Good luck now. That is what you say to the place, to the situation, to whatever version of yourself you are leaving behind. It is not dramatic. It does not claim victory. It acknowledges that the luck was real, that it had to do with the specific circumstances of his situation as much as with his response to them, and that the luck was ongoing — that the hike out and the rescue and the surgery and the recovery were all part of a sequence that was not yet finished when he wrote those words.
The canyon preserved the carvings, or has so far. Sandstone erodes, and the Colorado Plateau is a landscape of ongoing geological change. The carvings Ralston left in Blue John Canyon are not permanent — nothing carved in sandstone lasts forever in a landscape shaped by water and wind. But they have been there for more than twenty years now, in a canyon that few people visit, witnessed by the occasional canyoneer who finds and reads them.
Ralston has asked people not to seek them out. The request is consistent with his approach to the experience generally: not to make it a spectacle, not to reduce it to a tourist attraction, not to allow the fascination with extremity to override the dignity of what happened there.
## The Rescue System: Who Responded and How
The search and rescue operation that found Aron Ralston involved multiple agencies and demonstrated both the effectiveness and the limitations of wilderness search and rescue in the American Southwest.