Arm loss a prelude to new life

Ralston runs a business when he isn't hiking, biking or skiing

Joanne Kelley, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, July 15, 2006

ASPEN - Aron Ralston makes a habit of reminding himself why he quit a desk job at Intel Corp. several years ago to pursue a life of hiking and other outdoor escapades.

But three years after severing his right forearm to escape death in the remote Utah canyonlands, Ralston finds himself at the helm of his own booming business - formed to keep tabs on the many financial opportunities that have come his way since that fateful day.

Ralstar Enterprises Inc. could take up all of the 30-year-old's time. There are the speaking engagements, the television commercials, the endorsements, the upcoming documentary of the six days leading up to his self-amputation.

But then there's the main reason he quit his day job in the first place.

"I'm in a situation where I get to base my business decisions on my personal values," Ralston says. "One of those values is having fun."

As a self-described outdoor adventurer, Ralston's version of a good time might be an 18-mile day hike or a high-altitude trek on his mountain bike.

On a recent afternoon, Ralston reclines in a wooden chair in front of the Cafe Zelé coffee shop in downtown Aspen. He has just finished a ride to the top of Independence Pass, logging 42 miles on his orange Quintana Roo road bike.

An elderly woman stops on the sidewalk to ask Ralston, clad in black and orange biking garb that reveals his tanned, muscular biceps, whether his prosthetic arm has been designed especially to grip the handlebars of his bicycle.

Ralston readily engages her in conversation while extending his left hand and asking her name.

"What's your name?" she asks.

Ralston is clearly pleased the Aspen local doesn't recognize him. Even while backcountry skiing before spring's snowmelt, Ralston can't escape his celebrity.

"Hey, Miller Lite," yells another skier who had recently seen Ralston in a commercial with actor Burt Reynolds.

The Miller contract ranks high among the latest business deals Ralston has agreed to in the three years since his ordeal.

"It showed me I could enjoy being an actor," Ralston says. "Not that I'm really stoked on that because I wouldn't be able to live here."

Even the business-savvy Ralston couldn't believe it when Miller offered him a six-figure contract to appear on the "Man Laws" TV spots with Reynolds and other so-called icons of masculinity.

"Are you kidding?" Ralston says he asked himself. "I would have done it for free."

Such a scenario isn't likely under the watchful eye of Ron Elberger, an attorney who has represented a number of high-profile entertainers, including David Letterman.

Ralston hooked up with Elberger just after being discharged from the hospital in Grand Junction. He started out managing media requests, and eventually Ralston asked him to act as his literary agent.

"I've paid him twice what an MBA would cost, but I've learned more from him than if I'd gotten an MBA," Ralston says.

The book about his six days in the canyon, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, fetched the biggest advance ever for an outdoor adventure book, according to Elberger, an attorney at Bose McKinney and Evans, a law firm based in Indianapolis, where the Ralston family once lived.

Ralston said the book advance exceeded $1 million, but he declined to be specific.

He still drives the maroon 1998 Toyota truck rescuers were looking for in Utah. But he did splurge on the purchase of a townhome in Aspen.

"When I look out the window I joke I gave my right arm for this view," Ralston says.

More determined than most

"He's a very uncomplicated person - what you see is what you get," Elberger said. "It's just like Letterman's mom, Dorothy. I also happen to be her attorney."

But the attorney also describes Ralston as brilliant and more determined than most.

Elberger recalls Ralston's regimen in trying to get back in shape after losing weight and muscle in the process of recovering from losing his arm.

One workout involved running up and down 40 flights of stairs several times at a hotel the two stayed at during an early speaking engagement.

His speaking career soon took off.

"It's a never-ending request stream," Elberger says.

Ralston takes care not to accept too many offers, both because he doesn't want to get stale and because he wants to keep his sights on why he quit his engineering job with Intel: to live his dream of spending much of his time conquering peaks and roving the wilds.

"Do I have to be working because I'd be unfulfilled? Yeah. Do I have to be working because I can't pay my mortgage? No."

In pursuit of adventure

Ralston already has become the first to summit all the peaks in Colorado above 14,000 feet, in winter, alone. But he has no plans to cut back on his adventures.

In May, Ralston found himself staring at a mountain lion while hiking by himself in a wilderness area between Aspen and Basalt.

"It's so exhilarating to be out. Serene. Awesome. When I saw that 200-pound cat, it just kind of shuts you down."

He points across an Aspen side street to a parked car. "From here to that white car, that's how far I was from a 200-pound cat."

Just catching up with Ralston can be a challenge.

"I'll be around this week except when I'm hiking, which will be sporadic (sometimes mornings, sometimes afternoons)," he writes in an e-mail.

His company's name comes from friends, who like to rib him about "pulling a Ralstar" when he goes out on one of his high-energy adventures. While working for Intel in New Mexico, his idea of an efficient trip was driving to Colorado for a String Cheese Incident show at Red Rocks. Once the partying wound down in the wee hours of morning, he'd head to a trailhead for a solo climb up a 14,000-foot peak.

When Ralston arrived in Aspen for a new life focused on the outdoors, he took a sales job at Ute Mountaineer, a local gear retailer.

"I was spending time pseudo-outdoors, working at an outdoors' shop," he recalls. "I joke that they fired me after I was gone for a week."

It started as a day hike

Ralston's misfortune in the desert happened during his days off from the shop. He drove to a trailhead at the edge of Canyonlands National Park to find solitude exploring the nearby slot canyons.

Regrettably, he didn't leave word with anyone about his plans. So when he took off on his bike and then ventured on foot into a deep and narrow canyon, he knew he had a big problem when an 800-pound boulder tumbled downward and pinned his hand against the rock wall.

He'd brought about a gallon of water with him that day, but he had consumed most of it by the time he'd become trapped 100 feet down in the canyon, eight miles from his truck and many more miles from any well-traveled road.

Because he intended to go on a day hike on a warm day, he had minimal food and no jacket to keep warm when the temperatures plunged at night.

He bided his time brainstorming escape options, including a futile attempt to chip away at the chock-stone boulder with the dull knife in the pocket-sized utility tool he'd brought along. He'd been stuck for days before he realized he could break the bones above his wrist by bending his arm. After that, he alternated between the tool's knife and pliers to saw and rip through the rest of his arm.

"In so many ways, I'd been preparing my whole life for that to happen," he recalls. "I knew for five days I was going to die. When the opportunity came to get myself free, I was smiling."

Ralston now endorses a personal locator beacon - made by a company called ACR Electronics Inc. - that would have allowed him to call for help.

"That was one that really spoke to me because I can teach people these are available," Ralston said. "Buy one for your loved one who doesn't know when to turn around. I carry one when I'm going to be going far away from a road. It's for situations of grave and imminent danger."

If anything has changed for Ralston, he finds he spends less time by himself and more time with friends.

He knows he helps provide people with perspective on their sufferings, but he doesn't pretend to be able to relate to all the stories he's heard.

"It's hard to know the suffering other people have felt. Everyone's suffering is unique to them."

Still, that's what compelled him to write his story and to accept some 150 speaking engagements to relate his ordeal. He sometimes asks himself: "Do I really want to spent my time talking about this anymore? But, if it's helped people, then it's worth it."

No time for another book

Standing before huge groups never gets easier for him.

" I put a lot of pressure on myself to be at the peak and to convey (the impression) it's the first time I've told it so it has that power," he said. "It's not the story, it's the telling of the story."

He speaks to large companies - Hewlett-Packard, Daimler Chrysler, even his former employer Intel - and often waives speaking fees for charitable groups, who in turn charge admission for his talks to raise funds.

Despite the critical acclaim for his best-selling book, Ralston doesn't expect to plunge into another major writing project.

There's too much else to do. For now, there's the job of hammering out a contract for a motion picture based on the book. Ralston will narrate. And there's the documentary of his role in an upcoming expedition of K2, the world's second- highest mountain.

Ralston has also jumped into another project - a nonprofit aimed in part at making sure the state's "roadless areas" remain undeveloped.

He used the fees from a speaking gig to set up a group dubbed the Maroon Corps, a nonprofit that operates under the umbrella of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop.

"To Aron's credit, he immediately got it," said Sloan Shoemaker, executive director of Wilderness Workshop. "There are those out there who don't value these wild-country experiences and places as much he does."

Ralston has "adopted" many of the roadless areas, surveying many of them and acting as spokesman for a group campaigning to protect land in the White River National Forest.

"He's been able to take what's clearly an awful thing for anyone to have to go through and turn that into a very valuable platform for advocating for wildlands protection," Shoemaker said.

Challenge is 'defining myself'

Ralston says he's made enough money in the past couple of years that he's "lost his credibility" as one of Aspen's proletariat.

In his book, he writes: "There's a mostly unspoken acknowledgement among the voluntarily impoverished dues-payers of our towns that it's better to be fiscally poor yet rich in experience - living the dream - than to be traditionally wealthy but live separate from one's passions."

"The fun you have is not tied with the money you make," Ralston opines now. "There've been moments where I felt like I gave it away."

So, he's choosing his projects carefully.

"I won't write another book until I want to do another book tour. If I write another book, that means I have to leave my life behind. I don't think I'll ever do that again."

For now, he's still deciding how to move beyond the "day hike that changed my life" and captured so much attention.

He notes that explorer John Wesley Powell lost his arm in the Civil War, and it became "almost a footnote" to what he accomplished.

"My challenge from this point forward is going to be defining myself," Ralston says. "It's going to be a big challenge for me to move past being known as the guy who cut his arm off. But the story becomes a smaller and smaller part of my life. It becomes more how I chose to move forward with it.

New directions

Aron Ralston set up Ralstar Enterprises Inc. to oversee the business deals that have come his way.

Some of the ventures:

• A million-dollar-plus book deal to write and promote Between a Rock and a Hard Place, his memoirs and account of his six days trapped in a slot canyon in Utah

• A six-figure contract to appear in Miller Lite commercials with other male icons

• Motivational speaking engagements about the ordeal for corporations, large groups and nonprofits

• Endorsement of a locator beacon designed to prevent the kind of misfortune Ralston endured three years ago

• A motion picture/documentary based on his ordeal in the desert

• A nonprofit formed to help preserve "roadless areas" in Colorado's national forests and wilderness areas

kelleyj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5068