Miracle in the Andes 
Few of us had ever seen snow. None of us had ever set foot in the mountains. -41
Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
Selected Excerpts
Outstanding. If you liked Alive you will love this book, which reflects 30 years of meditation on the meaning of what he went through, as told from the first person perspective of one of the two survivors who walked 10 days to save his life and that of the 14 survivors waiting behind at the fuselage. Absolutely hands down the greatest survival story I have ever encountered. Shackleton's comes close, and in some ways deserves the nod because no one perished thanks to extraordinary leadership, perseverance, and luck, but Shackleton's Antarctic expedition was a well-supplied group of volunteers who knew what they were getting in for. Surviving a plane crash in street clothes then walking out in those same clothes, climbing a mountain experienced mountain climbers with full gear would find treacherous and demanding, THAT is astonishing.
I am particularly grateful for Nando Parrado's reflections on the meaning of his experience and how this shaped his view of God and his role in the universe. Scroll down to the final passages excerpted below for those reflections. They are quite moving in their simplicity and honesty.
45 people were on board including
4 crew members - pilot, copilot, mechanic, and steward
16 survived
After the crash:
"I am alive," I whispered to [my father], "I am alive." -40
Few of us had ever seen snow. None of us had ever set foot in the mountains. -41
I could not help myself from being swept away by the awesome grandeur all around us. There was incredible beauty here -- in the hugeness and power of the mountains, in the windswept snowfields that glowed so perfectly white, and in the astounding beauty of the Andean sky. As I looked up now, the sky was cloudless, and it crackled with an iridescent shade of cold, deep blue. It's eerie beauty left me awestruck, but like everything else here, the vastness and emptiness of that endless sky made me feel small and lost and impossibly far from home. In this primeval world, with its crushing scale, its lifeless beauty and its strange silence, I felt awkwardly out of joint with reality in the most fundamental sense, and that scared me more than anything, because I knew in my gut that our survival here would depend on our ability to react to challenges and catastrophes we could not now even imagine. We were playing a game against an unknown and unforgiving component. The stakes were terrible -- play well or die -- but we didn't even know the ground rules. -51
Because I blacked out in the earliest stages of the accident, I had no recollection of anything until I came to my senses three days later. But most of the other survivors had been conscious for every second of the disaster, and as they recounted the details of the crash, and the desperate days that followed, I realized it was a miracle that any of us were alive.-51
[when the plane struck the mountain] it landed on its belly and began to rocket down the snow-covered mountainside like a toboggan. Passengers screamed and prayed out loud as the fuselage raced down the slope at a speed of 200 mph for a distance of more than 400 yards, finding a fortunate path between the boulders and rocky outcrops that studded the mountain befor slamming into a huge snow berm and coming to a sudden, violent stop. The forces of the collision were huge. The Fairchild's nose was crumpled like a paper cup. In the passenger cabin, seats were ripped loose from the floor of the fuselage and hurled forward along with the people sitting in them, and dashed against the cockpit bulkhead. -53We had crashed at 3:30 in the afternoon. He guessed it would be four o'clock before officials could confirm that the plane was missing. -57
45 passengers and crew members had been onboard the Fairchild. There were five known dead at the crash site.
8 were unaccounted for, although the survivors felt certain that one of them, Carlos Valeta, was dead.
32 people [were left] alive at the crash site. -59
Liliana Methol was the only uninjured one survivor… the rest packed into a cramped space on the litter strewn floor of the fuselage that measured no more than 8 x 10' square. -59
45 -- 32 -- 29 (day three)
The youngest survivor was 17; the oldest was 38. -62
I wanted so badly to trust in God as they did. But God had already taken my mother and Pacheco and so many others. Why would he save us and not them in the same way, I wanted to believe rescue was coming, but I could not chase away the gnawing sense that we were on our own… No one will find this. We will die here. We must make a plan. We must save ourselves. -65
We dragged [my sister] Suzy to a spot in the snow to the left of the fuselage of the other dead were buried. Frozen corpses were clearly visible, their faces obscured by only a few inches of ice and snow. I stood above one of the graves, and easily made out a hazy shade of my mother's blue dress. I dug a shallow grave for Suzy next to my mother…
After we finished, the others walked back inside the fuselage. I turned and looked up the slope of the glacier, to the ridges of mountains blocking our path to the west. I could see the wide path the Fairchild had cut into the snow as it skied down the slope after clipping the ridge.... How could this happen? We were boys on our way to play a game!
Suddenly I was struck by a sickening sense of emptiness. Since my first moments on the mountain I had spent all my time and energy caring for my sister. Comforting her had given me purpose and stability. It had filled my hours and distracted me from my own pain and fear. Now I was so terribly alone, with nothing to distance me from the awful circumstances that surrounded me. My mother was dead. My sister was dead. My best friends had fallen from the plane in flight, or were buried here beneath the snow. We were injured, hungry, and freezing. More than a week had passed, and still the rescuers had not found us. I felt the brute power of the mountains gathered around me, saw the complete absence of warmth or mercy or softness in the landscape. As I understood, with a stinging clarity, how far we were from home, I sank into despair, and for the first time I knew with certainty I would die. -71
I decided I would not quit. I decided I would suffer a little longer.... for a moment I felt [my father] with me. An eerie calmness settled over me. I stared at the great mountains to the west, and imagined a path leading over them and back to my home.... staring West, I made a silent vow to my father. I will struggle. I will come home. I will not let the bond between us be broken. I promise you, I will not die here! I will not die here! -72
A past that was already beginning to feel distant and unreal. 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... my entire existence seemed to revolve around the two new organizing principles of my life: the chilling apprehension that I was going to die, and the searing need to be with my father....
it produced in me a manic urge to flee. -77
Marcelo, a deeply devout Catholic, began to rely more and more upon the beliefs that had always shaped his life. "God loves us," he would say. "Only to turn his back on us and allow us to die needless deaths."... I wanted to believe in Marcelo so badly, but as time passed I could not silence the doubts that were growing in my mind. -77
After Suzy's death, 27 survivors remained. -80
Arturo was different from the rest of us. For one thing, he was a passionate socialist, and his uncompromising views of capitalism and the pursuit of personal wealth made him something of an oddball in the world of affluence and privilege in which most of us had been raised.... as I got to understand him a little, I began to admire his way of thinking.... what fascinated me about Arturo was the seriousness with which he lived his life and the fierce passion with which he had learned to think for himself. Important things matter to Arturo, matters of equality, justice, compassion, and fairness. 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 week.
Arturo's strong opinions bothered many of the others, and often led to angry arguments at night concerning history or politics or current affairs, but I always wanted to hear what Arturo had to say, and I was especially intrigued by his thoughts about religion. Like most of the other survivors, I had been raised as a traditional Catholic, and though I was no one's idea of a devout practitioner, I never doubted the fundamental teachings of the church. Talking with Arturo, however, forced me to confront my religious beliefs, and to examine principles and values I had never questioned.
"How can you be so sure that of all the sacred books in the world, the one you were taught to believe in is the only authentic word of God?" He would ask. "How do you know that your idea of God is the only one that's true? We are a Catholic country because the Spanish came and conquered the Indians here, then they replace the God of the Indians with Jesus Christ. If the Moors had conquered South America, we would all be praying to Mohammed instead of Jesus."
Arturo's ideas to start me, but his thinking was compelling. And it fascinated me that despite all his religious skepticism, he was a very spiritual person, who sensed my anger at God, and urged me not to turn away from him because of our suffering.
"What good is God to us?" I replied. "Why would he let my mother and sister dies so senselessly? If he loves us so much, why does he leave us here to suffer?"
"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 forgive 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 his will 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 for 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…. If you have the balls to doubt God, and to question all the things you have been taught about him, then you may find God for real. He is close to us, Nando, I feel him all around us. Open your eyes and you will see him, too."
I looked at Arturo, this ardent young socialista lying in his hammock with his legs broken like sticks and his eyes shining with faith and encouragement, and I felt a strong surge of affection for him. His words moved me deeply. How did such a young man come to know himself so well? Talking with Arturo forced me to face the fact that I had never taken my own life seriously.... I laughed sadly to myself, thinking, if there is a God, and if he wanted my attention, he certainly has it now. -85
no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world. -89
The cold was always our greatest agony, and in the earliest days of the ordeal, the greatest threat we faced was thirst. 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 lead mountain air, the body forces itself to breathe very rapidly. This is an involuntary reaction often you can't just standing still. Increased inhalations bring more oxygen into the bloodstream, but each time you breathe then 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. -91
At high altitude, the body's core expertise are astronomical. A climber scaling any of the mountains surrounding the crash site would have required as many as 15,000 calories a day simply to maintain his current body weight. -94
Sometimes I would rise from a long silence to shout out loud in my frustration: "there is nothing in this fxxxing 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… 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 in polls certain primitive it shocked me.... once that door had been opened, it couldn't be closed, and from that moment on my mind was never far from the frozen bodies under the snow. I knew those bodies represented our only chance for survival, but I was so horrified by what I was thinking that I kept my feelings quiet…
we all reached forward, joined hands, and pledge that if any of us died here, the rest would have permission to use our bodies for food…
eating the flesh did not satisfy my hunger, but it calmed my mind. I knew that my body would use the proteins strengthen itself and slow the process of starvation. That night, for the first time since the crash, I felt a small flickering of hope… we all knew our fight for survival would be uglier and more harrowing than we had imagined, but I felt, that as a group, we had made a declaration to the mountain that they would not surrender, and for myself, I knew that in a small, sad way, I had taken my first step back toward my father. -99
But then I understood: Marcello had been broken not because his mind was weak, but because it was too strong. His faith in the rescue was absolute and unyielding: God would not abandon us. The authorities would never leave us here to die.
When he heard the news that the search had been canceled, it must have felt to Marcello like the earth beneath his feet had begun to crumble. God had turned his back, the world has been turned upside down... I suddenly understood in that awful place, too much certainty could kill us; ordinary civilized thinking could cost us our lives. I vowed to myself that I would never pretend to understand these mountains. I would never get trapped by my own expectations. I would never pretend to know what might happen next. The rules here were too savage and strange, and I knew I could never imagine the hardships, setbacks, and horrors that might lie ahead. 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. -112
As the days passed, we became more efficient at processing the meat.... on the rare occasion when we had a fire they even cooked it, which improved its taste dramatically.... to make the food last even longer, we eventually began to eat the kidneys, livers, and even the hearts. These internal organs were highly nutritious, and as grisly as it may sound, by this point in the ordeal, most of us had grown numb to the horror of friends being butchered like cattle.
Still, eating human flesh never satisfied my hunger, and it never gave me back my strength. -118
But what did it matter I was a dead man already. Why not die in the mountains, fighting for each step, so that when I died, I would die one step closer to home? -119
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 warm, golden light, and for the first time since the plane had crashed, I was certain I would survive. In excitement, I will be others.
"Guys, listen!" I cried. "We will be okay. I will have you home by Christmas!"
None of us had died since our eighth day on the mountain… we had passed the point of crisis. Things seemed more stable.... perhaps all 27 of us were destined to survive…-129
[October 29: Avalanche. Late at night, Nando spoke with Liliana, who lay next to him.] "But why would God save us and let the others die?"…
"there is no way to understand God or his logic," she replied.
"Then why should we trust him?" I asked. "What about all the Jews who died in concentration camps?" I said "what about all the innocents killed in plagues and purges and natural disasters? Why would he turn his back on them, but still find time for us?"
De Leon aside, and I felt the warmth of her breath on my face. "You are getting too complicated," she said with softness in her voice. "All we can do is love God and love others and trust in God's will."…
[the avalanche struck]
At first the pressure in my chest was unbearable, but as my awareness dimmed, I stopped noticing the discomfort. My thoughts grew calm and lucid. "This is my death," I told myself. "Now I will see what lies on the other side." I felt no strong emotion. I didn't try to shout or struggle. I simply waited, and as I accepted my helplessness, a sense of peace overtook me. I waited patiently for my life to end. There were no angels, no revelations, there was no long time of leading to a golden loving light. Instead, I sensed only the same black silence I had fallen into when the Fairchild hit the mountain [and he was in a coma for three days]…
Javier was kneeling beside me, with Liliana in his arms. I knew from the way her arms and head hung limply but she was dead. I shook my head in disbelief as Javier began to sob. "No," I said flatly. "No." As if I could argue with what had just happened. As if I could refuse to allow it to be real…
Diego Storm, who, on the third day of the ordeal, had saved my life by dragging me into the warmth of the fuselage while I still lay in a coma, had suffocated under the snow. And Liliana, who, just moments earlier, had spoken such kind words of comfort to me, was also gone…
It is hard to describe the depths of the despair that fell upon us in the wake of the avalanche. The deaths of our friends staggered us. We have allowed ourselves to believe that we had passed the point of danger, but now we saw that we would never be safe in this place. The mountain could kill us in so many ways. But tortured me most was the capriciousness of death. How could I make sense of this? Daniel Maspons had been sleeping only inches to my right. Liliana had been just as close on my left. Both were dead. Why them and not me? Was I stronger? Smarter? Better prepared? The answer was clear: Daniel at Liliana wanted to live as much as I did, they were just as strong as they fought just as hard to survive, but their fate was decided by a simple stroke of bad luck -- they chose their spots to sleep that night, and that decision killed them. I thought of my mother and Suzy choosing their seats on the plane. I thought of Panchito switching seats with me just moments before the crash. The arbitrariness of all these deaths outraged me, but it frightened me, too, because if death here was so senseless and random, nothing, no amount of coverage or planning or determination, could protect me from it. -130-134
There were 19 of us now. -134
"Nando, I want you to remember, even in this place, our lives have meaning. Our suffering is not for nothing. Even if we are trapped here forever, we can love our families, and God, and each other as long as we live. Even in this place, our lives are worth living." Arturo's face was lit with a serene intensity when he said this. I kept my silence, for fear that my voice would crack if I tried to speak.
"You will tell my family that I love them, won't you? That's all that matters to me now."
"You will tell them yourself," I said.
Arturo smiled at the lie. -149
Was there no rhyme or reason to our suffering? This one struggles bravely and is taken away, that one doesn't fight at all and still survives? Since the avalanche, some of the others had clung to the belief that God had seen 19 of us through that disaster because we were the ones he had chosen to survive. Rafael's passing made it harder to believe that God was paying any attention at all. -156
In the morning, I rested. The days I'd spent away from the Fairchild had given me perspective, and now I saw with fresh eyes the gruesomeness that had become a normal part of our daily lives. There were piles of bones scattered outside the fuselage. Large body parts -- someone's forearm, a human leg from head to toes -- were stored near the opening of the fuselage for easy access. Strips of fat were spread on the roof of the fuselage and dry in the sun. And for the first time I saw human skulls in the bone pile. When we first started eating human flesh, we consumed mostly small pieces of meat cut from the large muscles. But as time passed and the food supply diminished, we had no choice but to broaden our diet. For some time, we had been eating livers, kidneys, and hearts, but meat was in such short supply now that we would have to split skulls to get at the brains inside. -169
December 11, 1972 was day 60.
The crash site was an awful place, soaked in urine, smelling of death, littered with ragged bits of human bone and gristle, but to me it suddenly felt safe and warm and familiar. I wanted to stay there. How badly I wanted to stay.
"Nando," said Roberto, "it's time to go."…
we didn't know, for example, that the Fairchild's altimeter was wrong; the crash site wasn't at 7000 feet, as we thought, but close to 12,000. 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 17,000 feet, with slopes so steep and difficult they would test a team of expert climbers…. Uruguay was a warm and low-lying country. None of us had ever seen real mountains before. Prior to the crash, Roberto and Tintin had never even seen snow. If we had known anything about climbing, we'd have seen we were already doomed. Luckily, we knew nothing, and our ignorance provided our only chance. -185
Logic told us it would be wiser to climb in daylight, so we'd waited for the sun to rise. Experts, on the other hand, know that the best time for climbing is in the predawn hours, before the sun to turn the slopes to mush. -186
But something troubling was hiding behind all that beauty, something ancient and hostile and profound. I looked down the mountain to the crash site. From this altitude it was just a ragged smudge on the pristine snow. I saw how crass and out of place it seemed, how fundamentally wrong. Everything about us is wrong here -- the violence and racket of our arrival, our garish suffering, the noise and mess of our lurid struggle to survive. None of it fit here. Life did not fit here. It was all a violation of the perfect serenity that has reigned here for millions of years. I had sensed it the first time I gazed at this place: we had upset and 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. Space -188
Experts recommend that climbers ascend no more than 1000 feet per day, a rate that gives the body a chance to acclimate itself to the thinning air. We had climbed twice that in a single morning, and were making matters worse by continuing to climb when our bodies desperately needed time to rest. -189
The world was showing me how tiny I was, how weak and insignificant. And temporary. I listened to my own breathing, reminding myself that as long as I drew breath I was still alive. 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. -195
My life had collapsed to a simple game -- climb well and live, or falter and die -- and my consciousness had narrowed until there was no room in my thoughts for anything but a close and careful study of the rock I was reaching for, or the ledge on which I was about to brace my foot. Never had I felt such a sense of concentrated presence. Never had my mind experienced such a pure, uncomplicated sense of purpose…
I forgot myself in the intensity of my concentration, forgot my fears and fatigue, and for a while I felt as if everything I had ever been had disappeared, and that I was now nothing more than the pure will decline. It was a moment of pure animal exhilaration.
I had never felt so focused, so driven, so fiercely alive. For those astonishing moments, my suffering was over, my life had become pure flow. But those moments did not last.
-196.
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. -201
We made each other better men… "I would rather walk to meet my death than wait for it to come to me."
Roberto nodded. "You and I are friends," he said. "We have been through so much. Now let's go die together." -203
Even in our battered state, we were awed by the wild beauty of the Andes after dark. The skies were the deepest indigo blue, and clustered with blazing stars. Moonlight softened the rugged peaks surrounding us, and gave the snowfields and eerie glow. -211
Slowly I let it sink in I was safe; I was going to go home. I drew a long breath and then slowly, richly, I exhaled. Breathe once more, we used to say on the mountain, to encourage each other in moments of despair. As long as you breathe, you are alive. In those days, each breath was almost an act of defiance. In my 72 days in the Andes, there had not been a single breath that wasn't taken in fear. Now at last, I enjoyed the luxury of ordinary briefing.... I am alive. I am alive. I am alive. -233
I realized that except for Javier, every one of my fellow survivors was returning to a life that was just as it had been before. Many of them had lost friends in the disaster, that was true, and all of them had injured an incredible nightmare, but now, for them, it was over. Their families were intact. They would be embraced again by their parents, brothers and sisters, girlfriends. Their world would begin again, and things would be just as they were before the crash interrupted their lives. But my world had been destroyed, and the party only underscored for me how much I had lost. I would never spend another Christmas with my mother, or with Suzy. It was clear to me that my father had been shattered by the ordeal, and I wondered if he would ever again be this man I had known. I tried to share in the celebration that night, but I felt very alone. -242
I saw my photograph on the mantle, arranged with photos of my mother and Suzy in a somber memorial. I glanced out the window. Cars were passing on the street. Lights were coming on in other houses where people were going on with their lives. This is how life would look if I had died, I thought. I did not leave a very big hole. The world has gone on without me. -247
There was no glory in those mountains. It was all ugliness and fear and desperation, and the insanity of watching so many innocent people die. -247
I think now that at the center of my soul there was a numbness, an emptiness, and I was trying to fill that emptiness with night after night of carousing. I was still denying the pain I had held inside me since the first days of the disaster. I was trying to find a safe way to feel. -250
I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life, and the future that lay ahead was the only future available to me. To hide from this fact, or to live in bitterness and anger, would only keep me from living any genuine life at all. Before the crash, I took so much for granted, but the mountains showed me that life, any life, is a miracle.... it was not the life I wanted or expected, but I understood that it was my duty now to live that life is richly and is hopefully as I could. I vowed to try. I would live with passion and curiosity. I would open myself to the possibilities of life. I would savor every moment, and I would try, every day, to become more human and more alive. To do any less, I understood, would be an insult to those who had not survived.... so I open myself to life, and, to my great fortune, my new life began to happen.
On Faith:
I deeply respect the faith of my friends, but, to be honest, as hard as I prayed for a miracle in the Andes, I never felt the personal presence of God. At least, I did not feel God as most people see him. I did feel something larger than myself, something in the mountains and glaciers and the glowing sky that, in rare moments, reassured me, and made me feel that the world was orderly and loving and good. If this was God, it was not God as a being or a spirit or some omnipotent, superhuman mind. It was not a God who would choose to save us or abandon us, or change in any way. It was simply a silence, wholeness, an awe inspiring simplicity. 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.... I don't pretend to understand what it is or what it wants from me. I don't want to understand these things. I have no interest in any God who can be understood, who speaks to us in one holy book or another, and who tinkers with our lives according to some divine plan, as if they 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 16 young men home in leaves 29 others dead in a mountain? …
Now I understand that to be certain -- about God, about anything -- is impossible. I have lost my need to know.In those unforgettable conversations I had with Arturo as he lay dying, he told me the best way to find faith was byhaving the courage to doubt. I remember those words every day, and I doubt, and I hope, and in this crude way I tried to grope my way toward truth…. I don't imagine a wise, heavenly father listening patiently on the other end of the line. Instead, I imagine love, an ocean of love, the very source of love, and I imagine myself merging with it….
This is a very private thing for me, and I don't try to analyze 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…
I don't need any other wisdom or philosophy than this: 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… For me, this is enough.
Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath. -284
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