I kept doing things that were even more challenging and dangerous along the five, six years afterward. But I still am presently working on skiing the fourteeners, which is a very ambitious thing. They only get harder from this point. I think some of the lessons I also took from it were that yes, I made choices to go out by myself and not tell anyone, and OK, you can usually do one of those two things.
You wanted to find out—this is your chance. And b that the power of making choices gives you the power of being accountable to your choices, which gives you the power to make new choices, to create a different future for yourself. What was your recovery like? I still have most of my right arm, but it ends where your wristwatch would be. But we all know that feeling of you wish you had another hand to do something, and that happens more often for me probably than the average.
Or using adaptive devices like my prosthetics that allow me to hold onto the oar handle of a raft and row through the Grand Canyon. Or shuffling cards. I imagine it was probably easier adapting to that having been able to get through the experience with the boulder. I can handle this. Why do I have to endure this hardship, too? Have you felt called to be an advocate in the disability space? I mostly work in environmental conservation programs in Utah and Colorado.
The operation took about an hour. Once free, he rappelled down a foot cliff and walked five miles before finding help. News of his feat caught the attention of Ralston's former classmates, who, in true Carnegie Mellon fashion, took to the Internet to share updates. Ralston's poise and bravery under dire circumstances didn't shock those who were close to him in school.
If anyone could do what he did and handle it as gracefully, it would be Ralston," said friend Chris Adukaitis E'97 of Springfield, Va. Less than 48 hours after Ralston was transferred to a Colorado hospital, his Aspen, Colo. Ralston was already an avid outdoorsman when he came to Pittsburgh in A double major in mechanical engineering and French, he was an articulate scholar and a member of the national engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi.
Friends remember him as being constantly in motion: dancing, running, ducking into practice rooms in Porter Hall to play piano, conducting cafeteria food raids to appease his hunger and dreaming up mischief. Ralston continued to follow his favorite bands after graduation.
He looks at me and says 'Elias! I couldn't find your number and I need a place to stay tonight. Photos he had taken himself circulated on the Associated Press wire after his story broke. Ralston was deemed a hero, a warrior, even in one college newspaper headline a "badass. Rex Tanner is a ten-year search and rescue SAR veteran and commander of Grand County Search and Rescue, a volunteer organization that is responsible for 3, square miles 9, square kilometers near Bluejohn Canyon.
His group participated in 80 rescues last year and was on call to aid in Ralston's rescue. Tanner, like many in the SAR community, has high praise for Ralston and his steely resolve, but questions some of the decisions that placed him in such a life-threatening situation in the first place.
Here Tanner speaks on what Ralston did right, what he did wrong, and what the media left out of the story. He was in an area called the Maze. It's remote, probably up there in the top ten in terms of areas outside of population centers and difficulty to get to. To even go in and be able to explore areas in the Maze, you usually have to carry extra gasoline. I've hiked the Horseshoe Canyon area where he was picked up, and it doesn't get a lot of activity.
Thirty to almost 40 percent of our incidents deal with mountain biking situations. For the most part, they're medical and injury circumstances and need assistance out of the backcountry.
But it's not unusual to have people do exactly what Ralston did: Get themselves in a situation where they haven't told anybody where they're going, climb down into an area that's questionable, and not be able to get out.
Well, I think that he fared a lot better than most people would have. To realize that you're going to have to make a large sacrifice to survive, and acting on it—I have to hand it to him. I mean, there are a lot of people that would not have been as strong-minded to be able to pull that off. I think the number one thing is that he kept his head.
Ralston is experienced in the backcountry, and that experience builds confidence. In an emergency situation, confidence builds a stable mental frame of mind. And that's really important. There's probably a lot of people walking around thinking they can deal with those types of situations, but I've seen people end their lives out there because they completely lost their mental stability.
He could have left a note. He could have had a buddy. To me, one of the biggest problems out there is people don't tell someone that they're going to a particular location. It's really not that difficult to do, and to me, it doesn't take away from the wilderness experience.
What bothered me was the way the media made him out to be quite a hero. But they never talked about how the guy got himself into trouble because he really made some poor decisions.
What's kind of irritating is that rescuers have to go out and deal with those types of situations—a lot—and most of the time they're preventable. When one person, in this case Aron Ralston, gets himself into trouble, a bunch of SAR volunteers' lives may be placed in jeopardy in order to help him.
Even when you have trained experts that are conducting rescue activities, the environment that you're working in—whether it be the top of Mount Everest or the North Pole or out here in the middle of the desert, out in the middle of canyon country—is a dangerous environment. No training or equipment can completely remove the danger from the wilderness. If a SAR volunteer is conducting a nighttime rescue, walking along canyon rims with no moon, he can step through a slot just as easily as anyone else.
That's something that the public doesn't seem to give much thought to. Because one guy Aron Ralston got himself into a particular situation, 15 or 16 SAR volunteers will be placed in a similar, potentially deadly, scenario.
You need enough information about what you're getting ready to do, so you're prepared, so you really have an understanding. Having enough water is number one.
0コメント