## Between the Canyon and the Camera: The Video as Document
The video messages Aron Ralston recorded during his time in Blue John Canyon occupy a strange space in the record of the entrapment: they are primary sources for his psychological state during an experience that is otherwise reconstructed primarily from memory, and they are private documents that he has chosen to keep largely private, referencing their content in interviews and in the memoir without making them publicly available.
This is a reasonable choice. The video messages were farewell communications to his family — recordings intended to be watched by the people he was saying goodbye to, in the event that he did not survive. They were not intended as documentary footage. They were not intended as material for a memoir or a film. They were the most private form of human communication: a person saying goodbye to the people he loves.
That they serve now as evidence in the reconstruction of his experience is a consequence of his survival — had he died in the canyon, they would have been exactly what they were intended to be, and their content would have been between him and his family. Because he survived, they became documents of a person who turned out to be recording not a final goodbye but an account of a situation he would emerge from. The gap between the intention and the outcome is one of the more poignant aspects of the story.
Ralston has described the content of the messages in general terms: he addressed his parents, his sister, and friends. He expressed love and gratitude. He described his situation. He processed, through the act of speaking, the experience he was having. He was, in some sense, doing for himself what a therapist or a priest or a friend might otherwise do: bearing witness to his own experience, giving it language, making it something that could be communicated rather than something that could only be endured in silence.