The Mountain That Would Not Forget
The radio crackled to life on Day 4. A faint voice: "Search suspended. No signs of survivors. All hope lost."
And he wept.
For ten days, they climbed. They slept on ledges no wider than a coffin. They drank snow. They ate the last strips of frozen human meat. At the summit of the first peak, Nando looked back: the wreckage was a silver speck. Then he looked forward: nothing but white mountains to the horizon.
Roberto Canessa, the medical student, was the first to speak the unthinkable. "There is meat out there. It's human. But it's protein. It's life." Searching for- Society of the snow in-All Categ...
Of the 45 people on board, 12 died instantly or within hours. The survivors—29 of them—huddled in the broken shell of the plane, which had slid to a stop on a glacier at 3,570 meters (11,700 feet). The cold was a living thing, a predator with teeth of frost.
On October 13, 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 was a ribbon of metal and hope cutting through the Andes. Inside, the Old Christians rugby team, their friends, and family laughed, sang, and tossed crumpled paper balls at each other. They were young. They were invincible. Nando Parrado was showing a photograph of his mother and sister to a friend. Roberto Canessa, a medical student, was dozing, dreaming of the sea. The Mountain That Would Not Forget The radio
Everyone thought he was mad. The peaks were 4,600 meters high. They had no gear, no map, no food. And they were starving, freezing, dying.