The light changed above the canyon walls as the hours passed. The first night came. Temperature in the Colorado Plateau desert in late April can drop to approximately 30 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Ralston had the clothing he had worn for a day trip and the equipment he had brought for technical canyoneering. He was upright, his arm still pinned. The cold worked against him along with everything else.
## Days Two, Three, and Four: The Arithmetic of Survival
The mathematics of Ralston’s situation clarified as the hours accumulated. He had one liter of water, which he rationed carefully. He had two burritos and the remnants of a candy bar. He had the physical reserves of a trained mountaineer — but those reserves would deplete at a rate that the arithmetic of the situation made brutally clear.
He continued to work at the problem mechanically, chipping at rock, adjusting his ropes, testing combinations of leverage and position that might create some give in the geometry of his trap. None of them did. He also began, in the long stretches between these efforts, the kind of psychological work that extreme captivity forces on anyone who survives it: the work of understanding and managing what was happening to him mentally.
He spoke into the video camera he had brought. This was not a performance for an imagined audience; it was, as he later described it, a way of staying connected to the human world — to his family, to the people he loved — in a situation where that connection was otherwise entirely severed. He addressed the camera as if addressing the people who would eventually watch what he was recording. He kept a record of his situation. He gave himself something to do.