In October 1972, a plane took off from Uruguay carrying a team of young rugby players and their families and friends, headed for a match in Santiago, Chile. As weather conditions grew increasingly hazardous approaching the Andes, the pilots were forced to make an emergency landing in Argentina to wait out the storm. When conditions improved the next day, they took off once again, but due to a miscalculation, their plane was unable to clear the mountains and ended up crashing directly into them. After a fruitless eleven-day search, all forty-five passengers were presumed dead and the rescue operation was called off.
Meanwhile, on a remote mountainside, amid the wreckage of the plane and the corpses strewn about, a group of survivors emerged to fight a dire battle for survival. For 72 days they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable, stranded on a lifeless glacier nearly 12,000 feet above sea level with no supplies or means of summoning help. As they struggled to endure the brutal temperatures, the deadly avalanches, and the loss of friends and family, they soon had to face the devastating realization that the search for them had been called off.
In order to survive, they were forced to do what would have once been unthinkable.
Seventy days later, after trekking over the mountains for ten days, two of the survivors reached civilization and brought a rescue team to the remaining fourteen survivors.
The Uruguayan journalist and novelist, as well as childhood friend of the survivors, Pablo Vierci- who was scheduled to take the same tragic flight - spent years interviewing the survivors and their families in order to bear witness to their gripping collective ordeal. In his book these 16 survivors finally tell their complete story-- one of the most astonishing true adventures of the twentieth century. Vierci has given dramatic voice to each of the members of this unique "society of the snow," who reflect upon that stark surreal experience and how it came to radically redefine and inspire the rest of their lives. Their story is a testament to the strength of faith and friendship, and the resilience of the human spirit.
