Marcelo Pérez, who had been the primary organizer and morale-sustainer of the group, was devastated by the news. He had consistently told the group that rescue was coming, maintaining morale by keeping alive the possibility that their wait was temporary. The radio broadcast made that position impossible to hold.
The group had to reorganize itself psychologically around a new reality: they were on their own. No rescue was coming. If they were going to get out, they were going to have to get themselves out.
This realization shifted the group’s orientation from passive survival toward active effort to escape. The survivors began to think more systematically about what options they had. The fuselage was at the bottom of a valley. If the valley led somewhere — if the terrain descended eventually to lower altitude and then to inhabited land — they might be able to walk out. The question was which direction, how far, and whether anyone in the group was physically capable of making such a journey.
Several preliminary expeditions were organized in the weeks after the search was called off. Small groups of survivors set out in different directions from the fuselage to assess the terrain. What they found was not encouraging. The valley was surrounded by high ridges. Any exit route required climbing to altitude before descending on the other side. At the fitness level the survivors had reached after weeks of starvation and cold, climbing thousands of meters of snow-covered ridge was at the edge of physical possibility.