The truly burdensome weight comes from my full stock of rappelling gear: three locking carabiners, two regular carabiners, a lightweight combination belay and rappel device, two tied slings of half-inch webbing, a longer length of half-inch webbing with ten prestitched loops called a daisy chain, my climbing harness, a sixty-meter-long and ten-and-a-half-millimeter-thick dynamic climbing rope, twenty-five feet of one-inch tubular webbing, and my rarely used Leatherman-knockoff multi-tool (with two pocketknife blades and a pair of pliers) that I carry in case I need to cut the webbing to build anchors. I’ll be hungry by the time I get back to my truck, for certain, but I have enough for the day. Besides a gallon of water stored in an insulated three-liter CamelBak hydration pouch and a one-liter Lexan bottle, I have five chocolate bars, two burritos, and a chocolate muffin in a plastic grocery sack in my pack.
I wouldn’t normally carry twenty-five pounds of supplies and equipment on a bike ride, but I’m journeying out on a thirty-mile-long circuit of biking and canyoneering-traversing the bottom of a deep and narrow canyon system-and it will take me most of the day. The going would be much easier if I didn’t have this heavy pack on my back. Three times already I’ve had to walk through particularly long sand bogs. I try to avoid the drifts, but occasionally, they blanket the entire road, and my bike founders. Besides slowing my progress to a crawl-I’m in my lowest gear and pumping hard on a flat grade just to move forward-the wind has blown shallow drifts of maroon sand onto the washboarded road. to be named, explored, and mapped-and the La Sals to the east, a strong wind is blowing hard from the south, the direction I’m heading. With open tablelands to cover for a hundred miles between the snowcapped ranges of the Henrys to the southwest-the last range in the U.S. An hour ago, I left my truck at the dirt trailhead parking area for Horseshoe Canyon, the isolated geographic window of Canyonlands National Park that sits fifteen air miles northwest of the legendary Maze District, forty miles southeast of the great razorback uplift of the San Rafael Swell, twenty miles west of the Green River, and some forty miles south of I-70, that corridor of commerce and last chances (NEXT SERVICES: 110 MILES). It’s Saturday morning, April 26, 2003, and I am mountain biking by myself on a scraped dirt road in the far southeastern corner of Emery County, in central-eastern Utah. The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky-all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.įRAYING CONTRAILS STREAK another bluebird sky above the red desert plateau, and I wonder how many sunburnt days these badlands have seen since their creation. I don’t mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it-the canyonlands. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.įor myself I’ll take Moab, Utah. There’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, known or unknown, actual or visionary.
He continues to travel the world for both adventure and to share his story.
Today, as a father of an infant daughter and four-year-old son, Aron lives in Boulder, Colorado. His first book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, was a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into the major motion picture 127 Hours by Danny Boyle. Since his accident, he has completed his unprecedented project to climb the fifty-nine Colorado peaks of more than 14,000 feet, alone, in winter. All of these features combine to create a highly compressible expander that is lightweight, breathable, absorbs little moisture and, keeps its loft even when wet.Īron Ralston, a native of the Midwest, retired from a career as a mechanical engineer at age twenty-six before moving to Aspen, Colorado. The Expander features a full-length 70 YKK #8 coil separating zipper black 50 denier Ripstop Nylon double layers of Polarguard 3D insulation with offset stitching and built in draft tubes along the zipper. The Expander offers comfort for people who dislike the claustrophobic feeling of a mummy bag (it can be used on the top or underneath your mummy bag.) The Expander is available in either a 3-season or a summer weight. The Western Mountaineering Sleeping Bag Expander was created for campers who just want more room.