Climber’s video diary records how he cut off his own arm to save his life

A CLIMBER who escaped death by sawing off his arm which was trapped beneath a fallen rock told yesterday how he kept a video diary of what he thought would be his last hours of life.

Aron Ralston, aged 28, spent six days trapped in a remote canyon in Utah. Starving and dehydrated, he even recorded his final goodbyes to his family on his video camera on April 27 last year.

Ralston’s memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, is being published in the United States and excerpts were published in the latest edition of Outside magazine.

In the first scenes of his real-life thriller movie, Ralston videoed his own mangled arm.

“There it is - stuck. It’s been without circulation for 24 hours. It’s pretty well gone.”

After an unsuccessful bid to move the boulder with climbing ropes he realised he could escape if he cut the arm off with a pocket knife.

But the blunt blade could barely break the skin, let alone saw through the bones in his arms.

Recalling the first attempt to make an incision, he recalls in the book: “The sight repulses me. I set down my knife and retch.”

By the fifth day Ralston recorded that he was fading. But, as he was about to give up hope, he had a vision of a blond-haired three-year-old boy.

“I know the boy is my own,” he writes, envisioning a future child, and regains the strength to keep fighting.

On the sixth day he realised he could break the two main bones in his forearm like a “two-by-four in a vice.”

With one yank he broke the radius bone and with another he snapped the ulna.

He picked up his knife and began to tear at the rotting flesh.

Ralston, who had been climbing alone in Blue John Canyon in Utah, stemmed the blood flow from his severed limb with a tourniquet.

After walking six miles he found a group of tourists who called for an emergency helicopter.