Aron Ralston will be the featured speaker at the keynote session for The Rental Show 2012 in New Orleans on Monday, Feb. 6, sponsored by Ditch Witch.

The keynote begins at 8 a.m. in the La Nouvelle Ballroom, Level 2, at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center and includes recognition of companies that helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the passing of the gavel from American Rental Association (ARA) President Ted Cook to ARA incoming president Mike Flesher, and the induction ceremony for the Rental Hall of Fame.

In 2003, Ralston made headlines worldwide. After being pinned by a half-ton boulder for nearly a week in a remote 3-ft.-wide slot canyon in southern Utah, Ralston narrowly escaped death by severing his right forearm with a dull pocketknife. After applying a tourniquet, he rappelled and hiked alone for five hours in a haze of dehydration and pain, through Blue John and Horseshoe Canyons, until he found a family of hikers.

It has been more than eight years since his experience in that Utah canyon, but Ralston, 36, has spent them well. After publishing the book “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” in 2004, Ralston continued to reach his goals, aided by radical prosthetic devices that he helped design. To date, he is the only person to have solo-climbed all 59 of Colorado’s “14ers” — 14,000-ft.-high mountains — in winter; the only person with a disability to have skied from the summit of Denali, North America’s tallest mountain; and in April 2009, he became the first amputee to row a raft through the Grand Canyon.

He also has spent much of his time working on the film “127 Hours” and speaking about his experience around the world. The 2010 film, on which Ralston worked closely with director Danny Boyle, received six Academy Award® nominations — including Best Picture and Best Actor in a Leading Role for James Franco, who played Ralston.

“My presentation is different than both the film and book — because the book was a snapshot in time. It’s fixed at that point, while my perspective of what happened, how I implement that in my life, the lessons I learned — all of those things are shifting as I grow,” he says. “In the book, I wasn’t specific about lessons I hoped to learn. It’s one thing to have an epiphany about what’s important in life and another to actually change your life.”