A Broken Leg in a Place Without Roads 

Roadless country was terrifying in the summer of 1988, at the age of fifteen, when I fractured my tibia in a canyon of the Green River in Utah. I was cliff-jumping into shallows. With me were my brother Eric and his friend Rob, both New Yorkers, both much older, in their twenties, and with long experience running rivers in the desert. They told me not to jump, warned that I’d hit bottom. But stupid and impetuous is the mind of the fifteen-year-old boy. There was no way out to find help except down the river. There were no roads we knew of that accessed the canyon. This was before cell phones and we were too poor to own a satellite phone. Even if we did find a road, how might we make use of it without a vehicle? It would be a death march under the desert sun.

Robert Marshall, who founded the Wilderness Society in 1935, liked that roadless areas were difficult and sometimes