It's remote, probably up there in the top ten in terms of areas outside of population centers and difficulty to get to. To even go in and be able to explore areas in the Maze, you usually have to carry extra gasoline.
I've hiked the Horseshoe Canyon area where he was picked up, and it doesn't get a lot of activity. Thirty to almost 40 percent of our incidents deal with mountain biking situations.
For the most part, they're medical and injury circumstances and need assistance out of the backcountry. But it's not unusual to have people do exactly what Ralston did: Get themselves in a situation where they haven't told anybody where they're going, climb down into an area that's questionable, and not be able to get out.
Well, I think that he fared a lot better than most people would have. To realize that you're going to have to make a large sacrifice to survive, and acting on it—I have to hand it to him. I mean, there are a lot of people that would not have been as strong-minded to be able to pull that off.
I think the number one thing is that he kept his head. Ralston is experienced in the backcountry, and that experience builds confidence. In an emergency situation, confidence builds a stable mental frame of mind. And that's really important. There's probably a lot of people walking around thinking they can deal with those types of situations, but I've seen people end their lives out there because they completely lost their mental stability.
He could have left a note. He could have had a buddy. To me, one of the biggest problems out there is people don't tell someone that they're going to a particular location. It's really not that difficult to do, and to me, it doesn't take away from the wilderness experience.
What bothered me was the way the media made him out to be quite a hero. But they never talked about how the guy got himself into trouble because he really made some poor decisions. What's kind of irritating is that rescuers have to go out and deal with those types of situations—a lot—and most of the time they're preventable. When one person, in this case Aron Ralston, gets himself into trouble, a bunch of SAR volunteers' lives may be placed in jeopardy in order to help him.
Even when you have trained experts that are conducting rescue activities, the environment that you're working in—whether it be the top of Mount Everest or the North Pole or out here in the middle of the desert, out in the middle of canyon country—is a dangerous environment.
No training or equipment can completely remove the danger from the wilderness. If a SAR volunteer is conducting a nighttime rescue, walking along canyon rims with no moon, he can step through a slot just as easily as anyone else. That's something that the public doesn't seem to give much thought to. Because one guy Aron Ralston got himself into a particular situation, 15 or 16 SAR volunteers will be placed in a similar, potentially deadly, scenario.
You need enough information about what you're getting ready to do, so you're prepared, so you really have an understanding. Having enough water is number one. Being able to start a fire is number two. The proper clothing is important. A cell phone can be a big help. As long as you're not down in the bottom of a canyon, you've got excellent coverage. Also, having your ego in check, realizing that you may be getting in over your head, is essential.
In an age of extreme sports, people are getting themselves into more difficult situations all the time. So I think that there are other things; one of the miracles of the rescue was that I was able to hike for all that distance and make it to the place where the helicopter saw me. There are miraculous aspects to it. Has your health been affected long-term?
In some ways, the confidence I gained from this probably only put my health more at risk, at least in the short- to mid-term, until I was able to learn what the real lessons of that were. I kept doing things that were even more challenging and dangerous along the five, six years afterward.
But I still am presently working on skiing the fourteeners, which is a very ambitious thing. They only get harder from this point. I think some of the lessons I also took from it were that yes, I made choices to go out by myself and not tell anyone, and OK, you can usually do one of those two things.
You wanted to find out—this is your chance. And b that the power of making choices gives you the power of being accountable to your choices, which gives you the power to make new choices, to create a different future for yourself. What was your recovery like? I still have most of my right arm, but it ends where your wristwatch would be. But we all know that feeling of you wish you had another hand to do something, and that happens more often for me probably than the average.
Or using adaptive devices like my prosthetics that allow me to hold onto the oar handle of a raft and row through the Grand Canyon. Or shuffling cards. I imagine it was probably easier adapting to that having been able to get through the experience with the boulder. It was this moment of high emotion, rather than calm logic, that led to Ralston deliberately snapping the bones in his arm by hurling himself furiously against the boulder, finally enabling him to cut through his limb with a blunt knife.
It is hardly surprising that audiences have responded with feeling: fainting in auditoria when they watch the point when Ralston, brilliantly played by James Franco in the film he has been nominated for a Golden Globe , begins his amputation. Despite what might be considered an unpromising climax for mainstream entertainment, made more unpromising by the fact that most people know exactly what will happen, this moment is compelling, without Boyle being gratuitously gory.
And despite retelling the story for what must be the umpteenth time, Ralston is also utterly captivating, completely inhabiting the moment again, miming out what he did by making a brutal stabbing motion with his good arm into what is now a dark grey prosthetic limb.
In the film, Franco's Ralston is at first a hyperactive, overconfident loner who believes he is invincible as he careers around Bluejohn Canyon, shamelessly showing off to a couple of female hikers he meets and, Jackass-like, taking photographs of himself when he falls off his mountain bike.
The year before his accident, Ralston quit his job as an engineer with Intel to climb all Colorado's "fourteeners" — its peaks over 14,ft. In May , he began "canyoneering" in Utah, navigating the narrow passages of Bluejohn with a mixture of free-climbing, daring jumps and climbing with ropes.
He was negotiating a 10ft drop in a 3ft-wide canyon listening to his favourite band, Fish, when he dislodged a boulder he thought was stable. I fell a few feet, in slow motion, I look up and the boulder is coming and I put my hands up and try to push myself away and it collides and crushes my right hand. The next second, the pain struck. In an "adrenalised rage", for 45 minutes he "cursed like a pirate". Then he reached for his water bottle. As he drank, he had to force himself to stop.
Having failed to tell anyone where he was going, he knew he would not be found. It was like, all right, brute force isn't going to do it. This is the stop-think-observe-plan phase of rational problem-solving. I have to think my way out of here. He ruled out the most drastic option — suicide — but the next most drastic alternative came to him immediately.
That little back-and-forth. Then, 'Wait a minute. I'm not talking to myself. That's just crazy. You're not talking to yourself, Aron. After two days spent fruitlessly chipping away at the rock with his knife and devising a clever but futile system of pulleys with his climbing clips and ropes to hoist the boulder clear — he was defeated because climbing rope is stretchy and he couldn't obtain the required tension — he put his knife to his arm, only to find it was so blunt he couldn't even cut his body hair.
In Boyle's film, when Ralston realises he can use the knife like a dagger rather than a saw, the camera follows the knife's journey into his flesh so the audience can see blade come to rest against bone inside his arm.
This scene is "beautiful" to Ralston. He vividly remembers how it felt to have the knife in his arm, touching his bone "because it meant, I'm gonna die. It went from, 'I did it! By the fifth day, Ralston had found "peace" in "the knowledge that I am going to die here, this is my grave". In the middle of his final night, hallucinating through hunger, lack of water and 3C temperatures, he had a vision of a small boy.
I see myself scoop him up and there's this look in his eyes, 'Daddy, can we play now? Now it's like, I am going to get through this night. The next morning, finally, came the rage and its revelation — that Ralston could fling himself against the boulder to break his own bones.
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