exhausted. There was no Pollyanna rationalization, no easy dismissal that could explain my prolonged absence. With the alarm mounting to the level of a terrible ache in my dad’s stomach, by the time he said “I love you” to my mom and hung up, he felt like he’d been shot in the gut.

Things weren’t any easier on my mom, since ringing up the church turned out to be the most emotionally challenging call she made all day. As strong-willed as she is, she wasn’t used to asking for help for herself. However, when a good friend, Ann Fort, called back a few minutes later, saying she would be over to the house by seven
P.M.,
my mom was glad she’d made the request.

At 5:23
P.M.,
starting with the Aspen police, my mom began calling the names on her yellow legal tablet. She told the same story a half-dozen times in a series of twenty-minute conversations. She talked with law-enforcement representatives across Utah for two hours, beginning at five-forty-five
P.M.,
speaking first with two state patrol dispatchers within the Department of Public Safety (DPS) and then with another two dispatchers from the Zion National Park police, submitting request after request for urgency in their assistance on my case. Each time before she hung up, she finished with the question, “Who else should I call?”

Via our network of climbing friends and search-and-rescue colleagues, Steve Patchett had received a forwarded copy of the e-mail I’d written to Jason designating the four Utah canyons I’d wanted to visit. As a rescue leader with the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Council and one of my many mentors, Steve was acutely aware that time was of the essence in the developing situation. The first twenty-four hours of a search are often the most critical. From his house in Albuquerque, Steve called Mark Van Eeckhout in Los Alamos, and they spoke about the canyon list at 3:38
P.M.
on Wednesday, trying to figure out where some of the more obscure canyons were located. Mark typed “Seger Canyon” into a search engine that found “Tom’s Utah Canyoneering Guide.” Clicking on the link, Mark read through a full guidebook-style description, complete with driving directions and topographic maps for the canyon. On the other end of the phone, Steve marked an “X” in central Wayne County on his Utah road atlas, following the driving directions that Mark read to him off the Web page. They found Cable Canyon adjacent to Segers Hole, at the southern end of the San Rafael Swell.

Steve then called the Ute Mountaineer, responding to Elliott’s e-mail and volunteering his time. Steve and Elliott talked for almost twenty-five minutes, and Steve said he would contact the various authorities in Colorado and Utah. Elliott had received an e-mail from my climbing friend Wolfgang Stiller, and confirmed in a short phone conversation that we had canceled the Mount of the Holy Cross trip due to avalanche conditions. However, Wolfgang had acknowledged that it was possible I’d gone ahead with the attempt by myself. Elliott passed this along to Steve, who said he would call the Eagle County sheriff to close out on the Mount of the Holy Cross lead. He told Elliott his next efforts would focus on the Utah locations.

Between four-fifteen and five
P.M.,
Steve called the Zion National Parks police and the Emery County sheriff’s office (ECSO), headquartered in Castle Dale, Utah, to initiate searches at the trailheads for the Virgin River and the Black Box of the San Rafael, respectively. The Zion police indicated that they would check for my vehicle during their evening sweeps of the trailheads. Steve spoke with Captain Kyle Ekker of the ECSO at 5:19
P.M.
in his Castle Dale office. Captain Ekker took the information from Steve and then had his ECSO dispatcher enter the missing person’s report, including issuing an all-points bulletin for my truck. Additionally, Captain Ekker asked local search-and-rescue volunteers to drive out to various trailheads. By 6:07
P.M.,
deputies and SAR folks were en route to Swinging Bridge, Joe’s Valley, and the Upper and Lower Black Boxes. By 6:51
P.M.,
all four field units had reported back to the ECSO dispatcher that they were searching the outlying trailheads of the San Rafael region for my vehicle. Volunteers Russell Jones and Randy Lake of the Emery County search-and-rescue team met in the area of the Lower Black Box and took all-terrain vehicles in to check the most inaccessible trailhead that normally can be reached only by mountain bike or on foot.

After filing reports with the other counties, Steve got through to my mom at 6:38
P.M.
and let her know about the trailhead sweeps. Additionally, Steve was mobilizing a group from Albuquerque to go to Utah as early as the next day. My mom said she would keep in touch with DPS and a half-dozen contacts Steve provided, to keep tabs on the leads. As Steve read off his list of names and phone numbers, my mom recognized Emery County from the list she’d made after compiling the canyon information with Jason earlier in the afternoon. Once she got off the line with Steve, she was impatient to know if they’d found anything. When she called Emery County at 7:20
P.M.,
the dispatcher was in the process of receiving the calls from the field deputies and asked my mom to call back just a minute later. During the second conversation, my mom learned that the posse had “negative contact with the missing person or his vehicle.”

My mom pressed the searchers to keep going after dark, but the dispatcher indicated that was unlikely, as most of the deputies were going off-shift. It seemed reasonable to the dispatcher to suggest, “Sometimes hikers get disoriented and become lost. A lot of times, they find their way back after a few days.”

“This person clearly does not know my son,” my mom thought, and she replied in a stern assertion, “He is not
lost.
Something has happened to him.” But she acknowledged that the manpower situation was not going to permit these rural county sheriffs to dedicate all of their night-shift patrols to the hunt for my truck. She ended the conversation politely, then considered what to do next.

In the next ten minutes, she talked with Eric Ross of the Aspen police, who had taken over from Adam at the shift change. They decided he should go to my house in town and gather my credit-card numbers. My mom called and asked Elliott to help Eric, who was on his way to Spruce Street. Once the officer arrived, he and Elliott sat down in the living room and went over what had been going on at the Ute all afternoon. Elliott had left the shop when the doors closed at six
P.M.,
bringing the files back to the house but suspending the e-mail routine until the morning, as we had no Internet connection at the house. Elliott took Eric into my room and showed him the files with my credit-card and bank statements. Eric made notes of the numbers while Elliott looked for my checkbook, which he found on my shelves. Voiding check number 1066, he tore it out and handed it to Eric. Eric told Elliott he would call the credit-card companies to track my purchases and then go to my bank when it opened in the morning to track my debit-card transactions.

Ready for bed after an emotionally and mentally exhausting day, Elliott wrote out a note that he affixed to my room door: “Aron, you’re missing. Everybody’s looking for you. Knock on my bedroom door or call my cell phone the minute you see this note.” Then he retired for the night.

My mom spoke again with my dad at nine
P.M.
to tell him about the search activities. This second conversation left my dad pacing in his hotel room, certain there was something keeping me from coming back. He knew I hadn’t simply taken off or gotten lost; the only things he could think had happened were that I’d fallen and broken my leg, or I was stuck under a rockslide on the side of a mountain. Praying to me, “Hang in there, Aron, stick with it,” he fought back other, more distressing thoughts. My dad knew, or wanted to believe, that I was alive, but that meant I was injured. It hurt him to know I was suffering; however, that was better than the alternative. There was no way he was going to find enough peace to sleep—grief kept him up and moving—so he busied himself preparing notes for the rest of the New York tour, in case he did need to leave and hand over the reins to someone else.