By nature I’m an impatient person; when a situation requires me to wait, I need to be doing something to make the time pass. Call me a child of the instant-­gratification generation, or maybe my imagination was stunted from too much television, but I ­don’t sit still well. In my present situation, ­that’s probably a good thing. I have a problem to solve—I have to get out of here—so I put my mind to what I can do to escape my entrapment. Eliminating a couple ideas that are too dumb (like cracking open my extra AA batteries on the boulder and hoping the acid erodes the chockstone but ­doesn’t eat into my arm), I organize my other options in order of preference: Excavate the rock around my hand with my multi-­tool; rig ropes and an anchor above me to lift the boulder off my hand; or amputate my arm. Quickly, each option seems impossible: I ­don’t have the tools to remove enough rock to free my hand; I ­don’t have the hauling power needed, even with a pulley system, to move the boulder; and even though it seems my best option, I ­don’t have the tools, know-­how, or emotional gumption to sever my own arm.

Perhaps more as a tactic to delay thinking about self-­amputation and less as a truly productive effort, I decide to work on an easier option—chipping away the rock to free my arm. Drawing my multi-­tool from its perch above the boulder, I extract the longer of the two blades. I’m

Picking an easily accessed spot on the boulder in front of my chest and a few inches from my right wrist, I scratch the tip across the boulder in a four-­inch line. If I can remove the stone below this line and back toward my fingers about six inches, I will be able to free my hand. But with the demarcated part of the stone being three inches thick in places, I’ll have to remove about seventy cubic inches of the boulder. ­It’s a lot of rock, and I know the sandstone is going to make the chipping tedious work.

My first attempt to saw down into the boulder along the faint line I’ve marked barely scuffs the rock. I try again, pressing harder this time, but the backside of the knife handle indents my forefinger more readily than the cutting edge scores the rock. Changing my grip on the tool, I hold it like Norman Bates and stab at the rock in the same spot. There is no noticeable effect. I try to identify a fracture line, a weakness in the boulder, something I can exploit, but there is nothing. Even if I focus on a small crystalline protuberance in the rock above my wrist where I might be able to break out a chunk, it will be many hours of work before I can remove even that tiny mineralized section.

I hit the rock with the butt of my hand, still holding the knife, and ask out loud in an exasperated whine, “Why is this sandstone so hard?” It seems like every time I’ve ever gone climbing on a sandstone formation, I break off a handhold, yet I ­can’t put a dent in this boulder. I settle on a quick experiment to test the relative hardness of the wall. Holding my knife like a pen, I easily etch a capital “G” on the tableau of the ­canyon’s north side, about a foot above my right arm. Slowly, I make a few more printed letters in lowercase, “e-­o-­l-­o-­g-­i-­c,” and then pause to measure the space with my eyes and lay out the _rest of the letters in my mind. Within five minutes, I scratch out _three more words, then touch them up, until I can read the phrase “Geologic Time Includes Now.”

I have quoted mountaineer and Colorado Thirteeners guidebook author Gerry Roach, from his “Classic Commandments of Mountaineering.” ­It’s an elegant way of saying “Watch out for falling rocks.” As most people who live on fault lines are well aware, the processes shaping and forming the ­earth’s crust are current events. Fault lines slip, long-­dormant volcanoes explode, mountainsides turn to mud and slide.

I remember trekking with my friend Mark Van Eeckhout through a field of boulders and coming upon a house-­sized rock. We said to each other, “Wow, look at the size of this one!” ­We’d imagined what a spectacle it would be to see something that size separate from a cliff a thousand feet above and fall, spawning rock slides right and left, crashing with apocalyptic force.

But cliffs ­don’t just form in the middle of the night when no ­one’s watching. I’ve seen riverbanks collapse, glaciers calve and let loose tremendous icefalls, and boulders plummet from their lofty perches. Gerry ­Roach’s commandment reminds climbers that rocks fall all the time. Sometimes they spontaneously break away; sometimes they get knocked loose. Sometimes they fall when ­you’re so far off you ­can’t even see them, you only hear a clatter; sometimes they fall when you or your partners are climbing below them. Sometimes one will pull loose even though you barely touched it; and sometimes one will fall after ­you’ve already stood on top of it_._._._when ­you’re using it for a handhold and it shifts_._._._when your head is right in the way and you put your hands up to save yourself_._._.

It’s rare. But it happens. Has happened.

This chockstone pinning my wrist was stuck for a long time before I came along. And then it not only fell on me, it trapped my arm. I’m baffled. It was like the boulder had been put there, set like a ­hunter’s trap, waiting for me. This was supposed to be an easy trip, few risks, well within my abilities. I’m not out trying to climb a high peak in the middle of winter, I’m just taking a vacation. Why ­didn’t the last person who came along dislodge the chockstone? They ­would’ve had to make the same maneuvers I did to traverse the canyon. What kind of luck do I have that this boulder, wedged here for untold ages, freed itself at the split second that my hands were in the way? Despite obvious evidence to the contrary, it seems astronomically infeasible that this happened.

I mean, what are the odds?

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