The glacier of tears is 3,660 meters above sea level in the high Andes. The obelisk at the crash site marks the place where twenty-nine people died and sixteen survived. Fifty years after the crash, those sixteen were still talking about it.
The thirty-three who could not speak are spoken for in the foundation that bears the name Viven — they live — and in the stories the survivors have never stopped telling. The dead are part of the story, not its backdrop. They are the reason the story is told.
## The Two Men Who Walked Out: A Final Note
The image that endures from the 1972 Andes survival story is not the crash, not the avalanche, not the press conference. It is two young men walking west.
Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa were 20 and 19 years old, respectively, when they began the trek on December 12, 1972. They had spent sixty days at over 3,600 meters in cold that damaged their extremities, on a diet inadequate to sustain their bodies, watching people they knew die one by one, and planning an escape from terrain that offered no easy exit. They were not mountaineers. They did not have maps, except the visual memory of the terrain they had observed during preliminary expeditions. They did not have proper equipment.
They had the sleeping bag the group had spent weeks building. They had food prepared from the available resources. They had each other.
The trek took ten days from the crash site to the encounter with Sergio Catalán. During those ten days, the two men crossed terrain at altitudes that would challenge experienced climbers with full equipment. They slept on the glacier in temperatures below freezing. They descended through snowfields and then into the lower foothills of the Andes. They walked until they found cattle, then fences, then a river, then a man on horseback.