Aron Ralston Talks to the New York Times (Video)

Aron Ralston is a smart guy. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a former desk jockey at Intel, the Colorado-based climber is best known for a gruesome feat of engineering: severing his own arm below the elbow to free himself from a boulder in Utah's Bluejohn Canyon. But six years after becoming a media sensation, Ralston is still trying to come to grips with that day. And as smart as he is, he's having a hard time making sense of it all. The New York Times caught up with Ralston to discuss life after becoming one of the most famous survivors of all time. It's a fascinating read. And look for our own Ralston update in the April/May issue of NGA. 

Get Ready For Lost: Essential Survival Skills - Part 1

Lost will be on in just a few hours, and this season is proving to be more action- and adventure-packed than ever. To get ready, we thought we'd share a few survival skills so that if your aircraft goes down (as seems so common these days), you'll hopefully find yourself in a tropical island paradise using these handy skills from ADVENTURE. Or, if you're lucky enough not to have a plane crash in your future, at least the s'mores will wow your friends.

#1 Build a Signal Fire

“Understand that from the air you’ll be a tiny dot,” says John Dill, who has been a Yosemite Search and Rescue team technician for 30 years. “You’ve really got to call out.” And, as cellular service is spotty at best in the wilderness, a signal fire is the easiest method to improvise when you need help. Remember that during the day, the point isn’t the fire itself, but the column of smoke that billows from it. Choose a location where the plume can rise beyond the forest canopy, and feed the flame green matter, wet leaves, and rotten wood. Conversely, at night the flame’s the thing: Make it big and bright—extra dry leaves for fuel can’t hurt—and in a clearing so it’s highly visible and unquestionably distinct from campfires. Or build a few flames in a row (just not in a bed of pine needles, Pyro). If it’s too windy, flash your headlamp (especially at night) or, during the day, drape a brightly colored parka over a bush or rock rather than risk a wind-borne spark igniting your camp.

#2 Make New Friends

Befriending locals anywhere, from a Penan encampment in Borneo to a Vodou temple in Haiti, can be about as easy as cozying up to your significant other’s parents, with perhaps more potential for screwups and physical discomfort. “Look for that gesture that allows you to break down the inherent barrier between local people and an outsider,” says anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis, who has lived with indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon. “Often, that’s a simple willingness to share the physical reality of peoples’ lives, be that sleeping beside them on the stony ground, or sitting out a cold rainstorm.” And be prepared to roll the intestinal dice. “I’ve been offered food that was almost certain to give me amoebic dysentery or giardia,” says Davis. “And I always ate it. You can treat the parasite, but you can never overcome the distance created by a refusal of generosity.”

#3 Make a Better S’more

For all the care some take in toasting their marshmallow, let’s face it, the chocolate makes the s’more. And what if that chocolate came already attached to a cookie, so you wouldn’t have shards of crumbling starch stabbing you in the cheek as you try to tongue the ooey-gooey center? Then you’d have the perfect, or rather, parfait, s’more shortcut: Le Petit Écolier cookies.

Excerpted from "Ready For Almost Anything" by Melissa Wagenberg (February 2005)

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales When Times Were Really Tough

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

Lucy had a small brain, tiny bones, and wasn’t even four feet tall. But Lucy, the australopith, was a survivor.  

Many years ago, I read of a discovery that set my mind on fire. An American paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson had discovered the bones of a woman who lived almost 3.2 million years ago, making her our earliest known ancestor. The scientific community was equally excited by the find because it proved that people walked upright long before they evolved the large brains characteristic of modern humans. This was a big deal because the most famous researchers of human evolution, Louis and Mary Leakey, believed that we had developed our modern brains before we walked upright. But Lucy, as the new fossil was named, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the opposite was true.

I was certainly interested in our evolution for purely intellectual reasons, but to me a more intriguing question was how Lucy and her kind (Australopithecus afarensis) had survived. Lucy shared her terrain with hyenas, false sabertooths, and scimitar cats—just a few of the creatures that might have meant her harm. And predators weren’t the only hazard.

In May 1978, almost four years after Johanson discovered Lucy, some of Mary Leakey’s grad students made one of the most remarkable discoveries in history: a trail of footprints created by another group of australopiths at a place called Laetoli, in Tanzania, nearly 3.6 million years ago.

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Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales First-Time Skydiver Survives Instructor's Heart Attack

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

After deploying the parachute on the first skydive of his life, Danie Pharr, 25, realized that the instructor strapped to his back, George "Chip" Steele, 49, was strangely silent, MSNBC reports. Realizing that Steele was in no condition to get the two to the ground, Pharr took control of the parachute and piloted himself and his instructor to safety, drawing on skills he learned in the United States Army and a bit of know-how picked up from watching television. Once on solid ground, Barr was unable to revive the unconscious Steele, who died of an apparent heart attack.    

I think it's significant that Pharr had had military training—always a good thing to have in your back pocket. But I also think it's important to note the way he framed his situation. He said: "So at that point I realized I was just going to have to do what I had to do to get down to the ground and try to help him." He was trying to survive for someone else, not just to save himself. The best survivors always frame their predicament that way: How can I help someone else? That's true even if you're alone. The famous French aviator, Antoine St.- Exupery was stranded in the desert facing almost certain death, and he had the thought that he had to survive for the sake of his wife. He was worried that his death would be too much for her to take. Needless to say, the Frenchman made it home to her.

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Hudson River Plane Crash Remarkable in Aviation History

See more incredible photos at ABC News >>

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

I first began to write about airline crashes in the early seventies. Ever since then, I've tried to learn about and write about both the joys of aviation and the business of avoiding airplane crashes--or else surviving them when they happen.

As I write this, the crash of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 into New York City’s Hudson River happened just about three hours ago, and this is my first response to it. As a pilot and a journalist who writes about aviation, I know from long experience that it's much too early to be weaving detailed explanations of what happened. No one knows yet. It takes time to gather the facts, interview those involved, and examine the wreckage.

The system of airlines works so well that it sometimes seems miraculous to me that we can move so many people around the world, day and night, and have so few accidents. It's an extremely complex system, designed for safety as well as making money. And as a result, something as complex as the crash of an airliner takes a long time to unravel. Be patient. Don’t jump to conclusions.

But we think we know a couple of things at this early point in the investigation. It seems that a big airliner, an Airbus A-320, with 155 people on board, made a water landing in the Hudson River and everyone made it out alive. That is an astounding event. If you had asked me what probability I would assign to such an event (i.e., everybody lives), I might have said 50 percent if I had been feeling good. Landing any airplane in the water, other than a seaplane, is a very bad idea. There are 100 ways to screw up, and if you can think of 50 of them, you're a genius--and most of us pilots aren't geniuses.

For example, with a fragile structure like an airliner, the wings could have come off, and the plane could have burst into flames. You have to keep the nose very high while landing on water so that the tail and underbelly will slow the rest of the plane down, and then the body and nose come to rest gently (you hope) into the water. Water is not compressible, and hitting it at a high speed (the plane was probably going 150 miles an hour) is like hitting concrete. The pilots kept the plane intact. So we have to congratulate them on knocking that one out of the park. An oil and diesel fuel fire on the water during that evacuation would have given the news tonight a very different tone. Mayor Blumberg would not have been calling it "Miracle on The Hudson."

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737, took off from Washington National (now Reagan) Airport, skipped off the 14th Street Bridge, and crashed into the Potomac River less than a mile from the airport. The plane broke up and sank quickly. There were 79 people on board and only five of them survived. When the plane hit the bridge, it also killed four people in their cars. So we have to be thankful that the pilots from US Airways knew what they were doing.

We also have to acknowledge at this point that the passengers, presumably led by the flight crew, appear to have kept their heads. I have heard that there was at least one baby on board. That makes this achievement that much more remarkable. In crash landings, babies are easy to lose. I'm relieved to hear that this one made it out safely.

One passenger, named Jeff Kolodjay, told a BBC reporter, "I just kept saying relax relax, women and children first. And then it just started filling with water, quick." This suggests the kind of thinking--and emotion--that I talk about in my books and in my column: Perceive and believe. Don't engage in denial. And stay calm. Don't panic. If you're going to die, you're going to die. Suck it up. In a truly dire situation like this, you have to let go of thoughts of your own death and simply do what needs to be done: Act deliberately and in the right direction.

I reviewed the early photos and video that were coming in just after the crash. I always wondered about those yellow life vests. Luckily, they were actually under the seats on that plane. (They're not on every flight. I always feel under my seat before takeoff so that I know if I'm going to have to swim or not.) But most passengers appeared to be wearing them, which suggests a very good general level of calm and functionality among that group of survivors. Bravo to them.

As information becomes available, I'll be discussing this accident more in the coming days and weeks. It's one of the more remarkable accidents in aviation history, not because the plane crashed, but because no one died.

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales: How to Control Panic

When we hear the word “panic,” most of us imagine someone running around and screaming. But panic takes many forms. It can be thought of simply as any behavior that occurs when the level of stress or emotion is high enough to prevent conscious thought and deliberate decision-making.

For example, most people panic when they fall or when they’re knocked down. The panic may be brief and not very intense, such as when you slip on ice and scramble to get back up. But it can also be incredibly powerful. In the summer of 2000, a 35-year-old climber in Alberta grabbed a loose hold while soloing the southwest face of Mount Colin and fell more than 200 feet, hitting solid rock at the bottom. He died from extensive trauma, but even in his panicked state he was still trying to get back up.

In emergencies, such a powerful natural response can seem nearly impossible to suppress. On June 26, 1996, a 44-year-old man fell from a raft into the upper Hudson River near North Creek, New York. Despite being warned against doing so, he quickly tried to stand up. His foot was immediately caught between two rocks. Although the water was fairly shallow, the current pushed his upper body down and held him under. It stripped off his life vest, and he drowned. Foot entrapment is a common cause of death on rivers, because when boaters fall into the water, their momentary panic overrides the ability to think logically, and they forget what they’ve been told: Don’t stand up.

It may seem like panic is all about the mind, but panic is really about the body—or, more precisely, how you’re reacting to what the body is experiencing.

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Illustration by Harry Campbell

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Why We Crave Risk

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

Illustration by Paul Blow

There are certain foods and drinks that most people would consider empty calories, such as sodas and many kinds of snacks. When we eat or drink them, we feel nourished, when in reality we’re still lacking the ingredients needed to sustain a healthy organism. Many forms of information are like empty calories—a lot of the news we receive, for example. The mind works at taking in facts and comprehending events. It feels like we’re learning, but the ingredients of deep knowledge are missing.

I recently read a BBC news item with the headline: “Brain’s adventure centre located.”

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Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Mob Mentality: The Failures of Groupness

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

Illustration by David Plunkert

The power of groupness is not to be underestimated. It has been the downfall of organizations, blinding them to evidence that was there for everyone to see.

In the 1930s, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) was the most popular grocery chain in the United States, with nearly 16,000 stores. Its strategy was to focus on a single need: cheap groceries. After all, the Depression was on. A&P introduced self-service, no-frills,
cash-and-carry food with no credit, no deliveries, and no premiums.

By the end of World War II it was one of the biggest companies in the world. Then something strange happened: Leftover production capacity from the war created new industries. In that booming economy, people wanted more than cheap, plentiful groceries. They wanted more choices, more convenience, exotic foods, and new products almost weekly. They wanted bright lights, flashy decor, loud music, and even a pharmacy.

Ralph Burger, who ran A&P, dedicated himself to carrying on the company tradition, regardless of evidence that it was a doomed strategy.

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Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales Everyday Survival Nationwide Book Tour

Meet Laurence Gonzales and have him sign your copy of Everyday Survivial during his upcoming nine-city book tour.

Monday, September 22
7:00 p.m. Talk/Signing
Bookstall
811 Elm Street
Winnetka, Illinois

Wednesday, October 1
7:30 p.m. Talk/Signing
National Geographic
Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, October 7
7:30 p.m. Talk/Signing
Tattered Cover
1628 16th Street
Denver, Colorado

Wednesday, October 8
7:30 p.m. Talk/Signing
Boulder Bookstore
1107 Pearl Street
Boulder, Colorado

Friday, October 10
6:30 p.m. Talk/Signing
Third Place Books
17171 Bothell Way N.E.
Lake Forest Park, Washington

Saturday, October 11
2:00 p.m. Talk/Signing
Elliott Bay Book Company
101 South Main Street
Seattle, Washington

Monday, November 3
7:00 p.m. Talk/Signing
Half King
505 W. 23rd Street
New York, New York

Saturday, November 8
4:00 p.m. Talk/Signing
Collected Works Bookstore
208B West Sanfrancisco Street
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Sunday, November 9
3:00 p.m. Talk/Signing
Bookworks
Flying Star Plaza
4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico

Is K2 the New Everest?

Text by David Roberts

On August 1, 2008, in a single disastrous chain of events, 11 climbers were killed high on K2’s Abruzzi Ridge in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range. One of the worst accidents in mountaineering history, it made headlines around the world. Surprisingly, along with outpourings of sympathy for the victims, the tragedy generated a virulent backlash.

The vast majority of the public assumed that the climbers on K2 (a much harder and more dangerous peak than Everest) had duplicated the scenario indelibly captured in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air—affluent novices buying their way into a deadly ordeal. Web posts on the New York Times’s site commented, “Heroes my ass. No one should feel an inch of sympathy for these eggheads” and “They engaged in marginally suicidal behavior and wound up dead. To me, they were stupid and reckless beyond all limits.” Even the great Tirolean mountaineer Reinhold Messner railed against purported “K2 package deals” luring beginners to the mountain, and concluded that “something like this is just pure stupidity.”

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