He has continued to climb. He has continued to speak. He has continued to engage with the outdoor community, with conservation work, with the question of what the wild places of the American West mean and what obligations their users carry toward them. He has raised children who have, by his own account, changed his understanding of what risk is for and who bears its consequences.
The boulder that trapped his arm required thirteen men and mechanical equipment to move. The boulder that changed his life has not moved. It is still in Blue John Canyon, still wedged in that slot canyon in southeastern Utah, on Bureau of Land Management land 42 miles south of Green River. It sits in a canyon three feet wide in places, under a strip of sky that is narrow enough to count the stars through.
Somewhere on the canyon wall nearby, if the sandstone has not eroded it away in the decades since, there is carving: a name, a birthdate, a date that proved to be not a death date but a turning point. And two words: good luck now.
The person who carved them went on to need and use both the luck and the good.
## The Geography of Extremity: Understanding Blue John Canyon’s Terrain
To understand why the Blue John Canyon entrapment was simultaneously survivable and nearly fatal, it helps to understand the specific character of the terrain. The Colorado Plateau is not the desert of movie westerns — long horizons, sandy washes, open sky. It is a landscape of extraordinary vertical complexity, where plateaus and mesas have been carved by millions of years of erosion into a labyrinth of canyons, slots, arches, and fins that can make a traveler feel simultaneously on top of the world and buried within it.