Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A harrowing, moving first-person account of the 1972 plane crash that left its survivors stranded on a glacier in the Andes—and one man’s quest to lead them all home—by Nando Parrado, a subject of the Oscar-nominated film Society of the Snow

Featuring a new introduction by the author to commemorate of the fiftieth anniversary of the crash

“In straightforward, staggeringly honest prose, Nando Parrado tells us what it took—and what it actually felt like—to survive high in the Andes for seventy-two days after having been given up for dead.”—Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild

“In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, just a black and perfect silence.”
 
Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness in an attempt to save his friends’ lives as well as his own.
 
Decades after the disaster, Parrado tells his story with remarkable candor and depth of feeling. Miracle in the Andes, a first-person account of the crash and its aftermath, is more than a riveting tale of true-life adventure; it is a revealing look at life at the edge of death and a meditation on the limitless redemptive power of love.

Nando Parrado was one of the survivors of the 1972 plane crash that killed his mother, his younger sister, and many of his rugby teammates. Nando survived in the Andes for seventy-day days, including a ten-day trek through the mountains with his friend Roberto Canessa to find help. Following their rescue, Nando and other survivors worked with Piers Paul Read to write the #1 bestseller Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. Twenty years later, Nando served as the technical advisor in the film adaptation, in which he was played by Ethan Hawke. In 2006, he published his own version of events in Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home. Today, he is a renowned speaker and successful businessman, sportsman, and television producer. He and his wife, Veronique, have two daughters, Veronica and Cecilia, and three grandchildren: Alexia, Máximo, and Thor.