Ralston says accident was 'a blessing in a way'

BOULDER, Colo. — He called it "my accident."

On April 26, 2003, without telling anyone his plans, Aron Lee Ralston set out alone through Robbers Roost, a steep, treacherous, largely abandoned parcel of southeastern Utah backcountry last bent to human will by Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch, who had found its forbidding terrain favorable to hiding from the law.

Five days later, after several unsuccessful attempts to dislodge an 800-pound boulder that was crushing his right hand, Ralston snapped first the radius and then the ulna of his forearm near the wrist, applied a makeshift tourniquet, sawed through the cartilage with a throwaway multitool, rappelled to the base of Blue John Canyon and hiked until he came upon a rescue helicopter.

"It was a blessing in a way," Ralston, now 33, said in an interview. "It made me think about the way I was living."

The story of the crucible in Blue John Canyon has resonated through countless discussions of fortitude, indomitability and the will to live. But for Ralston, who has found enduring celebrity on the adventure sports and motivational speaking circuits, it has produced a struggle to divine some transformative meaning.

"He's more serious now, and by that I mean not somber but intense," said Ralston's younger sister, Sonja Ralston Elder, 28, a law student. "He does things with more focus, more purpose than before."

Raised partly in a farmhouse in Ohio, Ralston moved around as a boy before enrolling at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied mechanical engineering, French and piano. Among the East Coast intelligentsia, he said, he carried his Rocky Mountain home address as a badge of honor and a shield. He caught the ski bug, spent summers rafting the Arkansas River and set out to make his name as the first mountaineer to summit all 59 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains alone in the wintertime.

But the episode in Blue John Canyon brought him a different sort of fame.

To some, Ralston's story was an inspiration. His 368-page account, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," rose to No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. Corporations paid him $15,000 to $37,000 for motivational speeches. Wilderness conservation groups deployed him to raise donations. Schools invited him to speak to children, who often asked to examine his prosthetic hand. Travelers recognized him at airports. Strangers sent him letters. A film version is in the works.

To others, though, his story was the cautionary tale of a heedless fool. By Ralston's own written account, he had nearly drowned, disturbed a bear and stumbled into an avalanche on earlier adventures. Failure to leave word of his whereabouts in Utah, ignoring one of the most basic rules of hiking, drew sharp rebukes.