127 hours of suffering | Aron Ralston story — Transcript

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1. 0:01For six days, Aron Ralston kept himself alive with  fierce self-control and a conviction that only
2. 0:08logical thought could let him survive. But the  revelation when the 27-year-old climber realised
3. 0:15how he could save his own life came  from an explosion of blind rage.
4. 0:27The year before his accident, Aron  quit his job as an engineer with Intel
5. 0:32to climb all Colorado's peaks over 14.000ft.  In May 2003, he began "canyoneering" in Utah,
6. 0:41navigating the narrow passages  with a mixture of free-climbing,
7. 0:45daring jumps and climbing with ropes. At that  fateful day, he was negotiating a 10ft drop in a
8. 0:533ft-wide canyon listening to his favourite band,  when he moved a big rock he thought was stable.
9. 1:00He goes from being out in the wilderness in  a beautiful place and just being so happy and
10. 1:06carefree to, like, oh shit! He fell a few feet,  in slow motion, he look up and the rock is coming,
11. 1:13and he put his hands up and try to push himself  away, but the rock collides and crushes his right
12. 1:19hand. He was trapped in the canyon, his right  hand and lower arm crushed by the 400kg rock.
13. 1:26The next second, the pain hit. "If you've ever  crushed your finger in a door accidentally,"
14. 1:32he says, this was "100 times worse!". In an  adrenaline rage, for 45 minutes he cursed like
15. 1:40a pirate! Then he reached for his water bottle.  As he drank, he had to force himself to stop.
16. 1:47He realises this water is the only thing that's  going to keep him alive. Most foolishly of all,
17. 1:55he had not told anyone where he was going so he  knew he would not be found. He put the lid back
18. 2:02on the water bottle and gathered himself. It was  like, all right mate, brute force isn't going to
19. 2:09do it. This is the stop-think-observe-plan  phase of rational problem-solving.
20. 2:16He has to think his way out of there. He ruled out  the most drastic option – suicide – but the next
21. 2:23most drastic alternative came to him immediately. He had this surreal conversation with himself:
22. 2:30“Aron, you're gonna have to cut your arm off.”  “WTH I don't want to cut my arm off!” “Dude,
23. 2:36you're gonna have to cut your arm off.” He said it  to himself. That little back-and-forth and then:
24. 2:42“Wait a minute. Stop. I'm not talking to myself.  That's just crazy. You're not talking to yourself,
25. 2:47Aron.” Except he would continue to talk to himself  in various ways, to remind himself not to pass
26. 2:54out. After two days spent fruitlessly chipping  away at the rock with his knife and come up with
27. 3:00a clever but useless system of pulleys with his  climbing clips and ropes to lift the rock – he
28. 3:06was defeated because climbing rope is stretchy  and he couldn't obtain the required tension – he
29. 3:12put his knife to his arm, only to find it was  so blunt he couldn't even cut his body hair.
30. 3:18By the fifth day, Aron had found "peace" in "the  knowledge that he is going to die there, this
31. 3:25is his grave. In the middle of his final night,  hallucinating through hunger, lack of water and
32. 3:32cold environment, he had a vision of a small boy. He saw himself in this out-of-body experience
33. 3:39playing with him with a handless right arm. He  saw himself lifting this little boy up and there
34. 3:45was this look in his eyes: “Daddy, can we play  now?” That look tells him this is his unborn son,
35. 3:53this is in the future, He will have this  experience some day. And he was like: “I am going
36. 4:00to get through this night!" The next morning,  finally, came the rage and the courage to do it!
37. 4:07When his blunt knife pierced his skin but came to  rest against solid bone, he thought there was no
38. 4:14freaking chance he could perform the horrifying  amputation that would save his life. He brushed
39. 4:20some grit from his trapped thumb and a chip of  flesh peeled off like the skin of boiled milk and
40. 4:26he was like, WTH?! He takes his knife and poking a  bit more and the knife just slips into the meat of
41. 4:33his thumb like it's going into room-temperature  butter. His hand was almost jellified. The
42. 4:39knife tip goes in and, 'pssstt', the gases from  rotting escape and there was this rancid smell.
43. 4:46He goes into this rage, this hyper-emotional  state after all this discipline to keep it
44. 4:52together and in this moment, when he was  trying to rip his arm out from the rock,
45. 4:58he felt it bend and it stops him – “That's  it! I can use the rock to break my bones!”
46. 5:05From then, it was easy. The snap of his bones  "like, pooow!" was a horrifying sound but to
47. 5:11him it was delighted! The detachment had already  happened in his mind. He was like: “it's rubbish,
48. 5:18it's going to kill you, get rid of it Aron! It's  no longer your arm!” As he picked up the knife,
49. 5:24he was very cool and collected. It took him an  hour to cut through his flesh and release the arm.
50. 5:31There in the canyon, he calculated it would  take him at least 10 hours to find medical help
51. 5:36and he would most probably bleed to death, but  using pieces of climbing kit, he strapped himself
52. 5:43up and somehow managed to scale a  65ft cliff to escape the canyon.
53. 5:49Exposed to the fierce sun, he was found by  three Dutch tourists, who gave him water
54. 5:55and helped him to hold on, before he was picked  up by a search-and-rescue helicopter dispatched
55. 6:01by his family to look for him. He did this all on  his own and God doesn't exist because if he did,
56. 6:08he would help him out, that fucker! The vision  that Aron had during his final night in the canyon
57. 6:15has come true. More than a decade later, Aron’s  wife, Jessica, gave birth to his baby boy,
58. 6:22Leo! Aron still likes solitude but  when he goes out rafting or climbing,
59. 6:28now he almost always takes his friends with him.  Take care and join me on the next true case.