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Outside Magazine October 2001

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It Doesn't Hurt, at First

FALLING

THERE IS NO TIME TO FEEL FEAR, really. Within a few hundredths of a second of buttering off the hold, your "startle reflex" kicks in. Your arms fly outward as if to grab something, but there is nothing to grab. You've been free-soloing—climbing without a rope or a partner to catch your fall. What were you thinking? You might ask yourself that, but it's too late. Gravity accelerates your body. You plummet 30 feet—the equivalent of a three-story building—in 1.4 seconds, the time it takes to say, "How are you this morning?"

CRACK! Your right leg strikes a projection from the wall and you tumble another 20 feet before landing on a granite ledge. The valley is still a hundred feet below.

YOU TRY TO BREATHE, but the force of the fall has compressed your diaphragm, pushing the air out of your lungs. You manage a short spasmodic gasp, then another. A wave of nausea wells up from your gut and you vomit your breakfast in a long arc over the ledge. Your body instinctively knows that it must rally its defenses after such a severe blow. Digesting food would sap too much energy.

YOU NOTICE SOMETHING—a stick, it looks like—protruding from the stretchy nylon of your climbing pants. You look more closely. It's your right femur, shattered in an open fracture, blood oozing from the torn flesh of your thigh. Oddly, it doesn't hurt—not much, or rather, not yet. Your body blocks the pain by plugging the nerve endings with endorphins. Meanwhile, you are also experiencing what emergency-room doctors call "the golden hour," the immediate aftermath of a trauma, when the human body can more or less hold itself together and maintain blood pressure despite bleeding. You feel a dull ache in your trunk. When you hit the ledge, you not only broke the ninth through twelfth ribs on your left side, but you split open your spleen, the fist-size organ to the left of the abdomen that filters blood. Your blood supply is now slowly leaking into your abdominal cavity.

YOU PUNCH 911 into your cell phone, but the signal is blocked by the canyon wall. When a hunter spots your body several years later, the bones of your fingers will still be wrapped around the phone's weathered plastic casing.

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