This is how extraordinarily tough Amos Richards is: the 64-year-old North Carolinian was hiking in Utah’s desert backcountry, around Little Blue John Canyon, when he fell about 10 feet, suffering multiple leg fractures and internal injuries. He was alone and unable to put weight on the injured leg, and no one knew where he was. So he started crawling back to his car. For four days and three nights, with only five liters of water and a couple of power bars. According to the National Park Service, he had no overnight gear, no warm clothes, no map. It rained on him a couple of times. But he was still making those faint, parallel, classic-cartoon furrows across the sand when he was finally spotted by a helicopter search team.
Anyone who survives four days crawling across the Utah desert deserves his own star on the Walk of Badassery. (In fact, Richards was in the notoriously remote part of Canyonlands National Park known as the Maze.) He deserves his own accolades and congratulations for toughness, perseverance, bravery. And given that he is within 12 months of qualifying for Medicare, you might put a little extra something in your fist bump if you cross his path.
What he doesn’t deserve is comparison to Aron Ralston, the young hiker who got his arm pinned under a boulder and had to perform a little unsterilized, un-anesthetized self-surgery. (Which, granted, deserves a huge star wherever he wants it.) But that’s what Richards got from Fox News, which noted (in the second paragraph of their account) that Richards was hiking/falling/crawling close to where Ralston had his accident. They pitched the Ralston connection again in the eighth paragraph. And the ninth, where it mentioned the James Franco-starring movie of Ralston’s epic experience, just before the tenth paragraph, where we learn that Richards is expected to make a full recovery.
The U.K.’s Daily Mail went even further, publishing a photo of James Franco and another of Ralston being interviewed by Jay Leno.
