ALIVE! Survivor Nando Parrado on the Spirit of a True Survivor

Nando Parrado’s story is familiar. You’ve heard it, seen the films (Alive!, and Stranded!), read the books (also Alive!, and Parrado’s own account, Miracle in the Andes), but it bears repeating. It is simply that astonishing. On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild 571 twin-engine turboprop flown by the Uruguayan Air Force and bound for Santiago, Chile, crashed high in the Andes. Thirteen died in the crash, 16 in the weeks that followed, and finally, after two-and-a-half months, Parrado, Roberto Canessa, and Antonio Vizintín set out on an 11-day trek over 18,000-foot peaks and lived to tell the tale. Here, Parrado discusses the spirit of a true survivor. (See photos from NGA writer James Vlahos's first retracing of the Alive! Andes escape route here.) —Ryan Bradley

Your experience was so different from the rest of the survivors because your sister, your mother, your best friend all died in the plane crash…and what really struck me was that not only were you going through all this turmoil, but your father was as well. His entire family was gone.

He was going through some very bad times at home. When I came back, he told me “you know I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t concentrate” because when you lose all of your family in one second it’s different, you know? I came back and I had to sit with my father alone at a table and look forward and never look back.

What do you mean by that, exactly?

So when I came back, I didn’t have my family and I see my father is embracing another woman who gave him the comfort that he needed when he lost his family. Jesus, what do I do now? Do I want to live with my father and this lady or do I live alone? And I wish my mother was here, but she’s not. And there’s nothing I can do. So if I look back, I said the only thing that’ll get me is a bloody pain in the neck. So, look forward. What do I gain if I look back? I will feel sorrow for myself and my family and there’s nothing I can do about it now. And once you understand there’s nothing you can do I think you can go forward.

What is your relationship with the other survivors like now?

Some of the survivors, they are like my brothers. We trust each other and have so much confidence each other. Some of the guys, though, sat inside the fuselage for 72 days and it was three or four or five guys who were really the ones who pushed. But that happens all over: in a company, on every adventure, it happens if you get stuck on an elevator, everybody will react in a different way. And that’s human behavior.

But you took action. You didn’t sit in the plane.

Did I have inside me something that was different? That’s the question. And the only thing I can think is that I always loved to read geography, maps, atlases, adventure books. I didn’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer. I wanted to be a racecar driver or a captain on a ship or a pilot…something completely different.

Was there a moment, when you were in the Andes, that kind of set you in motion?

There was. It was when I listened to that radio on the tenth day. After I finish listening to that journalist, I knew we were dead. I saw a script of what was going to happen and I didn’t like it. I saw a script of everybody dying of hunger and thirst inside that fuselage…it was horrible.

You knew you were dead but you refused.

Yeah, I said “OK, I’m condemned to die” but I’m still breathing. I will do everything. I will take any risk because you change the wavelengths of your thoughts. It’s not like you and me talking on the phone right now. We can’t take risks like I did then. You have a job, I have a job, I have a family. We are influenced by all the things that live around us. We have our lives. Over there, I didn’t have a life, I didn’t have a future. I had lost everything. If I die? I’m already dead. No food, no water, no one’s looking for us, we don’t have any clothes, no one knows where we are, we don’t have any experience in the mountains, we don’t have any mountain equipment, we don’t have any ropes, we don’t have anything. So, we are dead.

I imagine that all your thoughts at that time are so in the moment.

You live in the moment. And sometimes your life only extends one minute ahead. You climb, then you sleep at 15,000 feet at night alone and you think: “Will I survive the night? Okay, I have survived the night. Now, let’s survive the next day, or the next two hours, or the next three hours, and if I get through those hours, I can keep going for a few more hours.”

There’s an interesting simplicity to that. Some survivors who talk about their experience describe feeling so alive during the experience that, afterwards, it’s almost like they miss it, that feeling of purely living in the moment. Do you feel that way?

In the Andes, being alone on the summit of a mountain, looking at all that vastness and how huge it is, you cannot imagine how huge it is and how small you feel. It’s something that’s impossible to feel here, and I clearly remember those moments. I don’t know if I was completely alive or so near death, you know? It’s like you complete the circle. And I was on the brink of dying but I was feeling so amazed by the environment, by the huge vastness of it all.

Was faith a part of it at all?

I think. We prayed a lot. Walking out of the mountains, you concentrate, you hypnotize yourself. I don’t know how to explain it. You just go into a rhythm, you know? Boom. Boom. Boom. I prayed a lot. Because, those were like mantras, you know? Hail Mary and Our Fathers. But, I don’t know, you grab faith, you grab God and you do not understand what it is, but you just grab onto it, you know? I always just kept saying why, if He’s so wise, so pure, such a fantastic being, why did He allow my mother, my sister, all the other guys to die? Why does He allow so much misery and death in the world? You keep asking yourself those things. But I think I have faith in the other guy who was with me. Also, we relied on each other a lot.

Do you think you could have done it without the two of you being together?

He [Roberto Canessa] pushed me a lot. And, I was like a train engine in front. I gave everything I had. And I said “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna explode, and I won’t stop until I die.” But in a way he was like a crutch. You know? He said “you’re gonna explode, you have to pace a little bit yourself.” Because neither of us would make it. So, I think we were a good team.

As soon as you ran into the shepherd and realized that you were safe, did you have any idea of how big a story this was, how dramatically your life was changed? That this is something that would define who you were for the rest of your life?

No, I didn’t have any idea. When we went through that, we kept talking. I was thinking: OK, if we find a road, maybe we’ll have to hitchhike and nobody will pick us up because of what we look like, you know? And if somebody, a truck, picks us up and takes us to a very small town, where do we go, then? We go to the police, okay, and tell them if we can use their phone. You lose track of the importance of the fact that you have crashed, you have survived, you have crossed the Andes without food on an epic traverse that nobody has ever done before. And we have that experience. And you lose track of what you’re doing. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know we had such a great, epic traverse. I was in Boulder once at the US Climber’s Club, I had been there with some of the best climbers in the US. And I spoke and learned so much with them. And they asked me so many questions and after, they all stood up and said, “We want to make a toast for the best climber in the world. The guy has achieved what we dream of achieving.” Because now everyone climbs alpine style, you know? Not with sherpas, they just go up and get down as fast as they can. No one was climbing across the Andes with nothing, it was thought to be impossible. So they stood up, and it was one of the best honors or awards I could have gotten.

Photographs courtesy of Stranded!

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