Should we all queue up to shake the - one - hand of Aron Ralston? What the American mountaineer did to stay alive took a brand of courage and self-possession that must be extremely rare.

His story, sweeping the globe through television news outlets, again brings attention to the lonely and fanatical pursuit of outdoor climbing.

It is not surprising that the Ralston family, after welcoming the survivor into their arms, took the immediate precaution of hiring a publicist, who has advised them to decline the offer of further interviews or more in-depth explanations of his extraordinary and gruesome endeavours of self-preservation.

High in Canyonlands National Park in Utah, with his arm trapped under a boulder, the 27-year-old outdoors perfectionist severed his lower arm off with a blunt penknife in a methodical and painstaking procedure that took several days. Although it was surely an act of a desperate man, Ralston appears to have planned it with an emotional distance that is as frightening as it is admirable. He made a tourniquet, rationed what water he had and, after completing the amputation, collected his senses enough to rappel down a 60 ft cliff and hike though six miles of wilderness before (as if the previous torture wasn't enough) happening upon a bunch of Dutch hikers who offered him Oreo cookies as a way of consolation.

Ralston has the radiant and superbly lean appearance of those who spend their days munching berries, diving through crystal ice waters and traversing obstacles such as Mount McKinley with little more than sturdy boots, a few ropes and a dazzlingly positive outlook for company. Even on the brief television clip, he reminded me of the larger-than-life heroes that appear in the more celebrated disaster stories, such as Jon Krakauer's universal bestseller Into Thin Air, the definitive account of the 1996 Everest catastrophe that wiped out 11 people.

Like the cast in that morality tale, the emergence of Ralston as the latest celebrity of the slopes poses the troubling question of what it is that high-risk climbing actually means. Is it a sport? Experts are already maintaining that Ralston could not have survived his ordeal had it not been for his preternatural physical condition. This is to be expected. Big-time mountaineering types tend to be brilliant physicists who churn out books of highly acclaimed poetry in their spare time, subsist on diets of edible leaves and bourbon, are fall-down funny and date supermodels - or at least would do if they hadn't sworn off carnality as an inferior pleasure to that of scaling the world's highest peaks without oxygen aids.

Reading about these folk is as close as most of us would wish to come to being them. Still, who hasn't, in idle moments, dreamed of conquering Everest? Krakauer's masterpiece is both an ode and a caution to those who would attempt the dream. Although a remarkably vivid account of a story that fascinates on endless levels, it is troubling. Passages such as the last radio dispatches from the legendary climber Rob Hall - freezing and lost on the South Summit - to his wife, Jan Arnold ("I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart."), veil the cold and horrible facts of what happened with macabre romance and fatalism.

It is generally accepted that anyone can have their shot at Everest for around $60,000, which will buy you a ticket and an experienced tour guide. With luck, the right weather, serious endeavour and no little bravery, you can plant your flag on the summit.

In his angry book Dark Shadows Falling, Joe Simpson all but accuses his fellow climbers of whoring Everest and, in a shocking first chapter, details how climbers ignored the dying cries of colleagues who lay helpless on the path to the top.

But with Joe Soaps now being coaxed to the summit, the true escapists are seeking more solitary climbs for their rush. Ralston had quit his engineering job to devote himself to mountaineering full time, and had already climbed all but six of Colarado's 14,000 ft plus peaks alone and in winter. No one has climbed them all in the harsh season without company.

Solitude seems to be the key attraction for people like Ralston, a total removal from the outside world. Krakauer also touched the bestseller's list with Into the Wild, a compelling and weird account of a bright, young, East Coast suburbanite who renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, spent time as a hobo hitching rides on freight trains and eventually wandered into the heart of Yellowstone Park, where he slowly perished. It is an unnerving and morally troubling waste of a bright life, but implicit is the suggestion that the hero took some sort of stand, that he railed against the outside world in a way all the more poignant for its quietude and Biblical resonance.

And there are several other stories of apparent death wishes involving this obsessive trailing and game of dares with the more extreme forces of nature. Ralston's case seems to be the inverse of this, as he obviously possessed a will to live that would buckle under no compromise.

The more dramatic elements of his five-day ordeal may well be reserved for us popcorn munchers as we look agog while Matthew McConnaghy is out-acted by the boulder in the silver screen version of Between a Rock and a Hard Place.

And because Ralston appears to have the fortitude to overcome the trauma of his ordeal, this is generally being portrayed as a happy story with its attendant lessons on the unquenchable human spirit. But if the knife had been a little blunter or if his nerve or strength had failed, then his remains could just have easily been found by some other thrill-seeking loner in a few years.

If that were the case, nobody would ever have heard of Aron Ralston and the grief of his family could only be guessed at.

Stories of man exploring the Great Beyond are as old as time. But the active and reckless pursuit of the extreme is a new phase. It is no longer enough just to escape the sounds of traffic and technology and fellow man. People are actively seeking to lose themselves without true regard for whether they can work a passage back to civilisation. Snowy peaks and vast nature reserves around the globe cradle the bones of victims who got lost too well. The lengths they went to just to escape everybody else are a poor reflection on the world they left behind. Ralston was one of the lucky ones.

Everybody feels the need to tune out now and again. But it was simpler back in the days of Woodstock, that's for sure.