More Than Able

In 2002, a 100-foot ground fall almost killed Craig DeMartino, who eventually lost part of one leg to those injuries. Now he is back, climbing 5.12 and doing the Nose in a day. For DeMartino, the question wasn’t how to survive after his horrific accident. It was how to thrive.

"Do you want me to call your wife?"

"No, I don't want my wife to know."

Craig DeMartino’s heartbeat bounded and then stumbled beneath ranger and climber Erik Gabriel’s fingers. DeMartino was losing blood. Broken ribs had ripped a hole in his right lung. With each breath, a deep gurgle choked from his torso. His neck was broken. The lower spinal column was worse; the fall’s impact had traveled up through his legs and pulverized the lower vertebrae. The feeling in his legs was gone. The shock wave had ripped the climbing shoes from his feet and peeled back the skin of his soles. Flecks of granite clung to open flesh. The pain was unmitigated; DeMartino’s heartbeat was too faint to risk morphine.

"Craig, I think we should call your wife. I think you should talk to her."

"Don't call my wife. That's a bad idea."

Rocky Mountain National Park staff and a wildfi re crew worked the litter downhill from Lumpy Ridge’s Sundance Buttress. DeMartino’s longtime climbing partner, Steve Gorm, shadowed and helped when he could. They clawed over talus toward a flat spot where they could put a chopper down. But 100 feet is simply too far to fall, the rescuers believed. Gabriel pressed the cell phone to DeMartino’s ear as the litter lurched.

I’ll be there, Cyndy DeMartino said. Hold on.

At dusk, a medevac chopper landed in a meadow. As they loaded DeMartino into the helicopter, his foot grazed the fuselage, sending a wave of pain up through his body. It was the first feeling he’d had from below his waist. The technician slipped a syringe into the IV drip, and DeMartino slid into darkness.

On July 21, 2002, after a miscommunication with his climbing partner, DeMartino fell half a rope length from the anchors of Whiteman (5.11c) on Sundance. Later that night, a doctor would emerge from an operating room and tell Cyndy DeMartino that it was likely Craig wouldn’t last through the night. She needed to sign resuscitation papers.

Eighteen months later, on December 2, 2003, after dozens of surgeries, months in a hospital bed, and a year in a wheelchair waiting fruitlessly for the fragments of bone in his right leg to knit together, DeMartino took a sharpie, pressed the felt tip to his skin, drew a large X across the useless limb, and then signed his name to execute the most difficult decision of his life: amputate. That December day, DeMartino lost his leg and embarked on the task of making his life whole again.

The epic survival tale is so basic, so human, that it cannot go stale. Such stories remain compelling because they catalyze a question stream in the reader: What would I do? Would I make it? Would I have the strength to endure?

When asked during the pre-release hype for 127 Hours whether he thought Aron Ralston’s personal amputation of his arm was extraordinary, Academy Award–winning director Danny Boyle responded, “People talk about the story and they go, Ahwww, as though they could never do it. I think that what’s extraordinary about the story, is that we would all do it.”

“You automatically go into selfpreservation mode,” says DeMartino, now 46. “During the accident, it didn’t feel like I was fighting for my life. You’re on board this train. You have no idea where it is going, when and how the ride is going to end.”

In immediate, life-threatening situations, we are by nature survivors. It is instinct, genetically encoded into our system. But after the trauma is over, that’s when survivors either thrive or flounder.

“Three months after my fall, I got out of the hospital and off that train,” says DeMartino. “We would all live. After the fact—that’s when you get a choice.”

It’s not supposed to rain in Colorado. DeMartino’s taken the week off from his job as an in-house editorial photographer for a Christian publishing company to let my creative collaborator, Bryan Smith, and me descend on his life with three cameras and a steady stream of questions. For two days we’ve been watching as small sun breaks close back down into sheets of rain above the Front Range foothills.

DeMartino is antsy and sporadically sifts through the guidebooks on the kitchen table in his Loveland home, searching for dry, overhanging routes. He drinks coffee like it’s water. “I have days where getting out of bed is a chore,” he says. “The rain, the low pressure, it makes it worse. I can defi nitely tell when weather is coming. So some days the wheelchair is very much my best friend. Other days, it will just sit in the corner.”

Three days before we invaded the DeMartino household, Craig had been back in the wheelchair after a sudden flare-up in his stump made wearing one of his prosthetics too painful (he tries to keep two in the quiver). But the day we arrived, he casually dispatched a V7 at Horsetooth Reservoir.

“It helps to move,” he says as more rain falls. “I’ll call Brad.” An hour later, we are skirting Fort Collins’ low-lying offi ce complexes and strip malls for a session in the weight room.