AT 11 O'CLOCK ON THE NIGHT OF FRIDAY, April 25, 27-year-old Aron Ralston parked his truck at the Horseshoe Canyon Trailhead, west of Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah, and slept in the covered bed. The next morning at 9:15, he bicycled 15 miles south along Maze-Robbers Roost Road until he reached a shortcut leading to the head of Bluejohn Canyon's main fork. He locked his mountain bike to a juniper tree and set out on foot toward the gulch.

By 2:45 p.m., Ralston had started his solo descent into the deep, narrow slot of Bluejohn Canyon. Passing over and then under boulders that clogged the three-foot-wide penumbral passage, Ralston was negotiating a ten-foot drop between two ledges when an 800-pound boulder shifted above him. He snapped his left hand out of its path in time, but his right hand was smashed between the rock and the sandstone wall.

"The adrenaline was pumping very, very hard through my body," Ralston recounted at his May 8 press conference at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, one of only several broadcast appearances he's made since his accident. (At press time, he'd done no print interviews; he had, however, assisted Outside in verifying the account that follows.) "It took some good, calm thinking to get myself to calm down and stop throwing myself against the boulder."

Ralston was trapped, alone in a remote canyon. Rescue was unlikely: He'd neglected to inform anyone of where he was going, which he later acknowledged is "something I almost always do but I failed to do this time."

Six foot two, long, lean, and fit, Ralston is an accomplished outdoor athlete. He first became interested in climbing in 1996, after reading about the Everest disaster in which eight mountaineers lost their lives in a single storm. "I wondered what I would do if I were in a situation like that," he told a reporter earlier this year.

He grew up in Colorado and graduated with honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, with a double major in mechanical engineering and French, then worked at Intel for five years, hopscotching to posts in Phoenix, Tacoma, and then Albuquerque, where he volunteered on a local search-and-rescue team. In the spring of 2002, he moved to Aspen, Colorado, took a retail job at Ute Mountaineering, a local shop, and began training to become a guide.
According to his Web site, Aron's Optimal Experiences On-Line, Ralston has built an impressive outdoor résumé: topping out on 34 of the 50 states' highest points, soloing 45 of Colorado's 59 fourteeners in winter, and, in June of 2002, summiting 20,320-foot Mount McKinley.

This kind of serious adventure invariably involves risk. In March 2003, Ralston and two companions were backcountry skiing on Resolution Peak, in central Colorado, when they got caught in an avalanche. "I just remember rolling down with it. Powder was swirling all around, and I was trying to breathe, but I would breathe a mixture of snow and air, and you'd swallow it like seawater," Ralston told The Denver Post after the slide. "It was horrible. It should have killed us."

It didn't. Buried up to his neck, Ralston was rescued by his friend, and together they dug out the third skier. It was less than a month later when he embarked on a solo day hike in the Utah desert.