His arm a stump, slung and bleeding across his chest, a near-death Aron Ralston staggered toward salvation, a helicopter that had been searching for him after he’d been trapped for five days in a remote slot canyon in southeast Utah.
The helicopter’s co-pilot screamed over the roar of the rotors: Are you Aron Ralston?
“There was that little voice in my head again,” Ralston said. “What if I weren’t?”
The crowd in Beaver Creek’s Vilar Center roused from their rapt attention to chuckle at Ralston’s jesting. Veering from throat-clogging tears to nervous laughter, the attendees of the 36th annual Mountain Travel Symposium hung on Ralston’s gripping tale.
Despite a very real chance of over-exposure — the Oscar-nominated Hollywood movie, the book, the countless magazine and newspaper articles detailing Ralston’s harrowing, arm-severing escape from Blue John Canyon in 2003 — the 35-year-old adventure athlete has scripted a relevant and utterly compelling presentation that has led to a promising career as a public speaker.
Thankfully, and wisely, Ralston eschewed any forced connections with the travel industry insiders and their business during his slideshow talk, opting instead for a straightforward and heartfelt delivery detailing the five days in April 2003 when a boulder trapped him in that lonely canyon. Still, with the theme of the confab “Adapt or Die,” Ralston’s decision to break the bones in his arm and stab through flesh with a dull knife to escape and live resonated with the businessfolk whose industry has weathered a severe blow of late.
The five-minute standing ovation that followed Ralston’s intimate talk proved that connection.
Merging clips from the visceral flick “127 Hours” and his own photographs from that fateful trip to the desert, Ralston’s narrative — even though now eight years old — remains riveting.
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