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

by Nando Parrado

Through the windows on the right side of the fuselage, I gazed at the mountains, which thundered up from the dry plateau below us like a black mirage, so bleak and majestic, so astonishingly vast and huge, that the simple sight of them made my heart race. Rooted in massive swells of bedrock with colossal bases that spread for miles, their black ridges soared up from the flatlands, one peak crowding the next, so that they seemed to form a colossal fortress wall. I was not a poetically inclined young man, but there seemed to be a warning in the great authority with which these mountains held their ground, and it was impossible not to think of them as living things, with minds and hearts and an old brooding awareness. No wonder the ancients thought of these mountains as holy places, as the doorstep to heaven, and as the dwelling place of the gods.

was Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere and one of the seven tallest on the planet. With a summit of 22,831 feet, it stands just 6,200 feet shy of Everest, and it has giants for neighbors, including the 22,000-foot Mount Mercedario, and Mount Tupongato, which stands 21,555 feet tall. Surrounding these behemoths are other great peaks with elevations of between 16,000 and 20,000 feet, which no one in those wild reaches had ever bothered to name.

The remarkable thing is this: at the very moment of success you cannot isolate your own individual effort from the effort of the entire scrum. You cannot tell where your strength ends and the efforts of the others begin. In a sense, you no longer exist as an individual human being. For a brief moment you forget yourself. You become part of something larger and more powerful than you yourself could be. Your effort and your will vanishes into the collective will of the team, and if this will is unified and focused, the team surges forward and the scrum magically begins to move.

No other sport gives you such an intense sense of selflessness and unified purpose.

A good life isn’t plucked from the sky. You build a life up from the ground, with hard work and clear thinking. Things make sense. There are rules and realities that will not change to suit your needs. It’s your job to understand those rules. If you do, and if you work hard and work smart, you will be all right.

sigh. I was too depressed and confused to see it at the time, but it seemed my mind was racing through the stages of grief at breakneck speed.

The mountains were forcing me to change. My mind was growing colder and simpler as it adjusted to my new reality. I began to see life as it must appear to an animal struggling to survive—as a simple game of win or lose, life or death, risk and opportunity.

Perhaps I didn’t want to speak my feelings out loud because I feared that would make them real.

When hope is lost, the mind protects us with denial, and my denial protected me from facing what I knew.

He was not afraid to question any of the rules of conventional society, or to condemn our system of government and economics, which he believed served the powerful at the expense of the weak.

“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.”

So I would teach myself to live in constant uncertainty, moment by moment, step by step. 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.

years. I had sensed it the first time I gazed at this place: we had upset an ancient balance, and balance would have to be restored. It was all around me, in the silence, in the cold. Something wanted all that perfect silence back again; something in the mountain wanted us to be still.

The mountain was teaching me a hard lesson: camaraderie is a noble thing, but in the end death is an opponent each of us would face in solitude.

In that moment all my dreams, assumptions, and expectations of life evaporated into the thin Andean air. I had always thought that life was the actual thing, the natural thing, and that death was simply the end of living. Now, in this lifeless place, I saw with a terrible clarity that death was the constant, death was the base, and life was only a short, fragile dream. I was dead already. I had been born dead, and what I thought was my life was just a game death let me play as it waited to take me.

Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that? How does anyone miss that? Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear.

“Roberto,” I said, “can you imagine how beautiful this would be if we were not dead men?” I felt his hand wrap around mine. He was the only person who understood the magnitude of what we had done and of what we still had to do. I knew he was as frightened as I was, but I drew strength from our closeness. We were bonded now like brothers. We made each other better men.

snow—penitentes, as geologists call them—carved at the bases of snowy slopes by swirling wind.

Sometimes I watched my shadow gliding beside me on the snow, and used it as proof that I was real, I was here. But often I felt like a ghost on those moonlit snowfields, a spirit trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead, guided by nothing more than will and memory, and an indestructible longing for home.

The Andes took so much from me, I explain, but they also gave me the simple insight that has liberated me and illuminated my life: Death is real, and death is very near. In the mountains, there was never a minute that I did not feel death at my side, but the moment I stood on the summit of the mountain, and saw nothing but towering peaks as far as the eye could see, was the moment all my doubts were swept away and the certainty of my own death became viscerally real. The realness of death stole my breath away, but at the same time I burned more brightly with life than I ever had before, and in the face of total hopelessness I felt a burst of joy. The realness of death was so clear and so potent that for a moment it burned away everything temporary and false. Death had shown its face, dark, predatory, invincible, and for a split second it seemed that beneath the fragile illusions of life, death was all there is. But then I saw that there was something in the world that was not death, something just as awesome and enduring and profound. There was love, the love in my heart, and for one incredible moment, as I felt this love swell—love for my father, for my future, for the simple wonder of being alive—death lost its power. In that moment, I stopped running from death. Instead, I made every step a step toward love, and that saved me. I have never stopped moving toward love.

It seemed to reach me through my own feelings of love, and I have often thought that when we feel what we call love, we are really feeling our connection to this awesome presence.

according to some divine plan, as if we were characters in a play. How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain?

what it means. I simply like the way it makes me feel. When I pray this way, I feel as if I am connected to something good and whole and powerful. In the mountains, it was love that kept me connected to the world of the living. Courage or cleverness wouldn’t have saved me.

My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love.

I have suffered great losses and have been blessed with great consolations, but whatever life may give me or take away, this is the simple wisdom that will always light my life: I have loved, passionately, fearlessly, with all my heart and all my soul, and I have been loved in return. For me, this is enough.

For me, the true miracle is that by living so long beneath the shadow of death, we learned in the most vivid and transforming way exactly what it means to be alive.

But in its essence—the essence of human emotion—it is the most familiar story in the world. We all, at times, face hopelessness and despair. We all experience grief, abandonment, and crushing loss. And all of us, sooner or later, will face the inevitable nearness of death. As I hugged that sad woman, a phrase formed on my lips. “We all have our own personal Andes,” I told her.

They are seeing, in my story, their own struggles and fears made real against a surreal backdrop, on an epic scale. The story chills them but also encourages them, because they see that even in the face of the cruelest kind of suffering, and against all odds, an ordinary person can endure. It satisfies me deeply that so many can find strength and comfort in the things I have to say, but they have given me much in return. They have shown me that there is more to my story than grief and meaningless tragedy. By using my suffering as a source of inspiration and reassurance they have helped heal my wounded memories. I saw that my mother, my sister, and the others did not die in vain, and that our suffering really does add up to something important, to some kind of wisdom, that can touch the hearts of human beings across the planet.

“Even here, even as we suffer, life is still worth living.…”

“Breathe. Breathe again. With every breath, you are alive.” After all these years, this is still the best advice I can give you: Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.