Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

by Nando Parrado

IT WAS FRIDAY, the thirteenth of October. We joked about that—flying over the Andes on such an unlucky day, but young men make those kinds of jokes so easily. Our flight had originated one day earlier in Montevideo, my hometown, its destination Santiago, Chile. It was a chartered flight on a Fairchild twin-engine turboprop carrying my rugby team—the Old Christians Rugby Club—to play an exhibition match against a top Chilean squad.

With such towering summits rising along the way, there was no chance that the Fairchild, with its maximum cruising altitude of 22,500 feet, could fly a direct east-west route to Santiago. Instead, the pilots had charted a course that would take us about one hundred miles south of Mendoza to Planchón Pass, a narrow corridor through the mountains with ridges low enough for the plane to clear. We would fly south along the eastern foothills of the Andes with the mountains always on our right, until we reached the pass. Then we’d turn west and weave our way through the mountains. When we had cleared the mountains on the Chilean side, we would turn right and fly north to Santiago. The flight should take about an hour and a half. We would be in Santiago before dark.

“Settle down, and please take your seats!” But we were young rugby players traveling with our friends, and we did not want to settle down. Our team, the Old Christians from Montevideo, was one of the best rugby teams in Uruguay, and we took our regular matches seriously. But in Chile we would be playing an exhibition match only, so this trip was really a holiday for us, and on the plane there was the feeling that the holiday had already begun.

Under Lina’s loving attention, the garden was soon producing bumper crops of beans, peas, greens, peppers, squash, corn, tomatoes—far too much for us to eat, but my mother would not let any of it go to waste. She spent hours in the kitchen with Lina, canning the surplus produce in mason jars, and storing it all in the pantry so that we could enjoy the fruits of the garden all year round. My mother hated waste and pretense, valued frugality, and never lost her faith in the value of hard work.

My respect for my father was endless, as was my appreciation for the life he gave us. I wanted desperately to be like him, but by the time I reached high school I had to face the fact that we were very different men. I did not have his clear vision, or his pragmatic tenacity. We saw the world in starkly different ways. For my father, life was something you created out of hard work and careful planning and sheer force of will. For me, the future was like a story that slowly unfolds, with plots and subplots that twist and turn so that you can never see too far down the road. Life was something to be discovered, something that arrived in its own time.

Eight were unaccounted for, although the survivors felt certain that one of them, Carlos Valeta, was dead. Zerbino had seen Valeta’s seat fall from the plane, but, incredibly, he had survived his fall. In the moments just after the crash, a group of boys had spotted him staggering down the mountain slope a few hundred yards from the Fairchild. They called to him and he seemed to turn toward the crash site, but then he stumbled in the deep snow and tumbled down the slope and out of sight.

We lived constantly on the verge of hysteria, but we did not panic. Leaders emerged, and we responded in the way we’d been taught by the Christian Brothers—as a team.

Much of the credit for our survival in those critical early days must go to Marcelo Perez, whose decisive leadership saved many lives. From the very first moments of the ordeal, Marcelo responded to the staggering challenges before us with the same combination of courage, decisiveness, and foresight with which he had led us to so many victories on the rugby field. He instantly understood that the margin for error here was slim, and that the mountain would make us pay dearly for stupid mistakes. In a rugby match, hesitation, indecision, and confusion can cost you the game. Marcelo realized that in the Andes, these same mistakes would cost us our lives. His strong presence in the first hours after the crash prevented what could have been total panic.

Now we felt a small sense of control. We knew one fact at least: To the west is Chile. This phrase quickly became a rallying call for us, and we used it to bolster our hopes throughout our ordeal.

I felt so beaten and trapped that for a moment I thought I would lose my mind. Then I saw my father on that river in Argentina, wasted, defeated, on the verge of surrender, and I remembered his words of defiance: I decided I would not quit. I decided I would suffer a little longer.

Gustavo and Roberto suspected gangrene, but Rafael never allowed himself to sink into self-pity. Instead he kept his courage and humor, even as the poison flowed through his system and the flesh of his leg rotted before his eyes. “I am Rafael Echavarren!” he would shout every morning, “and I will not die here!” There was no surrender in Rafael, no matter how he suffered, and I felt stronger every time I heard him say those words.

“You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child,” Arturo answered. “The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can’t understand His will; He can’t be explained in a book. He didn’t abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change, He simply is. I don’t pray to God for forgiveness or favors, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don’t need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.”

“Breathe once more,” we would tell the weaker ones, when the cold, or their fears, or despair, would shove them to the edge of surrender. “Live for one more breath. As long as you breathe, you are fighting to survive.” In fact, all of us on the mountain were living our lives one breath at a time, and struggling to find the will we needed to endure from one heartbeat to the next.

At high altitude, the human body dehydrates five times faster than it does at sea level, primarily because of the low levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. To draw sufficient oxygen from the lean mountain air, the body forces itself to breathe very rapidly. This is an involuntary reaction; often you pant just standing still. Increased inhalations bring more oxygen into the bloodstream, but each time you breathe in you must also breathe out, and precious moisture is lost each time you exhale. A human being can survive at sea level for a week or longer without water. In the Andes the margin of safety is much slimmer, and each breath brings you closer to death.

Surrounded by a frozen ocean, we were slowly dying of thirst. We needed an efficient way to melt snow quickly, and, thanks to Fito’s inventiveness, we found one.

“There is nothing in this fucking place to eat!” But of course there was food on the mountain—there was meat, plenty of it, and all in easy reach. It was as near as the bodies of the dead lying outside the fuselage under a thin layer of frost. It puzzles me that despite my compulsive drive to find anything edible, I ignored for so long the obvious presence of the only edible objects within a hundred miles. There are some lines, I suppose, that the mind is very slow to cross, but when my mind did finally cross that line, it did so with an impulse so primitive it shocked me. It was late afternoon and we were lying in the fuselage, preparing for night. My gaze fell on the slowly healing leg wound of a boy lying near me. The center of the wound was moist and raw, and there was a crust of dried blood at the edges. I could not stop looking at that crust, and as I smelled the faint blood-scent in the air, I felt my appetite rising. Then I looked up and met the gaze of other boys who had also been staring at the wound. In shame, we read each other’s thoughts and quickly glanced away, but for me something had happened that I couldn’t deny: I had looked at human flesh and instinctively recognized it as food.

I don’t recall the exact words he used, but I will never forget the tinny sound of his voice and the dispassionate tones with which he spoke: After ten days of fruitless searching, he said, Chilean authorities have called off all efforts to find the lost Uruguayan charter flight that disappeared over the Andes on October 13. Search efforts in the Andes are simply too dangerous, he said, and after so much time in the frigid mountains, there is no chance that anyone still survives.

I would live as if I were dead already. With nothing to lose, nothing could surprise me, nothing could stop me from fighting; my fears would not block me from following my instincts, and no risk would be too great.

Even though he was a new friend for most of us, I believe Numa was the best loved man on the mountain.

I understood that Roberto’s willfulness and strong sense of self would be the perfect complement to the wild impulses that drove me to flee blindly into the wild. With my manic urge to escape, I would be the engine that pulled us through the mountains; Roberto’s cantankerous spirit would be the clutch that prevented me from revving out of control.

one night something remarkable happened. It was after midnight, the fuselage was dark and cold as always, and I was lying restlessly in the shallow, groggy stupor that was as close as I ever got to genuine sleep, when, out of nowhere, I was jolted by a surge of joy so deep and sublime that it nearly lifted me bodily from the floor. For a moment the cold vanished, as if I’d been bathed in a warm, golden light, and for the first time since the plane had crashed, I was certain I would survive. In excitement, I woke the others. “Guys, listen!” I cried. “We will be okay. I will have you home by Christmas!”

THE WRECKAGE OF the Fairchild had always been a drafty and crowded shelter, but in the aftermath of the avalanche it became a truly hellish place. The snow that invaded the fuselage was so deep that we couldn’t stand; we had barely enough headroom now to crawl about the plane on hands and knees. As soon as we had the stomach for it, we stacked the dead at the rear of the plane where the snow was deepest, which left only a small clearing near the cockpit for the living to sleep. We packed into that space—nineteen of us now, jammed into an area that might have comfortably accommodated four—with no choice but to squeeze together, our knees, feet, and elbows tangled in a nightmare version of a scrum.

I felt their hopes were flickering, and I couldn’t blame them. We had suffered so much, and the signs were so bad: despite his brave resistance, Rafael was dead. Our escape to the east had failed. Two attempts to climb the mountains to the west had ended in near disaster. It seemed that every door we tried to walk through was slammed in our faces. Yes, they agreed, we should try the radio. But none of them seemed to see any reason to expect that it would work.

Numa was one of the strongest and most selfless of all the survivors, and he had battled as bravely as anyone to keep us all alive. But now that he could battle for us no longer, and had only himself to care for, he seemed to be losing heart. One night I sat beside him and tried to raise his spirits.

We didn’t know, for example, that the Fairchild’s altimeter was wrong; the crash site wasn’t at seven thousand feet, as we thought, but close to twelve thousand. Nor did we know that the mountain we were about to challenge was one of the highest in the Andes, soaring to the height of nearly seventeen thousand feet, with slopes so steep and difficult they would test a team of expert climbers.

Luckily, we knew nothing, and our ignorance provided our only chance.

Then I heard the calm voice in my head, the voice that had steadied me in so many moments of crisis. “You are drowning in distances,” it said. “Cut the mountain down to size.” I knew what I had to do. Ahead of me on the slope was a large rock. I decided I would forget about the summit and make that rock my only goal. I trudged for it, but like the summit it seemed to recede from me as I climbed. I knew then that I was being tricked by the mountain’s huge scale of reference. With nothing on those vast empty slopes to give me perspective—no houses, no people, no trees—a rock that seemed ten feet wide and a hundred yards away might really be ten times larger and more than a mile distant. Still, I climbed toward the rock without resting, and when I finally got there I picked another landmark and started all over again.

I promised myself I would not think of the future. I would live from moment to moment and from breath to breath, until I had used up all the life I had.

It dawned on me slowly that there was no more mountain above me. I had reached the top. I don’t remember if I felt any joy or sense of achievement in that moment. If I did, it vanished as soon as I glanced around. The summit gave me an unobstructed 360-degree view of creation. From here I could see the horizon circling the world like the rim of a colossal bowl, and in every direction off into the fading blue distance, the bowl was crowded with legions of snow-covered mountains, each as steep and forbidding as the one I had just climbed. I understood immediately that the Fairchild’s copilot had been badly mistaken. We had not passed Curicó. We were nowhere near the western limits of the Andes. Our plane had fallen somewhere in the middle of the vast cordillera.

Roberto stood beside me. I saw the fear in his eyes, but I also saw the courage, and I instantly forgave him all the weeks of arrogance and bullheadedness. “We may be walking to our deaths,” I said, “but I would rather walk to meet my death than wait for it to come to me.” Roberto nodded. “You and I are friends, Nando,” he said. “We have been through so much. Now let’s go die together.” We walked to the western lip of the summit, eased ourselves over the edge, and began to make our way down.

each step I took was a step stolen back from death.

“The sun will come up tomorrow,” he told me, “and the day after that, and the day after that. Don’t let this be the most important thing that ever happens to you. Look forward,” he said. “You will have a future. You will live a life.”

Some people even went so far as to tell me that they envied me for my experience in the Andes, and wished they had been there with me. I didn’t know how to explain to them that there was no glory in those mountains. It was all ugliness and fear and desperation, and the obscenity of watching so many innocent people die.

Two and a half years later my daughter Cecilia was born after only five and a half months of pregnancy. She weighed only two and three-quarters pounds, and spent the first two months of her life in intensive care. There were many nights when the doctors told us to prepare for the worst, that we should go home and pray, and each of those nights was another Andes for me. But Veronique spent hours at the hospital every day, caressing our baby, speaking to her softly, coaxing her back to life, and slowly Cecilia grew stronger.

WHEN MY FELLOW survivors and I first returned from the mountains, our parents and teachers, worried that we’d been scarred by the horrors we’d faced, asked us to visit a therapist. As a group, we said no. We knew we had one another’s support, and for me that has always been enough.

Of all the survivors, Javier is most convinced that it was the hand of God that led us out of the mountains. Once he wrote to me: God gave us life again in the mountain and made us brothers. When we considered that you were dead, He brought you back to life, so that afterwards together with Roberto you became His messengers in search of the salvation of all of us. I am so sure, that for some moments He carried you both in his arms …

I shared with them what I suddenly realized was the true lesson of my ordeal: It wasn’t cleverness or courage or any kind of competence or savvy that saved us, it was nothing more than love, our love for each other, for our families, for the lives we wanted so desperately to live. Our suffering in the Andes had swept away everything trivial and unimportant. Each of us realized, with a clarity that is hard to describe, that the only crucial thing in life is the chance to love and be loved. In our families, in our futures, we already had everything we needed. The sixteen of us who were lucky enough to return to our lives will never forget this. No one should forget this.

We all, at times, face hopelessness and despair. We all experience grief, abandonment, and crushing loss.

“We all have our own personal Andes,”

Nando can be contacted at nando1@parrado.com