Plane Crash in the Andes | Returning to the Andes with Mountaineer Ricardo Peña | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds.

Over the last four episodes, we've told the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The plane was bound for Chile carrying members of the old Christians rugby team when it crashed deep in the Andes Mountains. The surviving passengers spent a total of 72 days stranded in freezing conditions at nearly 12,000 feet before two of them climbed over the mountains for help.

Today, we're speaking with mountaineer Ricardo Pena. While climbing near the crash site in 2005, he discovered a jacket belonging to one of the survivors and wreckage from the plane that had never been found three decades later. The following year, Pena led a National Geographic expedition, retracing the escape route Nando Parado and Roberto Canessa took out of the Andes into Chile.

Ricardo Pena, welcome to Against the Odds. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to ask you about your expeditions in the Andes. But first, can you tell us how you learned about Miracle Flight 571 and the old Christians rugby team? Yeah, the story of the Andes survivors was talked about a lot in Mexico. I grew up in Mexico City. It was talked about everywhere, all over the world. But it hit even closer in Latin American countries.

And Mexicans made a movie in 1974, which now you can find that movie entitled Survive. I was about six years old when I first saw the movie. It was a very bad movie, but the story was so powerful that it made a huge impact. We would catch it on TV. It's just an incredible story. And I also always had a fascination with snow.

Wanted to touch snow, go to snowy places. And that whole story took place on a glacier. The snow was what was trapping them. You mentioned the snow. What else about the story captured your imagination?

Well, the adventure. I was always fascinated by stories of adventure. I remember reading about the first ascent of Everest in a children's book. When they first reached the South Pole, those explorations just seemed amazing to me. I just love true adventure. And this is an incredible survival story.

Especially because unlike other adventure stories, these guys were not professional adventurers. They weren't going prepared to survive in Arctic conditions or anything like that. They were rugby players going to a rugby game in Chile in spring. And so they had a few sweaters and things like that, but that was it. And all of a sudden they crashed in the middle of the Andes at high altitude on a glacier and they have to survive there.

Many of them had never even touched or seen snow. Wow. And they're stuck for 72 days without anything to eat or drink. They have to melt snow to drink and eventually have to eat the bodies of the dead to survive. So it's a truly incredible survival story. Out of 45 passengers, 16 survived. But it was incredible how they survived. Everybody thought they were dead after 10 days. And so they had to get themselves out of there by themselves. So that makes it truly one of the most amazing stories.

survival stories in modern times. And that's why I loved it. So this was a story that made an impression on you as a kid. Can you tell us about the moment when you rediscovered the story again?

Yeah, other than the movie and when my family members were talking, I didn't have any access to any more information, but it definitely planted a big seed. And then my whole family, we will move to the United States. I ended up studying music at Buffalo, the State University of New York at Buffalo. And that's when I found the book Alive. And I was like, oh, wow, this is the...

the story of the anti-survivors and I just couldn't put it down so I read the whole book many times and then I found the Hollywood movie alive and a documentary that they made and I rented them. This is in the 90s. I rented it from a blockbuster video store and saw the movie and the documentary over and over and I was just fascinated by it. In about the same years,

I realized also that I was really missing adventure. I used to be in scouts in Mexico and we used to go camping and hiking and I really liked that. And I was missing that contact with nature, adventure, physical challenge. And so I started doing hikes in the Adirondacks and sometimes in the winter. And it was all mixed in. Me discovering the love of mountaineering and then being fascinated by that story and thinking of the survivors.

When I was climbing winter ascents of the high peaks in New York State, I was thinking about, "Wow, imagine surviving these snowy conditions, low temperatures." I didn't know I was going to become a mountaineer, a mountain guide, go to Everest, or be involved in the anti-survivor story. I had no idea.

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Ricardo, you have an impressive climbing resume. You've led expeditions in the Himalayas and all over the world. I'm curious, what brought you to the crash site of Flight 571 in Argentina? I moved to Colorado to pursue mountaineering, and I met a mountain guide there, and he invited me to an expedition to Aconcagua, the highest of the Andes. And so in 2001, I went with him

And I climbed Aconcagua and I was excited to be in the Andes, you know, and I was thinking again about the survivors and everything. So while I was there, Mendoza, Argentina, I asked the local contacts there what they knew about the story. They're like, oh, yeah, the story of the Uruguayan plane. Sure, of course.

So they're like, yeah, you can actually go there. They said in summer, there's somebody who organizes horseback riding trips. You go two days on horseback.

riding horses, and you get to where the cross is and where there are still airplane parts. What's the significance of the cross? The cross is where they buried the remains. They buried everything there and then they put a cross. And that's where the cross stands today. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. But when I finished Aconcagua trip,

I didn't have enough days or anything. Then in 2005 is when I led my first expedition to Aconcagua. And when I finished, I was like, I really want to see that place, the Andes place. So we found the number of the guy that led those trips, called him and I said, you know, I have a few more days here and I wonder if I could visit the place. He said, well, this weekend, I've got a trip with a few people. You can join us if you want.

So, started the horseback riding section of the trip and made it to a high camp or a base camp. We could call it about 8,800 feet. I had told the owner of the business, I said, would it be possible for me to check out this skate route? You know, could I do some climbing there? I had brought my ice axe and boots and

And the guy was like, sure, yeah, whatever. It was a good thing it was Argentina. If this would have been our United States, I'm sure it would have been like, oh, I'm sorry, we can't let you do that. It's a matter of liability. Yeah. Or something, you know, red tape or whatever. Yeah. Where in Argentina is like, sure, yeah, you want to climb there. It's dangerous. But if you kill yourself, well, whatever, you know, it's another gringo dying. That's his fault. And that's that.

So, because it is dangerous, the terrain around there. People usually go to the cross on this path that has been made. And that's as far as they go. Because everywhere else is steep, rocky terrain, this rockfall danger, this avalanche danger. So...

That's why nobody explores there. Wow. The horse guide also wanted to explore. So we got to the cross early in the morning. I took photographs. It was incredible to be in the same place, to see the valley. And then we decided to go check out a little bit of the escape route. And we started hiking up and I realized that it was an active glacier. It had crevasses, which are the cracks that open up in active glaciers. And sometimes they get covered in ice or snow and you can fall.

Walk on them without seeing them and fall through and you can die like that So when you do glacier travel you usually rope up so if somebody falls the other person catches the fall and you can they can get you up and I didn't have a rope I hadn't brought I brought crampons and an ice axe but not a rope so I realized it's too dangerous to cross this glacier and try to follow the escape route and

So we decided to go explore instead, go up this gully, which was the path that the plane had taken. When the plane crashed on a high ridge at 14,200 feet and slid down this gully 2,000 vertical feet and end up in the glacier, in the bottom of a valley. So we climbed that. We started climbing that. This is...

February 12th, 2005, the middle of summer, there was some snow and ice formations, but there was also parts that were free of snow. And as we got higher, we came to this junction of two gullies. Now from the bottom, you can only see one gully, just this main gully that goes straight up. And they always assumed that the plane had hit at the top of that main gully.

What they can't see from the bottom is that there's a junction and it's a separate gully that goes to the right. So we got to that junction and we were finding airplane parts. We also found a knife made out of plastic from a window. And I remember from the book that they made a few tools, a few knives out of that plastic to aid in the cutting of the bodies, to help them cut the bodies and made smaller pieces of

meat they could eat. So it was really impressive to find one of those plastic knives. We started thinking, well, should we leave this here or should we take it? We didn't know what to do. And then when we got to that junction, I thought, you know, this airplane part seems to be coming from the gully on the right, not the main gully. Why don't we explore the right gully? And the horse guide, Mario, he says,

I agreed. Like, sure, let's try it. Because I said, maybe the theory is wrong. And so we started going up this right gully. And sure enough, we found airplane parts, part of an engine. And when we were about 200 feet from the saddle, getting to the ridge, we found blue clothing sticking out of the rocks.

Now, Mario has said, you know, we don't even know if all the bodies have been recovered because some bodies fell out on the airplane crash when the plane crashed. So when we found this blue clothing, we thought, is this a body or what is this? And I started carefully taking this blue clothing out of the rocks. Turned out to be a coat. And I thought, wow, wow.

This looks really battered. It was kind of cut and weathered. It was 33 years since the crash site. So I was like, it would be amazing if they had anything in its pockets. And I start checking. And sure enough, inside the inside pocket, there was a wallet and a passport. And so I take it out, open it. And I saw the driver's license that said the name Eduardo Strauch, which I remember the Strauch cousins were very important in the story.

They became kind of leaders of the group. And so the Strauchers are mentioned a lot. And Eduardo Strauch was one of the three cousins. And so I was like, wow, this really belongs to that story. This is not just somebody that was hiking here and left.

A code. This is from the crash. I could see the stamp on the passport. It said October 13th, 1972. You could see it was just a few hours in the time, a few hours before the crash. There was the final stamp, you know, and there was money. There was 13 U.S. dollars.

And the years were 1966, 1968. Everything was just, it was incredible. I felt also like I was in a Indiana Jones movie or something. You know, it's just unbelievable. Unbelievable. Did you know that the jacket and these objects have been lost for like 30 plus years? Yeah. When we saw this stuff buried like that, we realized this must be the place where the plane made contact and left all this here.

It was probably covered in snow and ice most of the years. It's like, why would this be up here? I mean, it must have been here since the crash site. And actually, later we reconstructed everything. Eduardo remembers taking his coat off, putting it on the top of the shelf. And he remembers when the plane crashed, the back of the plane broke. People and stuff went flying out the back and the plane slid down. And when he got to the bottom, one of the first things he looked for

was his coat because he was freezing. So he's like, where's my coat? And it was a brand new coat. He was really happy with it. He's like, oh, my coat and my passport. He thought about it and then following 72 days, a lot about his belongings. But yeah, to answer your question, the coat landed there and it was there for 33 years until we found it. Nobody had found it.

And it didn't just like disintegrate. I mean, it's crazy how it just stayed kind of. We decided, we talked about it and we're like, well, why don't we bring down the documents? Because those are going to get disintegrated. And we could probably get him back to the owner because the owner of the business, of the horses business, had contact with the survivors. So we get it to Eduardo Strauch, we thought.

So we took the passport and the wallet and the coat. We decided to leave there and put rocks in it to kind of mark the spot. Eventually, we made it back to San Rafael. We met with the owner of the business and we called Eduardo because he had the phone number.

So he called Eduardo. He said, hey, I got some Mexican climber. He's got some of your money and he discovered something. And let me just have you talk to him. And Eduardo was all confused. Like, what is this guy talking about? Yeah. What was that conversation like with Eduardo? What did you say to him? It was wild. All of a sudden he answered and I started talking to him and I hear his Uruguayan accent. I was like, I can't believe I'm talking to one of the anti-survivors. I got all nervous, nervous.

And then he heard my Mexican accent in Spanish and in my nervousness. And he realized, wow, this is for real. This is not a prank or anything. And he's telling me he found my coat and my passport and wallet. And he said he got chills. So he got like goosebumps. Wow. I can imagine. And I was also getting goosebumps just talking to him. So it was wild. I just told him what we had found, what we had done.

i said uh well we brought down the wallet and the passport i have them here with you

And he told us that one of the survivors, Coche, Coche in Ciarte, he was actually going to go to the Andes the following week. So he was going to meet the owner of the horse business. So I left the wallet and everything. And he gave them to the survivor. Eventually, he brought them to Uruguay, gave it to Eduardo. And I went back home, you know, back home after that. I had spoken to one of the survivors. And that was that. And I thought that was the end of that amazing story.

thing and my life continued a few weeks later I was in Mexico guiding again all of a sudden I have all these messages and everybody's telling me we saw you on the news about the story about the I'm like what I went to a computer and and it was like all over the world the news was out there that the wallet of one of the survivors had been found and returned to to the survivor and then Eduardo started receiving calls from BBC and New York Times and I mean everybody

Everybody wanted interviews with him. And he's like, what is going on? Wow. I'm wondering, after following this story almost your whole life, what was it like for you to suddenly become part of that history and meet someone who had been through this incredible journey? Oh, yeah. That discovery changed my life.

Because from there, I got to meet all the survivors. I got to do expeditions. And it wouldn't have, none of that would have happened if I hadn't found that code. What happened was Eduardo mentioned that he wanted to meet me in one of those interviews. And so I eventually found his phone number again, called him, and we met again.

We became instant friends. We hit it off really good because he's an artist, he's a painter and loves music too. He also has a love for mountains. He actually likes going to mountains. He found moments of peace, very deep peace and serenity and he just loves that contact with nature. So

in spite of the fact that it was a hell that was trapping him and he almost died there. So we really connected. And he felt that with me as a mountaineer going to many expeditions, experiencing dangerous situations, I could relate better. I could understand what they went through compared to the general public. I understand the environment. I understand the dangers. I understand what it's like when you come out of an expedition after weeks of being in the mountains.

you just appreciate like water, food, toilet, a bed, you know, just like them. When they got a second chance to live, all of a sudden, just having a chance to live, just the basic comforts were incredible joys.

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So you visit the site in 2005 and make this huge discovery. Then a year later, you go back to try and do something no one had attempted before. And that was to retrace the exact route that Nando and Roberto took out of the mountains into Chile. How did that expedition come about? So when I was up there with Mario, the horse guy, he told me, you know, nobody's ever retraced a skate route.

I was like, wow, that's incredible. And I thought that would be like a perfect National Geographic expedition. I thought, yeah, we got to, after we found Eduardo's code, we're like, wow, it felt like anything is possible. So we're like, I should try to connect with National Geographic, do whatever I can and see if we can get

than to sponsor an expedition. And I got nowhere. It took eight months of a lot of hard work. And finally, I got to somebody who could present the idea to the National Geographic Expedition Council. And they loved it. That is incredible. That's so hard to achieve. Who is on the team? So Mario, the horse guide, and then

James Vlahos, a National Geographic writer and adventurer. Wow. What was the goal and what were you hoping to learn? So the goal was to retrace this escape route on the same days in as similar conditions as possible as Nando and Roberto. The only reason why everybody survived was because Nando and Roberto went for an expedition. And they're like, to the west is Chile, to the west is where we got to go. But to the west lay this big mountain. So they're like, it must be just on the other side of that mountain.

What they didn't know was that that mountain was the crest or the continental divide. It's actually...

middle of the Andes, and they were in the Argentina side, actually, not on Chile. So they had to climb to the crest and then cross into Chile and then go a long way until they made contact with civilization. And this route crossing the border from Argentina into Chile, this isn't one that's taken by hundreds or thousands of climbers each year, right? Right. This had never been done other than Nando and Roberto in

in a do or die situation. For 33 years, nobody had attempted it, mainly because it's a very dangerous, illogical route. Did you have maps when you did it? No, there was no maps available. Wow. Nothing. And so we had the diagrams that the book put together, which turned out to be useless. These were not made by mountaineers. They weren't based on topographic maps.

They just gave us an idea of, well, they climbed for three days up and then they went down for seven days. What really helped us was Eduardo actually organized for us to meet many of the survivors, including Nando and Roberto. So we talked with them and Nando talked to us for like two and a half hours in detail, everything he remembered. How were their memories of the journey all these years later? They remembered emotions very vividly, what they felt afterwards.

how scary it was, how they thought they were going to die. They remembered when they got to the top, how they saw all around. They thought there were green valleys and there weren't. They realized at that point, three days later, when they got to the crest of the Andes, that they were in the middle of the Andes and there were snowy peaks everywhere. And that was one of the things I wanted to experience. I wanted to see what did they see? What was it like? Now, for them, it was horrifying. It was just, they realized we're going to die.

And the question for them was like, should we go back to the plane and die with everybody else? Or should we die trying, you know, continuing? And Nando felt like, you know what? I don't want to die. He told me, I just imagine going back and seeing everybody die. And what if I'm the last one to die? That would be horrible. He said he already seen his mother and his sister die.

And they were seeing his friends die. And so it was like, you know, I'd rather die trying to get out of here. I'm curious. Did Nando and Roberto or any of the other survivors have any words of advice for you? Not really, because they were like... First, they felt, well, you guys are mountaineers. You know about this. We had no idea what we were doing. For us, it was horrible. But they told us, you know...

It was scary. It was very steep for them. They felt they were going to fall and die. They said it was exhausting and it was cold, you know, to bring plenty of warm layers. Eduardo did say to me, it was very touching. He said, you know, be really careful. I mean, this hasn't been done. It would be terrible if you guys would die doing this.

They weren't able to give us too much technical information because they weren't mountaineers at the time and it had been 33 years. Exactly. But Roberto did help me a lot because we were able to sit at a computer and look at Google Earth. And I told him my theory. Is this where you guys climb? Is this? And he kind of corrected my, oh, yeah, I remember this. I remember this. And we kind of put piece together.

with Google Earth images where they had gone down. So that was very, very helpful. And I remember him telling, and then after this whole glacier and all this, when the snow ends, it's rocks and rocks and rocks forever. How do you think your journey compared to Nando's and Roberto's? You had proper climbing gear, right? So I'm guessing there was no Gore-Tex in 1972. Right. Yeah, it was interesting.

First of all, they were starved for 62 days before they started. All they were eating was human flesh, no vegetables, no vitamins. So they were weak, very weak. They had jeans, they had wool sweaters. Nando was wearing rugby, basically soccer cleats. And then he put plastic bags over the socks so he would keep his feet dry on the snow.

And then Roberto was wearing these skiing boots that somebody had brought. They were like the old fashioned leather skiing boots. They had sunglasses from the pilots and they had learned a lot in those 62 days, snow blindness, about,

They would put lipstick on their, on the woman's lipstick they found on their lips to not burn their, their lips. I can't even imagine being up at like 12,000 feet facing those brutal conditions. And there's probably a psychological component to it too, right? Oh yeah. For them going into the unknown.

They didn't realize they were walking on active glaciers and they could have fallen in a crevasse and died. It would have been, we would have never heard of this story. Now for us, we had experience. We had good gear, good food, a stove, sleeping bags, tent, and all that. Because we had all that gear, the disadvantage we had was we were much heavier overall. It was much, I mean, I can trade myself, you know, with the conditions that were, it was incredible what they accomplished. It was,

I mean, unbelievable. Amazing. Unbelievable. Nando and Roberto argued about which was the best way to get out of the Andes. At one point, they headed east for a few days, but eventually escaped by climbing west over this big peak. Having walked in their footsteps, can you tell us the pros and cons of heading east versus west?

Yeah, it's a tricky answer to that question. In order for us to retrace the escape route, we had to actually do an expedition in December in snow to get us ourselves to where they had crashed. We approached from the east. So we did get to experience what it was like in December if they would have gone east. And it is definitely gentler to the east. It's all downhill. But the big question that's hard to answer is the river crossings.

Would they have been able to cross those raging rivers as they are in December? We used horses. We actually used a little inflatable boat to cross one of the streams. And then the horses crossed us on several, barely were able to cross the rivers with the horses. And then it was just snowshoeing expeditionary style going up to the crash site. So without snowshoes, without horses, without a boat, they might have been stuck.

If they would have gotten out of all that, they still would have been 40 miles away from the nearest town. It's not a straight answer. It's not an easy answer. And like Nando says, he says, look, the way we went worked. So that's all there is to it. That's what he says nowadays. Yeah, don't double think anything. Yeah. And it's true. What they did worked, you know. Yeah.

Well, I want to talk about the headwall, which is this steep 2,000-foot cliff leading up to the summit of a mountain to the west of the crash site. This is a major obstacle for Nando and Roberto in their escape to Chile. Seeing it in person, can you describe it? Yeah, from where the plane was...

When you're looking west, the glacier rises at an angle of like 10, 20, 30 degrees. It's about a mile. You go like that. And then the headwall is 2,000 vertical feet of a steep slope, about 45 degrees. And then to the right, there's a hanging glacier. Glacier is like a frozen river coming down a mountain. And when that frozen river comes to a cliff, sometimes it'll form hanging glaciers.

It's just this piece of ice leaning to the void, glued to the rest of the ice, and that's why it can lean, looking like it's defying gravity. And eventually gravity pulls these giant chunks of ice down and they create these ice avalanches. This is how people died in Everest in 2014. We saw it avalanche the day before we started. And it can avalanche any time of day or night.

You can't really predict it because it's just gravity pulling on this mass of ice. Eventually, it's too much hanging and it breaks off. Wow. So when you get to the headwall, you go too far to the right and you're exposed to that hanging glacier. And then if you go too far to the left, there's rockfall coming down. We noticed there was rocks falling and that can kill you easily. And then in the middle, there's this steep slope of 45 degrees, which is if it's loaded enough with snow, it can avalanche.

and bury you. So it actually was a lot more dangerous than I thought. When we climbed the first mile, we found that we couldn't go straight up the headwall because there was a crevasse and a huge hole in the way. And so we had to go. It forced us to go all the way right under that hanging glacier and go as fast as we could to spend as little time as possible under that turn left and then get on the slope. And when we got on the slope,

It was so much snow and it's the right angle for avalanching. So it was like, oh man. We're like, well, what do we do now? I mean, if we want to go back, we have to go under that hanging glacier again and expose our lives again.

If we want to go up, we have to deal with this avalanche. And if we want to retrace the escape route, this is it. We're going to have to risk our lives a little bit. We're not going to get done. And so it was kind of like, well, we're here. Let's do it. And how long did it take you compared to Nando and Roberto?

As we were climbing, we decided we weren't going to camp on that slope because it was too dangerous. It could avalanche. So we wanted to just do the whole thing and get to the crest of the Andes, to the top of that, what they call the top of the mountain. So it took us one day. Wow. Yeah, it was brutal. We were singing to our thighs, just like they described. And it was like, it was exhausting trying to climb with all this deep snow. And we took the snow. They actually took some of the rock bands.

because it was easier for them instead of all that sinking in the snow. But it was very scary for them. And so they spent two nights in that headwall. From the second camp, Nando made it to the crest and saw that there weren't green valleys of Chile. So for us, going up that, it was a brutal effort. I was exhausted. By the time I got to the top, it was cold and very windy. And that's when I thought of them, because even with my down jackets and everything...

I started getting really cold. From all that effort, I started getting hypothermic. And I'm trying to battle with the stove and try to make it work so we could melt snow and get a hot drink. And I couldn't get it. When you start getting hypothermic, your brain doesn't work so well. I had a critical moment there. Mario helped me and got the stove going and eventually got some hot cocoa and gave it to me. And so...

I just thought of them. I was like, wow. And they were wearing jeans in the snow and all that. If they hadn't had perfect weather with no wind, they would have been super cold and they would have just died of hypothermia. Nando talks about when he got to the top, he was like, I can't believe I'm this high, top of a mountain, and there's no wind at all. He talks about that, mentions that. And he didn't realize how lucky he was that it wasn't normal conditions. They would have died of cold.

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And I got up there and I saw it's like, wow, snowy peaks everywhere, you know, all around. It just looks like you're in the middle of the Andes. And I saw what they saw, too, in the distance towards the east. You see two peaks, two symmetrical peaks that had no snow. And we saw the same thing. Everything's snowy, but in the distance, about maybe 50 miles away.

Two peaks with no snow. And they saw those and they're like, you know what? That must be the end of the Andes. Because you see those peaks don't have snow. They must be less high. So we're going to have to go that way. And I thought, wow, these guys, how brave and how desperate they were to see this and go into the unknown. Did you share those emotions with Nando and the others? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Before I left, when we met them, it was a joke that one of the Strauss cousins, Fito,

said, you know, you're going to have to tell us what it was like because we've been hearing for years from these two about this unbelievable expedition. And maybe it's not even hard. Maybe it's like really easy. They're just making it sound like it was. Yeah, imagine that. So I was like, oh, sure, we'll bring photos. We'll tell you. They were joking. They knew it had been brutal. But yeah, when I got back,

Eventually, we did meet with everybody and I did talk to Nando and Roberto. We met many times. They told me, what did you think? I said, wow, it's hard. That's a tough route. And it was much more dangerous than you guys even realized. They were dangers that you weren't even aware of, like crevasse danger, like avalanche danger, rockfall danger, stuff that you guys, you just lucked out to win through that. You guys were terrified enough as it was.

Without knowing all the dangers, and it might have been a blessing in disguise, but my respects for them. I was like, I was so impressed how brave, how strong, how incredible of an accomplishment. And being so young, too. Yeah. Well, having made the trek out of the Andes, what did you learn about this story that you didn't know before? Yeah.

In the end, what they covered was about 36 miles, which to a modern trail runner or the modern athletes is like, oh, I can do that in one day. No problem. Yeah, but it's hard to convey because there's no trail at all. Those 36 miles were rough. When we went down the Chilean side, it was snow and snow and snow forever. And then we hit the rocks. And just like Roberto had said, it was rocks and rocks forever. It was...

I fell one time with my heavy pack and I cut my arm. And for a second, I thought, is that my bone sticking out? I was like, ah, you know, it was just, I was panicking because if you get a compound fracture in a situation like that, I would have died. Luckily, it was just a cut. So we just bandaged it and kept it clean. It was fine. But it just illustrates, it was a dangerous journey that they accomplished. It was an incredible thing. And then meeting the survivors, I've learned a lot of them.

amazing life lessons. Those 16 survivors became a family. They were really, really, really close through this whole ordeal. They realized they had to depend on each other and work together to work this out, to make it. So that team effort really is what would save them. The one thing that the three Strauch cousins had in common

also with Nando and Roberto is that they're very pragmatic. Roberto is religious. Nando is not. But Roberto was like, look, either we save ourselves or we're going to die here. We have to do something about it. Nando was the same. But Nando was ready to escape from the very beginning. And the Strauss cousins were like, wait, wait, wait, Nando. If you leave now, you're just going to die. And all your strength and all that is going to be wasted. We need to plan this. So that you won't die in the mountains. How are you going to survive up there?

And so what really worked in my interpretation, what I see is that it worked, that they were pragmatic, realistic down to earth and so realistic.

This is the real problem. What are our options? What can we do? And they executed the most logical, rational, best laid plan possible. Now, I say that the faith helped him because they were very Catholic, most of them. And the faith, they would pray together. The faith, you know, kept some hope, kept hope and helped them emotionally, many of them. I'm curious, what do Eduardo and the other survivors say about the experience today? How did it change their outlook on life? Yeah.

If you ask some of them, some of them, they'll tell you it strengthened my faith 10 times. I saw God helping us. And, you know, if it hadn't been for God, we wouldn't have been saved. And then in the meantime, Nan and Roberto are like, oh, yeah. And what did we do? Nothing. It's jokes like that. It's like, wait a minute.

We crossed the Andes. You guys would have been, you know, there's always, there's like sibling humor between them. They joke like that. But it affected 16 survivors in 16 different ways. It's really interesting. For some of them, it was traumatic. They had problems afterwards. And for some of them, like Eduardo, he says he never had a nightmare after that. He was so happy to get a second chance to live.

And that he never looked back. And so it really is very unique to everybody how they experience it. But they handle it, most of them, actually pretty well. They were just really, really happy to be alive. And they came out, they were so intensely happy to get a second chance to live. And those are the life lessons that they all talk about is they realize when they're up there deprived of everything, what was truly important in life.

We can all talk about this, but until you experience some of this deprivation or life or death situation, you can't feel it like they feel it. The important things are having a chance to live, having shelter, food, being close to the people you love. That's the common theme they all talk about. That was enough to be incredibly happy when they came out of the Andes.

Looking back at your time with the survivors and your own experience, what do you take home with you? To this day, they're like a family. They're really close. They fight like brothers would fight or have differences and stuff like that, but they love each other. It's a very special bond. Every year on December 22nd, they get together and they celebrate what they call their second birthday. That was the day when this

When the helicopters made it back, brought by Nando, the helicopters got everybody else, all 16 of them. So they celebrate every December 22nd. They get together and celebrate their new life, their second life. That's why they call it their birthday. And they invited me to their 40th celebration in Montevideo, and I...

It was amazing to be there and to see them all together. And you could see that bond. They may not be like constantly hanging out with each other or anything like that. Nando and Roberto are very different people, but they're close brothers of that experience. And they made the winning team, the team that were able to breach the Andes and save everybody. Well, Ricardo Pena, thank you for sharing your journey with us today. Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you.

This is the final episode of our series, Plane Crash in the Andes. If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend the book Alive by Pierce Paul Reed. I'm your host, Cassie DePeckel. This episode was produced by Peter Arcuni. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis. For Wondery...

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