Working because survival at that altitude required constant effort. Snow had to be melted for water: they found that sheets of aluminum from the aircraft’s fuselage could be bent into shallow trays that caught sunlight and melted snow into drinkable water. This technique — simple, requiring no tools beyond what they had — solved the most immediate hydration problem. Food was rationed strictly. Each person received a small daily portion from what remained of the aircraft’s provisions.
Nando Parrado regained consciousness on the third day. He was told that his mother had died and that his sister Susana was alive but very seriously injured. He spent the next days at Susana’s side. She died on October 21, nine days after the crash. Parrado later described this loss — arriving at consciousness to find that he had already lost his mother, then watching his sister die over the following days — as the experience that destroyed and then remade him. The grief was real and immediate and total. What emerged from it, he has said, was a clarity about what mattered: getting home. Not hoping to be rescued. Getting home.
This distinction — between passive survival and active effort to escape — would eventually define what saved them. But in the first weeks, with rescue still expected, the group was focused on maintaining itself and waiting.
The food rationing was precise and closely managed. Each survivor received a measured portion — roughly three small squares of chocolate per day, or the equivalent in other remaining provisions — that was entirely inadequate for sustaining body weight and health but that could forestall starvation while rescue was expected imminently. The survivors lost weight rapidly. The cold required the body to burn calories to maintain temperature. The altitude suppressed appetite while simultaneously demanding more energy for basic activity. By the end of the first week, most of the survivors were significantly weaker than they had been.