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## What the Mountain Did to Time
The experience of time in extreme survival situations is well documented as being fundamentally different from the experience of time in ordinary life.
The survivors’ accounts of the 72 days describe a relationship with time that was distorted in multiple directions. Some periods — particularly the first days after the crash, the avalanche, the discovery that the radio attempt had failed — were experienced with an intensity that made them feel very long, filling consciousness completely. Other periods — the weeks of waiting in November — were experienced as simultaneously endless and shapeless, without the events that give ordinary time its structure.
The loss of normal time structure is part of what makes extended survival situations psychologically difficult. Human beings organize their days, their weeks, their years around routines and events and anticipations. The survivors’ days were organized around survival tasks — melting water, preparing food, managing injuries — that were repetitive and whose repetition marked time without providing the usual sense of forward movement. Each day was essentially like the last. The lack of variation produces a kind of temporal blurring that multiple survivors have described in their accounts.
The cold exacerbated this. Cold reduces metabolic rate, dulls cognition, and produces a kind of suspended animation of consciousness that is distinct from normal wakefulness. The survivors sleeping in the fuselage at night were not experiencing normal sleep; they were experiencing the kind of cold-driven semi-consciousness that the body uses to conserve heat. The mental clarity available during the day was affected by the ongoing malnutrition and cold exposure.