Aron Ralston

Aron Lee Ralston was born October 27, 1975 in Marion, Ohio. He moved to Denver at 12 and developed his outdoors career through high school and at Carnegie Mellon, where he double-majored in mechanical engineering and French. He worked at Intel for five years after graduation and quit in 2002 to move to Aspen and pursue climbing full time. By the spring of 2003 he was 27 and had been working a counter at a mountaineering shop, climbing on weekends, and pursuing a personal goal: become the first person to climb all of Colorado’s 54 fourteeners alone and in winter.

On April 26, 2003 he was solo canyoneering in Bluejohn Canyon, south of Canyonlands National Park. He had not told anyone where he was going. While downclimbing through a narrow slot, he dislodged an 800-pound boulder that pinned his right hand and forearm against the canyon wall. He could not move it. He could not be heard. He had a small backpack, two burritos, less than a liter of water, a video camera, and a cheap multitool he had picked up free at a hardware store.

He spent five days and seven hours — the 127 hours of the title — running through every option. He rationed his water until he drank his own urine. He carved his name and the dates of his birth and presumed death into the canyon wall. He filmed messages for his family. On the morning of May 1, 2003, he realized he could break both bones of his right forearm by levering against the boulder, and that with the bones snapped, he could amputate the arm below the elbow with the dull blade of his multitool. He did. The cut took roughly an hour. He then rappelled 65 feet down a sandstone wall one-handed, hiked seven miles, and was found by a Dutch family on the trail and airlifted to St. Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction.

His 2004 memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place became a New York Times bestseller. The 2010 film 127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle and starring James Franco as Ralston, was nominated for six Academy Awards. Ralston himself called it “as close to a documentary as you can get and still be a drama.” In 2005, just two years after the amputation, he completed his original goal of soloing all of Colorado’s fourteeners in winter — the first person to ever do it. He has been a full-time motivational speaker since, telling audiences that everyone has “boulders” — the literal kind he had, or the financial, health, and family kind most people carry — and the question is what each person does with them.