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- [00:01]
Sarah Marshall
It says a lot that you ask me what I would do and I'm like, I give up. Pass. Welcome to youo 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 Aron 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. 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 are 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. 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 up 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. Here is an episode for you. Welcome to your 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.
- [02:53]
Blair Braverman
Oh, Sarah, I think of you.
- [02:57]
Sarah Marshall
It's, you know, it's a team effort. I mean, something I want 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 and those boys. 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 Andy's rugby player episode.
- [03:38]
Blair Braverman
Oh, I think about the Andy's rugby players all the time.
- [03:42]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, I really do. I think a lot of us do.
- [03:44]
Blair Braverman
Because of you and talking about them with you. We all went on a journey.
- [03:48]
Sarah 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 9th grade, 9th or 10th grade, there was suddenly this big story about this guy named Aron 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, I don't know what that's a metaphor for, but I think I'm right.
- [04:39]
Blair Braverman
It's 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 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 the pattern is that I come on this podcast that I'm like, actually, you know, I end up really defending the person and saying, like, I think these people did 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.
- [05:39]
Sarah Marshall
That's exciting.
- [05:41]
Blair Braverman
Have you seen the film that's based on Aron Ralston's story?
- [05:44]
Sarah Marshall
I have.
- [05:45]
Blair Braverman
Do you recall?
- [05:46]
Sarah Marshall
I do. Because, 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 to you at the time, which you had notes on, understandably. 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 kind of a horror movie premise, but was lit in such a way that it felt like an IMAX movie, which is a really interesting combination of story and aesthetic, if that makes sense.
- [06:21]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [06:28]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, wow.
- [06:29]
Blair Braverman
It's a very dramatic movie. It uses noise and color to illustrate pain.
- [06:35]
Sarah Marshall
Right.
- [06:36]
Blair Braverman
And so I remember we both, like, left the theater, like, shell shocked. Like, it had such a visceral effect on us. And what I also remember about this particular date and this movie theater, which I just have been holding onto 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, ingenfo storetti namaj savne jam. Which means, nobody understands this except for me. I miss home. 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 understand. 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.
- [07:58]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [07:59]
Blair Braverman
Unless you're trapped under a rock in the wilderness. And then you really are.
- [08:04]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, and then you are.
- [08:06]
Blair Braverman
I'll start at the beginning so we know who this guy is. By the time he's stuck under a.
- [08:10]
Sarah Marshall
Boulder, they Say that in all the screenwriting books, do they.
- [08:14]
Blair Braverman
They do.
- [08:14]
Sarah Marshall
Well, you know, something like that.
- [08:16]
Blair Braverman
They're just intuitive. So Aron 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 fourteener in 1994 when he was 19. And a fourteener is a mountain.
- [08:39]
Sarah Marshall
Thank you so much for explaining. I'm like, don't make me ask.
- [08:44]
Blair Braverman
A fourteener is a mountain over 14,000ft.
- [08:47]
Sarah Marshall
Okay. And what is 14,000ft? What is a mile in feet are.
- [08:51]
Blair Braverman
96 14ers in the United States. Colorado has more than any other state. It has 53 and 14,000ft. Like, that's. It'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.
- [09:30]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [09:31]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [09:59]
Sarah Marshall
Some of those suckers are hard to keep afloat, even, you know, on a pond. So because a lot of young men, you know, 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.
- [10:19]
Blair Braverman
Yeah. I gotta say, mountaineering is one of those sports where it seems like everyone knows someone whose. Everyone who does it, like, knows has peers who have died doing it.
- [10:29]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [10:30]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [10:39]
Sarah 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 it does seem like that is a dynamic for some people some of the time at the very least.
- [10:52]
Blair Braverman
Absolutely right. Like the risk is part of the thrill.
- [10:56]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [10:56]
Blair Braverman
So Eren 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 he 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.
- [11:33]
Sarah Marshall
He'S experienced a TikTok scenario in real life.
- [11:37]
Blair Braverman
Yes, like that. 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 going to climb all of Colorado's 14ers solo in winter, which is something that's never been done before.
- [12:02]
Sarah Marshall
With good reason. Arguably with good reason.
- [12:05]
Blair Braverman
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 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 going to 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 I still think.
- [12:43]
Sarah Marshall
About your weird Aspen stories.
- [12:45]
Blair Braverman
I, you know, I. It's beautiful. 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 guiding in Aspen, Colorado for a summer, but I never did any mountaineering stuff. And so he's immediately going to this mountaineering. 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 to do in a really lovely way.
- [13:31]
Sarah 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.
- [13:41]
Blair Braverman
It is, it is. And 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?
- [14:00]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, I remember this. It's called A Rock and a Hard Place Between a Rock and a Hard Place Between a Rock and. That's so good. I mean, you gotta. You just gotta.
- [14:09]
Blair Braverman
Here's a sentence from it just to give you a sense of the tone. I went on a monthlong 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 8 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 going to go wrong. But like, if you're doing these things, if you're on a streak of having close calls on everything you do, to me, that's not. To me, that's a wake up call and not a bragging point.
- [14:59]
Sarah Marshall
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.
- [15:19]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [15:27]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [15:28]
Blair Braverman
Some of my quote unquote, best stories are from things that went wrong. But you want that to be the exception.
- [15:35]
Sarah Marshall
Right. You want most of your days to have no great stories in them.
- [15:39]
Blair Braverman
Maybe the great story is I saw a bear.
- [15:43]
Sarah Marshall
There you go.
- [15:43]
Blair Braverman
And we kept our distance from each other. So 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. 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 friend's concerned about him, and he's thinking about his new skis. And there's this bull, this sort of, like, picture, literally, sort of the shape of a bull on the mountain that the others don't think is safe to ski down because it seems like really, really prime avalanche terrain. And Eren 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. And there is a massive avalanche that all three of them get trapped in.
- [16:51]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God.
- [16:52]
Blair Braverman
Yeah. Yeah. Aaron gets trapped neck deep in the snow.
- [16:55]
Sarah Marshall
Jesus.
- [16:56]
Blair Braverman
And he's able to dig himself out.
- [16:59]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God. Yeah. So again, like, a very close call where he, like, sort of theatrically makes it, but shouldn't have.
- [17:07]
Blair Braverman
Well, he's neck deep. His friend Chadwick is up the slope. Survives. He's not buried. Mark's gone.
- [17:14]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, God.
- [17:15]
Blair Braverman
Mark is missing. They've been swept the length of two city blocks. It's a D5 avalanche. It's as destructive as an. 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, what do you do? How do you do it? And what 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, 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.
- [17:56]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [17:59]
Blair Braverman
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. The three of them do manage to get to safety. Mark and Chadwick never speak to Aaron again.
- [18:24]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. Yeah. God.
- [18:27]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [18:51]
Sarah Marshall
Mm.
- [18:53]
Blair Braverman
Babe, I had to put down the book. I was so upset. Yeah, I was so upset by that sentence. The choices we made.
- [19:02]
Sarah Marshall
Mm.
- [19:04]
Blair Braverman
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 ball avalanche, I found it easier to let go of the ego and attitude that otherwise pushed me to risk more than I was com. Comfortable with. I'm curious, when he says he lost friends because of the avalanche and the choices quote, unquote, gui made, 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.
- [20:17]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [20:18]
Blair Braverman
Like, did. Did he apologize? Who knows?
- [20:21]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And I wonder if. If he even knows.
- [20:24]
Blair Braverman
We don't see it. We hear every other detail, but we don't hear if he apologizes. 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.
- [20:35]
Sarah Marshall
It's like, well, yeah, you are. Yeah. 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, because it feels like, it's 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.
- [21:02]
Blair Braverman
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 ralston now is 20 years older. I'm guessing he wouldn't write the same book.
- [21:19]
Sarah Marshall
Now, 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 gonna learn something else.
- [21:30]
Blair Braverman
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 Moutrie, March 13, 2003. And it's about Aaron before the whole arm thing happens. So it's a glimpse of him. He's in the news, but it's before he's famous.
- [21:50]
Sarah Marshall
It's like when you see Rachael Ray on an old New Jersey morning show.
- [21:53]
Blair Braverman
It's just like that.
- [21:54]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [21:55]
Blair Braverman
It says, 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, I think.
- [22:29]
Sarah Marshall
This might be foreshadowing.
- [22:32]
Blair Braverman
The world is full of foreshadowing.
- [22:34]
Sarah Marshall
That's true.
- [22:34]
Blair Braverman
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, their rescue bait. This is how he's describing himself.
- [22:56]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [22:57]
Blair Braverman
Ralston always leaves behind detailed itineraries with friends or family, with explicit instructions should he become overdue.
- [23:05]
Sarah 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 Mark, the guy who.
- [23:23]
Blair Braverman
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, 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, inexperienced. So if we look at these heuristic traps, which I'll explain more in a second, 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.
- [24:14]
Sarah 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.
- [24:29]
Blair Braverman
Yeah, it's true. So are you familiar with heuristic traps?
- [24:33]
Sarah Marshall
No, I have no idea. I feel like heuristic is a word. I pretended to know what it means in academia, but I don't.
- [24:38]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [24:52]
Sarah Marshall
Okay.
- [24:52]
Blair Braverman
And they're often very helpful.
- [24:54]
Sarah Marshall
Huh.
- [24:55]
Blair Braverman
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 taken 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 Aron Ralston's ego, and not just in.
- [25:29]
Sarah Marshall
Nature, because, like, our stuff, we live with heavy objects.
- [25:32]
Blair Braverman
It's true. And this is for me, too, as a wilderness person, because I feel judgy about Eren. And I have to remind myself I can't think my 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 examples from a paper called Evidence of Heuristic Traps in Recreational Avalanche Accidents, written by Ian McCammon in 2002. Thank you, Ian.
- [25:58]
Sarah Marshall
Thank you, Ian.
- [25:59]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [26:34]
Sarah Marshall
It would also, if you find this unrelatable, you can compare this to going on a trip to ikea. Right.
- [26:44]
Blair Braverman
Say more.
- [26:45]
Sarah Marshall
The bookcases were here before. They must be in this area. And then you end up lost, disoriented, and increasingly confused.
- [26:52]
Blair Braverman
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. Yeah, 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.
- [27:08]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. This all relates to the satanic panic as well. Oh, yeah. Okay. So the ikea, a great example is when you see 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.
- [27:28]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [28:05]
Sarah Marshall
They're discontinuing the blue IKEA bags. Suddenly everyone is running out with armfuls of them.
- [28:14]
Blair Braverman
Does that fit? Yeah, I think so. I think so. There's a lot of ways we use these.
- [28:19]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [28:19]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [28:33]
Sarah Marshall
Ooh. Okay.
- [28:34]
Blair Braverman
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 3 in the morning and he decides to take a shortcut up a goalie. And we talked in the Andes episode about climbing gullies and how they can be like funnels for things that are falling on you. A huge ice block falls past his head and he writes in his book, terror chilled my blood. But I climbed on hoping that the 20 pound ice cube didn't have any friends.
- [29:12]
Sarah Marshall
They always do though.
- [29:14]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [29:31]
Sarah Marshall
Wow. That is definitely that first heuristic or one of the heuristic that says I decided to climb this thing today.
- [29:40]
Blair Braverman
It really is. I decided to go to ikea. Now I must get the meatballs. 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 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 put pushed me to take more risk than I was comfortable with.
- [30:05]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. And it's like, I guess your ghostwriter just said you should say that.
- [30:09]
Blair Braverman
I don't know. At this point in the book I'm reading this and I'm like, why are you telling me the reader this? Like, yeah, 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 thinking telling me this now.
- [30:31]
Sarah 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.
- [30:54]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [31:14]
Sarah 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, which is, you know, makes sense 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, so.
- [31:58]
Blair Braverman
But anyway, he. 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 would. I. I resent 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.
- [32:28]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. That is unexpected. Love it. Okay, tell me, please. I'm excited.
- [32:32]
Blair Braverman
I was vegan at the time too, but I took a hunter safety, a.
- [32:36]
Sarah Marshall
Gun safety course, because, you know, you're a Renaissance woman.
- [32:40]
Blair Braverman
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. And the stages are the shooting stage, where you're a new hunter and you just want to be shooting your gun. You Just want to be shooting. You don't care what you're shooting at. You just want to shoot your gun.
- [33:00]
Sarah Marshall
Yes. Yeah.
- [33:01]
Blair Braverman
The limiting out stage, which is when you want to shoot as much as you can, as many animals as you can.
- [33:07]
Sarah Marshall
Kids playing Oregon Trail might go through some version of this, possibly went through.
- [33:11]
Blair Braverman
All of this with Oregon Trail. The trophy stage, which is where you want, like a trophy animal, like a big, beautiful specimen. The method stage. 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 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 out 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.
- [34:04]
Sarah Marshall
Well, what comes to mind for you, though?
- [34:07]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [34:33]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. Well. And, you know, it definitely occurs to me to compare that to the development of a writer as well.
- [34:39]
Blair Braverman
Oh, yeah.
- [34:40]
Sarah 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 he progressed to having certain goals. And to me, that's sort of being a young person or a young adult and wanting to publish and get in this or that publication or to have a book out. And I do think that if you were able to keep progressing, then you do ideally come out the other side feeling in the end, the goal is to have a nice day writing. I think the trophy stage maybe is about accomplishing enough things that it means something, that you accomplished them. It is significant to you. Once you've bagged whatever trophies apply in your field, then I think 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 challenge is a big part of the excitement, it would seem.
- [35:43]
Blair Braverman
Yeah, absolutely. And actually, now I'm looking at this list, and I feel like Eren 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. 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 Christy, and they start chatting. He explains Edward Abbey to them and then tells us that he explained Edward Abbey to them.
- [36:29]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, you know, that is. That's a sporting event for guys of that age.
- [36:33]
Blair Braverman
It's a sporting event. It's one of the stages. And then they part ways. He continues on. He's feeling good. He's listening to Fish. 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. 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.
- [37:09]
Sarah 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?
- [37:18]
Blair Braverman
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. 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 gonna be a moment I can lift this, it's gonna be right now. He shifts it like, a tiny, tiny bit, and it settles even more onto his arm.
- [37:45]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God. Is he feeling any pain at this point, or is it just shock?
- [37:50]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [37:59]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God.
- [38:00]
Blair Braverman
The stone is about 4ft 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. 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 gonna live till Tuesday and probably the search crew will find him like five days later.
- [38:56]
Sarah Marshall
His body, 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.
- [39:10]
Blair Braverman
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?
- [39:35]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God, I have no idea. Dissociate, you know, I mean it. Because, like, the rock is not going to move, right? Like, a bus tire is really big. I assume it weighs, like, tons.
- [39:49]
Blair Braverman
They found out later. They estimated later it weighs 800 pounds.
- [39:52]
Sarah 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 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.
- [40:19]
Blair Braverman
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, but he comes up with four plans, and amputating his arm is only one of them, so. And it's the last resort. So the ideas he comes up with, a sort of immediate aftermath are, one, he has batteries. Can he use the battery acid to erode the stone?
- [40:38]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God.
- [40:40]
Blair Braverman
To get his arm out.
- [40:41]
Sarah Marshall
Nice one.
- [40:42]
Blair Braverman
Can he chip away at the rock?
- [40:44]
Sarah Marshall
Huh.
- [40:44]
Blair Braverman
With the multi tool.
- [40:45]
Sarah Marshall
Right. Could it be soft? Ish.
- [40:47]
Blair Braverman
Can he use the ropes to make a pulley system to lift the Rock enough that he can get his arm off.
- [40:53]
Sarah Marshall
It says a lot that you ask me what I would do and I'm like, I give up. Pass.
- [40:58]
Blair Braverman
That's why when we go into the wilderness, I'll go with you, Sarah.
- [41:01]
Sarah Marshall
Yes, exactly. That's why I will not go to the canyon by myself. Okay, so the pulley.
- [41:08]
Blair Braverman
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 tests it. I think this is actually incredibly beautiful. He tests it 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.
- [41:37]
Sarah Marshall
I love it.
- [41:38]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [41:59]
Sarah Marshall
Right. And he's working with his. And is he left handed or right handed? He's right handed and his right hand is under the boulder.
- [42:08]
Blair Braverman
At 6pm, 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. 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.
- [42:55]
Sarah Marshall
I feel like this is a moment when it really comes in handy to be an engineer.
- [43:00]
Blair Braverman
Oh, absolutely.
- [43:01]
Sarah Marshall
Both 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.
- [43:11]
Blair Braverman
Day two.
- [43:11]
Sarah Marshall
Does he sleep? Can he sleep?
- [43:13]
Blair Braverman
Not really. Yeah, he hears voices.
- [43:18]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God.
- [43:18]
Blair Braverman
And he starts yelling, absolutely yelling, hoping that these people will hear him. And it turns out to be a rat scratching around.
- [43:26]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, gosh.
- [43:28]
Blair Braverman
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 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?
- [43:56]
Sarah Marshall
I think so. It's like a camelbath.
- [43:58]
Blair Braverman
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [43:59]
Sarah 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. Or trail running. I feel like I see people do that because it sort of packs up nicer, I guess. Flatter.
- [44:11]
Blair Braverman
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 coax 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 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 gives up.
- [44:37]
Sarah Marshall
Forgive me for the ridiculousness of this metaphor, but also, I know that we're getting into a freaky part. And 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, I might be opening myself up to a world of trouble. Because 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?
- [45:03]
Blair Braverman
You have to commit to eating the whole watermelon.
- [45:05]
Sarah Marshall
You do. Once you open it, you can't go back, is my point. And just that in this example, and in the case of anybody who has to do kind of field medicine on themselves in some capacity, or working on a patient in many cases, I presume 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 that I imagine the potential for, like, bleeding out really, really quickly would be at. At hand.
- [45:37]
Blair Braverman
I also imagine that. I mean, and he's an engineer, not a doctor, so he doesn't.
- [45:42]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [45:43]
Blair Braverman
He does not have surgical experience.
- [45:45]
Sarah Marshall
No.
- [45:46]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [46:11]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [46:12]
Blair Braverman
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 release them talking to the camera as he's basically waiting to die. So he introduces himself. He gives his parents names. He asks 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. To die in the wilderness? You could take a video for your loved ones. What would you be doing with it?
- [46:52]
Sarah 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 I. Or I would be using the time that I had to speak to everybody I loved for the last time.
- [47:05]
Blair Braverman
Yeah.
- [47:05]
Sarah Marshall
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 those exact words. I would have more time to think about it, but really just that you're given this sort of gift of a conduit between the present and the future and are given away to. Because I do think that 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.
- [47:52]
Blair Braverman
Yeah. Would you leave a message for listeners of this podcast?
- [47:58]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, sure, sure. 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. 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 Sarah's last podcast.
- [48:22]
Blair Braverman
That's because you're in the sportsman stage of podcasting.
- [48:25]
Sarah Marshall
Aw, I hope so. Okay, so, yes, he has the video camera, which. And I knew that there was a video camera element to this, mainly because 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 prime time.
- [48:46]
Blair Braverman
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? 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 mean, I hate to say it, but it must be a situation that is not. Certainly not unheard of.
- [49:51]
Sarah Marshall
Well, and do you think that maybe that is also part of, in a way, the sort of subconscious appeal of his story specifically breaking 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, and most of.
- [50:18]
Blair Braverman
It is probably because they're being bombed and not because they went on, like, a cool hike.
- [50:24]
Sarah Marshall
Yes, right. Yeah. That 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 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 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 this sort of. As part of our culture, this expectation of safety as a white middle class American. So we as a group and as the people who make media and make the news, typically like to gather around and tell our scary sort of campfire stories about the person who shouldn't have expected great suffering and yet it happened anyway.
- [51:19]
Blair Braverman
Right. Like, how would this story be different if someone else caused his arm to be stuck? Would this guy still be idolized in the same way as a hero of the situation?
- [51:30]
Sarah Marshall
Or what if this had happened to him in his own house, you know, because I know that that can happen. Right.
- [51:36]
Blair Braverman
Or an earthquake.
- [51:37]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. I don't know.
- [51:38]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [51:44]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. 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 you've talked about on the show in the past, too, there might be.
- [52:23]
Blair Braverman
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. Right.
- [52:38]
Sarah Marshall
And that it's just one boulder as opposed to, you know, something much bigger or something systemic.
- [52:45]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [53:08]
Sarah Marshall
Is that good or bad?
- [53:09]
Blair Braverman
I don't know.
- [53:11]
Sarah 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.
- [53:23]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [53:44]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [53:45]
Blair Braverman
And at night, it's getting cold. The air drops, like, 40 degrees. It goes from 100 to 60. He can feel that his heart rate is irregular. Things. He's really falling apart by now. We're on day three.
- [53:57]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. Oh, my God.
- [53:58]
Blair Braverman
At 8:00am 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 wound.
- [54:35]
Sarah Marshall
At least it's not raining.
- [54:36]
Blair Braverman
At least it's not raining because then there would be a flash flood.
- [54:40]
Sarah 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 gaslight yourself. Yeah. Well, 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.
- [55:17]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [55:32]
Sarah Marshall
Oh yeah.
- [55:34]
Blair Braverman
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, of friends leading him places. And the visions feel real, like 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 logicing his way through these situations, through these doorways, through seeing people who aren't really. 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. 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. 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 3 in the morning. I'd be like, if only I had a screen to distract me from the lions.
- [57:33]
Sarah Marshall
If only I could scroll just a little.
- [57:36]
Blair Braverman
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 keep going, keep trying to hold on in this body that is decomposing with him in it.
- [57:59]
Sarah Marshall
You know, 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 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?
- [58:28]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [58:47]
Sarah Marshall
I love that, too.
- [58:48]
Blair Braverman
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. Like, the ma. The mom is on it.
- [59:08]
Sarah Marshall
Luckily, his password is 1-2-34-56.
- [59:11]
Blair Braverman
She. 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. Fast.
- [59:18]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. What's her name?
- [59:19]
Blair Braverman
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 likely 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.
- [59:59]
Sarah Marshall
Is that good or bad for what we. I guess good.
- [60:03]
Blair Braverman
It's dangerous.
- [60:04]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [60:04]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [60:28]
Sarah Marshall
Well, that's great because, yeah, the tiny little multi tool blade is one of, I think, the aspects of the story that works on the mind the most.
- [60:39]
Blair Braverman
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, to bend his arm until it breaks.
- [61:08]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God.
- [61:09]
Blair Braverman
And so he drops his weight. He just stops 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.
- [61:25]
Sarah Marshall
And on the first try, which is really ideal. And like, what is the pain like at this point?
- [61:31]
Blair Braverman
At this point he's in extraordinary pain 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.
- [61:56]
Sarah Marshall
And does he do a tourniquet or does he just like go in there?
- [61:58]
Blair Braverman
He does do a tourniquet. It. He did, he did with the, with the tubing.
- [62:02]
Sarah Marshall
Great.
- [62:03]
Blair Braverman
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. He's only thinking about the fact that he's eight miles from the trailhead. He's so depleted, he's going to have to climb out of the canyon. He's going to 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 repel at the bottom of the wall, he gets to a puddle, and it is the best water he's ever tasted. He chugs three Nalgens 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. 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 found the person who's lost here. And so they run to him.
- [63:20]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah, they have Oreos.
- [63:22]
Blair Braverman
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. 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.
- [64:36]
Sarah Marshall
Totally.
- [64:37]
Blair Braverman
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, which I strongly dispute. I think it represents science.
- [64:54]
Sarah Marshall
There you go. Yeah, I like that one.
- [64:55]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [65:11]
Sarah Marshall
My God. The math on that is tough to figure out. That's amazing.
- [65:15]
Blair Braverman
They're close to each other.
- [65:17]
Sarah Marshall
Oh, my God. But wow.
- [65:19]
Blair Braverman
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. Right. That's my response, too. I'm happy he's happy. 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, man.
- [65:47]
Sarah Marshall
What do they do with his arm?
- [65:49]
Blair Braverman
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, although I.
- [66:01]
Sarah Marshall
Don'T know if Parks let you do that.
- [66:03]
Blair Braverman
I feel like. Like, for cleanliness.
- [66:05]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah. You know, just to. Yeah. The whole biohazard issue, but. Or, you know, so you don't freak out any other tigers. 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. What kids in the 50s grew up with. And I think that is such a great genre because 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 Westerns 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 having adventures and going outside. It's just that, you know, maybe when you're young, you take too many risks with it.
- [67:18]
Blair Braverman
I think it's interesting how different he feels to me at the end of the story.
- [67:22]
Sarah Marshall
Do you feel like you're watching him describe his own growth?
- [67:25]
Blair Braverman
Absolutely. I mean, it's hard to imagine how someone could go through this and not. Not be transformed by it.
- [67:32]
Sarah Marshall
Yeah.
- [67:32]
Blair Braverman
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 14 or in the US in winter.
- [67:48]
Sarah Marshall
Wow.
- [67:49]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [68:07]
Sarah Marshall
Well, yeah. Or 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.
- [68:17]
Blair Braverman
Absolutely. Although I. I mean, talk about agency in cutting off. Cutting off your own.
- [68:23]
Sarah Marshall
Well, yeah, that's true. It's really about both in this case. Yeah. The rock falls on you, but then you decide what to do about it.
- [68:31]
Blair Braverman
Yeah.
- [68:31]
Sarah Marshall
And I do think that it still has that draw of. 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. 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.
- [68:53]
Blair Braverman
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 and then still didn't make it.
- [69:06]
Sarah 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 that 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.
- [69:21]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [69:28]
Sarah 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.
- [69:35]
Blair Braverman
Yeah.
- [69:35]
Sarah Marshall
The people who survive are the people who are able to keep a clear head 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 makes sense as something that we less want to put on the news on Sunday night. But that. That is. Yeah. Part of an important part of these stories that we Tell and what we learn from them.
- [70:02]
Blair Braverman
I think there's also an interesting comparison to be made between Aron ralston and Chris McCandless, 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.
- [70:20]
Sarah Marshall
People in Arizona don't talk about how much they hate Aaron Ralston all the time. Presumably, I.
- [70:25]
Blair Braverman
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. Yeah, Aaron Ralston is aspirational. Chris McCandless is so often dismissed. And the differences between them are largely things that were out of their control.
- [71:17]
Sarah Marshall
And, yeah, we love winners who manage to not die.
- [71:23]
Blair Braverman
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.
- [71:30]
Sarah Marshall
I know we're kind of. I mean, we as a country are in an early phase of whatever the five phases of being a country are. We still look at places who have existed for longer and are taken over by another country or experience some kind of massive devastation and are like, couldn't be me. You know, the sense of being. Of needing to believe that you can stay lucky forever is very strong with us. I think it really.
- [71:58]
Blair Braverman
I mean, I'm inclined to say we're at the shooting stage for obvious reasons.
- [72:02]
Sarah 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 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, and that's a scary thing to accept, but it does make us appreciate what we have more.
- [72:51]
Blair Braverman
I think we do everything we can to tell ourselves that our lives aren't based on luck.
- [72:56]
Sarah Marshall
But Billy Zane in Titanic says a real man makes his own luck. So, you know.
- [73:02]
Blair Braverman
What happens to him again?
- [73:04]
Sarah Marshall
Well, you know, I mean, he, he survives the Titanic, but then we learned that the stock market crash left him penniless and destroyed his life. So, you know, thought provoking. I feel like this story, it still puts us in. 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, 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 after of it.
- [73:47]
Blair Braverman
That's so good, sir. You're so good at this.
- [74:05]
Sarah 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.