Adventurer Aron Ralston did the unthinkable – he cut off his own arm to save his life. As a film about his experience opens in cinemas, Steve Pratt hears from him why he believes he must share this life-changing experience with others.

‘WITHIN an hour of being trapped I thought, ‘Aron, you are going to have to cut your arm off’. And I was like, ‘dude, I don’t want to cut my arm off, are you crazy?’ And then it was, ‘you are going to have to cut your arm off’. I actually said that out loud to myself.”

Aron Ralston is reliving an experience that to most of us is unthinkable – cutting off a limb with nothing but a blunt knife and the rock that’s trapped it for five days – even if it is your own only hope of survival.

The adventurer from the US Mid-West was climbing a rock face in the beautiful, but isolated canyons of Utah, in April 2003, when he slipped and fell deep into Blue John Canyon. A falling boulder tumbled on top of him and wedged his right hand against the sandstone rock face.

He was trapped. Although his first thoughts were of amputating his arm, he tried every possible option to free himself. He chipped away at the rock with his penknife to try to free his hand. He thought of waiting to be rescued, but realised that was unlikely because he had failed to tell anyone where he was going.

He had limited supplies, a bottle of water and some energy bars, and little equipment – a flashlight, a penknife and a rope – to use in any escape bid. He also had a video camera on which he recorded farewell messages to his loved ones.

He’s been reliving the ordeal for the film, 127 Hours, by Danny Boyle, the Oscar-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting.

James Franco plays Ralston, who was a frequent visitor to the set.

“There were basically two chains of thought,” Ralston explains of finding himself trapped in the canyon. “One was about how I was going to get free, and potentially survive myself and survive the situation. So there was a lot of tactical and logistical kinds of issues.

And then there was this emotional side of things that was about connecting with my family through the videotape, turning on the camcorder.

“You see that very accurately represented in the film where James is totally absorbed in these logistical operations – trying to lift the boulder almost comically juxtaposed with Lovely Day on the soundtrack.

“Then there are the poignant moments where he’s very still and talking right into the camera and saying, ‘mom and dad, I regret that I haven’t perhaps appreciated you as much as I could have in my heart’. That’s lifted verbatim from the tape I made.”

Becoming more and more dehydrated and running a fever, he knew time was running out and turned to cutting off his trapped arm. The blade on his knife was too blunt to pierce the skin.

Then he had another idea – he could use the rock that was keeping him captive as a lever to literally break his arm free.

It was, he says, a moment of euphoria arising from mounting desperation a mounting willingness and desire to actually want to do it. “I was screaming and shouting at myself, ‘that’s it, that’s it. Use the boulder, break your bones,” he says.

“To me it’s still exhilarating just to think about it, because I was dead in that place. I’d made my will and testament, I’d written my epitaph on the wall and I had come to peace with dying.

“And then, finally, there’s this ‘eureka, I’m going to get out of here. If I’m going to die, at least I’m not going to die here’. There was this desire for freedom, not to be trapped, that was probably as strong as the desire to get back to my family. At the end I was smiling the whole time. I broke my bones and I was cutting through my arm, but I was smiling.”

RALSTON, now married with a baby son, wrote about his life-changing experience in his 2004 book Between A Rock And A Hard Place and has become a much sought-after public speaker.

What happened was the defining experience of his life, after being bullied and ostracised at school and then giving up his engineering job at 25 to follow his dreams out West.

“It will always be the watershed,” says Ralston.

“I also have in my life in the present day that mostly revolves around my wife and our eightmonth- old baby son. So finding that balance of sharing this gift that was given to me, an incredible experience, a great blessing, perhaps one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me in my life, this story, and then to give that to other people, is part of what I think I’m here to do.

“I’ve needed stories of inspiration and hope in my life. I’ve been motivated by them just to get out and explore the outdoors, to find an identity that felt like me, to do things.

“We need other people’s stories. So I do try to share my story and that’s important, it’s almost like a duty. But I also set boundaries. For me, sharing this story is not a burden but I also have to be careful not to let it override what I’m doing with the rest of my life.”

He also has a reminder of the accident – one of the fake boulders used during the making of the film. He’s put it in his back garden. “It’s a reminder of what happened to me, of the euphoria I felt when I cut the last strand and I was overwhelmed with joy,” he says.

“This euphoria was pulsing up and down through my body. It was an incredible sense of being alive and if I can remember just a little bit of that it’s an extraordinarily powerful experience.”

The closest he gets to that feeling is when he returns to the canyon. “I can’t wait to take my son there one day and stand with him at the rock and to be able to share that with him.

That’s going to be really cool.”

■ 127 Hours (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.