Grave And Memorial, The Valley Of Tears
It’s difficult for me to believe that it has been ten years since I posted a diary marking the 40th anniversary of these remarkable events, and yet it was indeed 50 years ago today, Friday, October 13, 1972, that a Uruguayan Air Force Fairchild turboprop chartered by the Stella Maris school’s alumni rugby team was crossing the Argentine portion of the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile.
Much of this diary will be a summary of that story as I related it 10 years ago. I’ve added updates as well as reviews of additional books I’ve read that were written by the survivors, and I will also be linking to stories from today’s newspapers and websites as I find them. You’ll find those links towards the end.
Flying through heavy clouds and turbulence, Flight 451 clipped two mountains, breaking off first one, then the other wing. As the right wing swept back it severed the plane’s tail, sending five passengers to their death. The wingless fuselage hurtled forward silently, landing on a mountainside glacier and sliding hundreds of feet before coming to a stop over two miles above sea level. Upon coming to rest the plane’s seats tore loose, hurtling forward and crushing many passengers against the cabin bulkhead.
Many died upon impact or shortly afterwards. Within days only 27 of the original 45 passengers remained alive. The team’s doctor had been killed upon impact, leaving a first year medical student, Gustavo Zerbino, and a second year medical student, Roberto Canessa, to fashion splints from the plane’s wreckage, and douse gaping wounds with aftershave in an effort to prevent infection.
The survivors, most of whom had never seen snow, were ill-equipped to deal with a record winter snowfall of over sixty feet. On their way to play an exhibition match, they had packed only light clothing. They improvised snow goggles from the plane’s sun visors and bent aluminum from the plane's fuselage to melt snow into drinking water. In order to walk without sinking deep into the snow, they used the plane’s seat cushions as snowshoes, although these quickly became saturated and unusable.
There was no vegetation at the crash site. The survivors ate cosmetics that the plane’s few female passengers carried, as well as toothpaste. Leather luggage was cut into strips and eaten, and seat cushions were ripped open in the hopes of finding straw to eat, but they were stuffed with plastic foam.
In his book Miracle In The Andes: 72 Days On The Mountain And My Long Trek Home, Nando Parrado wrote of how he made his last bit of food, a chocolate covered peanut, last for three days.
On the first day I slowly sucked the chocolate off the peanut, then I slipped the peanut into the pocket of my slacks. On the second day I carefully separated the peanut halves, slipping one half back into my pocket and placing the other half in my mouth. I sucked gently on the peanut for hours, allowing myself only a tiny nibble now and then. I did the same on the third day, and when I’d finally nibbled the peanut down to nothing, there was no food left at all
Eventually the survivors decided that their only chance of remaining alive was to consume the flesh of their dead friends and family members. Some initially refused to do so, while the others choked down matchstick sized slivers of flesh dried on the airplane’s fuselage. Some convinced themselves to do it by likening the act to Holy Communion. They formed a pact, agreeing that if any one of them died the others had not only their permission, but their encouragement to use their bodies to keep themselves alive.
Three nations engaged in an aerial search, but the last of these was called off after ten days, the people on the mountain learning of this via a transistor radio. Other planes had previously crashed in the Andes, and no one had ever been rescued alive.
On the evening of October 29th, sixteen days after the crash, as the survivors huddled in the remnants of the fuselage against temperatures that reached -40 F, an avalanche swept over the plane, filling it with snow and killing another eight people.
Over the next several weeks the survivors mounted trial expeditions with small groups attempting to hike out of the cordillera in which they were trapped. None were successful, though on one sojourn the tail section of the plane was discovered, affording some additonal clothing from the luggage inside and a few slats of wood from Coca Cola crates that could be burned. Attempts were made to connect the batteries from the plane’s tail section to the cockpit radio, but to no fruition.
After over two months on the glacier, the survivors’ numbers having dwindled to sixteen, Roberto Canessa, Nando Parrado, and Antonio Vizintin, with no mountain climbing experience or equipment, spent several days successfully ascending one of the surrounding peaks. Looking to the other side they saw not the green valleys of Chile they’d hoped for but only more and more mountains. It was decided that Vizintin would give his supplies to the two others and return to the plane. The next day, before beginning their descent of the mountain’s other side, Canessa turned to Parrado and said “You and I are friends, Nando. We have been through so much. Now, let’s go die together.”
For ten days they climbed and hiked 44 miles eventually reaching vegetation and finding an old tin can. Garbage...a sign of civilization. They were near collapse when they spotted a Chilean cattle herder named Sergio Catalan on the other side of a raging snow melt. It was the following day before they were able to meet up with Catalan, who fed them and gave them shelter before riding ten hours on horseback to alert authorities. Catalan’s son described the two men as looking like “walking skeletons” and having “A smell of the graveyard.”
The Chilean Army’s rescue helicopters nearly crashed attempting to reach the plane’s wreckage. The thin air caused their engines to lose power and diminished the rotors’ effectiveness, and strong winds coming across the peaks tossed them back downwards repeatedly. In two day’s time they were able to bring everyone out of the cordillera.
On December 23rd, more than ten weeks after the Fairchild’s disappearance, news spread that 16 of its occupants were alive and had been rescued. They suffered from malnutrition, mineral deficiencies, broken bones and skull fractures, as well as burned lips and infections. Roy Harley, who is 6’1” tall, weighed 80 lbs. when he was airlifted off the mountains. Weight loss among them ranged from 30 to 80 pounds.
The rescued survivors had originally hoped to meet privately with the families of those who had died, but shortly after news of the rescue broke a Peruvian newspaper revealed that their survival had been dependent upon anthropophagy. While the Catholic church dismissed the survivors’ comparisons with the Eucharist, church officials were quick to affirm that such acts in extremis were acceptable, and that the sin would have been to not do what was necessary in order to survive. Pope Paul VI sent both a blessing telegram and a congratulatory telegram, saying that they had acted like true Christians.
In the fifty years since these remarkable events, the survivors have led full and complete lives. Roberto Canessa is a prominent pediatric cardiologist and once formed his own political party and ran for the presidency of Uruguay. Nando Parrado spent time as a professional race car driver, and today owns a number of businesses.
This is not to imply that they resumed their lives untroubled. Some spent decades unable to bring themselves to even speak of the experience with anyone other than their fellow survivors. Roberto Canessa used to have a YouTube channel dedicated to his promotion of youth rugby. Each video was preceded by a brief piece on the crash and rescue and in one of them his wife recounted how wonderful it was to have her rescued fiancé and the others back, but that in a sense it was like they weren’t back, “Because they were all very different and they cried all the time.”
Many years after the crash, as some survivors began being approached for paid speaking appearances, they used some of the proceeds to start their own foundation, the Vivien Foundation, to assist poor Uruguayan communities and later to promote organ donation. Unfortunately the foundation’s website appears to be no longer operable.
In 2010, when 33 Chilean miners were trapped underground in the Copiapó mine disaster, four of the Uruguayan Andes survivors travelled to the mine with messages of support from Uruguayan children.
The survivors gather each year on the anniversary of the crash, as they will do today for a mass at their old school, then again on the anniversary of the avalanche, and then finally on the anniversary of their rescue. Many of them have visited the crash site, as well as the nearby grave of their teammates, friends, and family members, on multiple occasions. On the 40th anniversary they reunited with Sergio Catalan in Chile. The former Old Christian teammates played rugby against members of the Old Grangonian Club, the team they had been on their way to play when the plane went down.
One of the survivors, Javier Methol, passed away in 2015. He and his wife had been among the few older adults on the plane to survive the crash, but his wife perished 16 days later in the avalanche.
Sergio Catalan, the Chilean herder who found the emaciated Parrado and Canessa and then rode ten hours to alert authorities, passed away in 2020.
Over two dozen books have been written about the ordeal, and several movies have been made. Wikipedia has a very good summary, and I strongly recommend the 2007 documentary Stranded: I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed In The Mountains.
Many of the survivors were opposed to cooperating with any book about their experience, but others pointed out that their story was going to be told inevitably, and they could sit by and see it told in an exploitative and false manner, or they could take the initiative in an effort to prevent that from happening. In 1974 they chose author Piers Paul Read to chronicle their story. His book, Alive, is a thorough overview of their experience, as well as that of their families and loved ones as they pooled resources, hired their own aircraft, and even contacted psychics, to try to find the lost plane. In 1993 the book was adapted into a movie featuring Ethan Hawke among others. I do not recommend the movie because, among other reasons, it unnecessarily fictionalizes the story. Roberto Canessa is certainly not a fan.
The movie is from Disney, it's what Donald Duck does. If you put in the movie what really happened on the mountain, you have to get up and go, because we slept in a cemetery surrounded by the dead
It is certainly preferable however to the 1976 Mexican film Survive, a low budget unauthorized production that was later distributed in the USA by producer Allan Carr.
It was not until I read Nando Parrado’s book that I began to truly “wrap my head around” this extraordinary story. It is a tale so alien to normal experience, so foreign, that I found it took the very personal narrative of Parrado for me to even begin to grasp it.
The book is difficult to read at times, as people are subjected to horrors that no human should have to face. It is also a gripping adventure story, thought-provoking in its insight as to how the individuals involved regarded their experiences as relating to the nature and existence of God, and inspiring as Parrado and the others first battle to stay alive in their snowy Hell, and then build lives for themselves after the rescue. If you visit Amazon’s page for the book and read the comments, you will not have to go far before reading messages from people who state they have had their lives changed, and even saved, by this extraordinary book. I reread it every few years, and I’ve begun to give it as a gift to my loved ones on their birthdays. I can’t begin to do justice in this essay to this remarkable story of the human spirit. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
NEWS (Some sites will be in Spanish. translate.google.com can be used)
Article from Chilean news source on today’s anniversary.
News site posts numerous photos on 50th anniversary.
29 Died, 16 Lived. Scroll down for graphic detailing who they were.
Last week Uruguay unveiled a 50th anniversary stamp and coin.
LINKS
Wikipedia page. Lengthy and detailed entry. Also contains links to Canessa, Parrado, and other survivors.
Official website. Resource rich site that unfortunately does not appear to have been updated in some time.
Andes 1972 Museum. Opened in October of 2013 in Montevideo.
Alpine Expeditions. In 2005 Colorado based mountaineer Ricardo Peña discovered a tattered jacket near the site of the Fairchild plane crash. Inside was a wallet belonging to survivor Eduardo Strauch. This led to the forming of a friendship between the two men and eventually a business offering tours to the area. Accessing the memorial at the base of the Valley of Tears (which is done only during the Summer) involves a day’s journey by 4X4 followed by two days on horseback. Depending on conditions properly certified mountain climbers may then ascend to the site of where the fuselage came to rest (the wreckage itself having been incinerated by the Chilean military shortly after rescue to discourage souvenir hunters.)
NPR interview with Eduardo Strauch on the publication of his book, Out Of The Silence.
Stranded: I’ve Come From A Plane That Crashed In The Mountains. Extraordinary, award winning 2007 documentary directed by Gonzalo Arijón, working with cinematographer César Charlone (City Of God, The Constant Gardener.) Charlone was supposed to be on the flight, but missed the plane.
BOOKS (I’ve linked to Amazon for informational purposes but by all means try your library or another bookseller if you can.)
Alive, by Piers Paul Read. Definitive overview, focusing on the experiences of both the plane's passengers and their families.
Miracle In The Andes, 72 Days On The Mountain And My Long Trek Home, by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause. If you read only one book about these events, make it this one.
I Had To Survive. How A Plane Crash Inspired My Calling To Save Lives, By Dr. Roberto Canessa. The story as recounted by the other person who along with Parrado undertook a 10 day trek which led to the rescue of the survivors, interspersed with stories from his career as a physician. I would probably recommend this after the above two books.
Out Of The Silence: After The Crash, by Eduardo Strauch. Eduardo Strauch and his cousins, referred to as “The Germans” by the others in the group, are major figures in the story. Eduardo, at age 24 and a bit older than the others, assumed a leadership position. It was he who thought to fashion pieces from the plane’s aluminum fuselage into a device to melt snow and collect the water for drinking. This is the shortest book I’ve read regarding the story, but that is because it is less a recounting of the events as they unfolded, and more of a spiritual book. I found it deeply moving.
Into The Mountains: The Extraordinary True Story Of Survival In The Andes And Its Aftermath, by Pedro Algorta. Unlike most of the survivors, Algorta came to live most of his life outside Uruguay. He writes in a very warm and open style that makes you feel as though you’ve made a friend by the end of the book.
After The Tenth Day, by Carlitos Páez Rodríguez. It was on the tenth day after the crash that the survivors learned via a transistor radio that the search for their plane had been called off. Turning 19 on the mountain, Páez was the youngest survivor of the crash. Of all of them he was the only one to lead a serioiusly troubled life for a time, battling several addictions. However he attributes these struggles not to his experience on the mountain but rather to his relationship with his father, the artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, who was a contemporary and friend of Picasso. His book, a rather disjointed hodgepodge of thoughts, was a disappointment, due not in the least to a very poor translation into English. Nonetheless, if you can read the letters he wrote to his mother, father, and sister, convinced for good reason that he would never live to see them again, and not weep….well, you’ve got a heart harder than the Andes themselves.
La Sociedad De La Nieve/The Society Of The Snow, by Pablo Vierci. Each of the 16 survivors gets a chapter to tell their story. This book has been highly recommended to me by a Uruguayan friend. Unfortunately it was never translated into English, is out of print, and used copies fetch hundreds of dollars. A documentary was adapted from the book (I only just discovered it and have not had the opportunity to watch but it looks very good,) And Netflix is making the book into a movie that will be released in 2023. In the movie Carlos Páez Rodriguez will play his father who used his wealth and connections to spearhead the families’ search for their loved ones. I am hoping that the release of the film will bring about a new English translation of the book.
