To read the Rocky Mountain News story on Aron Ralston, click “Arm loss prelude to a new life.”

Aspen outdoorsman Aron Ralston, author of “Between A Rock And A Hard Place,” is a celebrity who walks among us doing what celebrities do.

There are the popular “Man Laws” television commercials for Miller Lite: the brewer just ordered another batch, and Ralston will return to Los Angeles soon to be with those manly men like Bert Reynolds and Jerome Bettis in the strange metallic box made for television. There is also the docu-drama he is starring in–the famous story of how he lost a piece of his arm in a hiking accident, hacking it off with a pen knife in order to survive.

All the while Ralston is preternaturally aware that the life of a celebrity keeps him indoors and hence far away from the outdoors that he loves even when it doesn’t love him back. Nowadays, when he moves about the wilderness, the celebrity from Aspen is a man on a mission: to walk the roadless areas of the national forest now under siege from a Bush Administration that would open them to development.

To that end, Ralston and about fifty of his outdoor mates have decided to form the Maroon Corps, a bunch of twenty- and thirtysomethings determined to make a difference. The idea goes like this: the group will move from issue to issue, trying to marshall their forces. With an important hearing coming up in Glenwood Springs in June 2006, the issue de jour is keeping the roads out of the wilderness.

So it goes with Aron Ralston, a man whose fifteen minutes of fame may go on for years. The road is long, especially when there’s no road to speak of.