Post by Grubb.
It’s fitting that that the first museum we visited in Montevideo on Friday, after having on Tuesday been in the Andes, was the one devoted to the 1972 plane crash of a Uruguayan flight that, leaving Mendoza en route to Santiago, failed to make it over the mountain range. The accident took place on October 13. The survivors were rescued on December 22 and 23, 72 days later. Their harrowing ordeal was recreated in the movie “Alive” based on the non-fiction best seller. Part of the fascination with this disaster stems from what it took to survive the freezing cold without food which was the same desperate measure the infamous Donner Party took when the got trapped in high Sierra snow: cannibalism.
The museum bends over backwards to avoid the topic of anthropophagy. Everything else, including digging out from an avalanche 17 days after they crashed, gets close attention. The exhibits emphasize clever ingenuity over gnawing desperation. And, indeed, these people went to heroic lengths. I never saw the movie, but somehow I was well aware of the miraculous outcome. So it was the dismal search and rescue failure that stood out for me in the narrative the museum offered. After the crash the fuselage of the plane couldn’t be found because it was…white, like the snow. Really? How hard were they actually looking? The search was called off a week after the crash. 65 days later a Chilean muleteer found two of the survivors waving for help.
Even though it happened over fifty years ago, I don’t think I’ll be flying over the Andes any time soon.
Society of the Snow( Netflix ) is a more recent film of the tragedy and done very well
I would go to that museum. I read the book. It was during a period when I was reading a bunch of survival stories. There was another one I thought of while reading your blog about two men hiking/climbing in the Andes; one of them fell and was left for dead and he managed to survive. “Touching the Void.”
I happened to see that movie (possibly on a flight). Worth seeing.