Nando Parrado · 2006 · survival

Nando Parrado's 2006 memoir of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, when a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the high cordillera and the survivors lasted seventy-two days in the snow, kept alive at the last by eating their dead. Parrado's own trek out over the mountains to find help is one of the great feats of human endurance. Told from the inside, it is quieter and more harrowing than any retelling. Two flight legs, then the trek on foot down into Chile.

1. 1
   Montevideo

   A young Uruguayan rugby player, Nando Parrado, boards a chartered flight with his team, his mother and his sister, bound for a match in Chile.

2. 2
   Mendoza

   The plane stops at Mendoza, in the lee of the Andes, waiting for the weather to clear before the crossing.

3. 3
   Crash Site

   High in the cordillera the Fairchild strikes a peak and breaks apart; the survivors are stranded on a glacier with no food and no hope of being found.

4. 4
   Los Maitenes

   After seventy-two days, having endured an avalanche and the unthinkable, Parrado and Roberto Canessa climb out over the peaks on a ten-day trek and reach a Chilean herdsman in a green valley.

5. 5
   Santiago

   Helicopters carry the last survivors off the mountain to Santiago; sixteen of the forty-five come home.